Manivannan Selvaraj
I am a software engineer turned founder who once survived Silicon Valley by writing code and occasionally pretending I knew what I was doing. I worked at Salesforce, Slack, and PayPal, building and leading large-scale systems before moving back to my hometown, Coimbatore, India.
These days, I am building my own venture and trying to create useful things without breaking production too often. Over the years, I have worked with Python, Java, Go, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform and a long list of tools that sounded cool at the time. I enjoy mentoring engineers, sharing lessons from the trenches and contributing to open source when I can.
Session
As engineers grow in their careers, many of us try to support our teams by writing more code, reviewing every pull request, and stepping in to fix the hardest problems. It feels helpful and responsible. Over time though, this approach can unintentionally create too much dependency on one person.
This talk explores the shift from being the person who solves everything to becoming someone who helps the whole team succeed.
Drawing from lessons learned through experience(often the hard way :)) and from colleagues and mentors along the way, I will share practical shifts that make a difference: creating clearer technical direction, improving design conversations, sharing context early, mentoring thoughtfully and building systems that reduce reliance on any single “hero.”
If you are a mid or senior engineer who is always busy but still feels that too much depends on you, this talk aims to offer useful ideas for your own journey.