Tudor Barbu
Principal Engineer at Logify
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Tudor Barbu — Principal Engineer at Logify, former Tech Lead at Personio and engineer at Skyscanner and DaVinta — to unpack 20+ years of engineering decisions, debugging scars, and career evolution.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Tudor:
🧠 Code has no value unless it delivers value.
Tudor shares how he moved from chasing clean architecture to delivering user impact—even if that meant hardcoding entire frontend flows temporarily.
🔧 When layout shifts hurt users, ship the fix—even if it's ugly.
He tells the story of a frontend layout shift issue that would’ve taken weeks to solve “properly.” Instead? They hardcoded the UI, shipped it in 2 days, and kept the abstraction layer ready for the future backend rewrite.
🪲 Octal bugs still happen.
One of his earliest prod bugs? Prefix-padding dates with 0 triggered octal parsing in JavaScript, breaking downstream calculations. It only happened on the 8th or 9th of each month. Debugging that was a nightmare.
📖 Nobody teaches you to read code.
Tudor believes most engineers are taught how to write—but not how to understand legacy code. He interviews with this in mind: giving messy-ish codebases and looking for signal in how candidates adapt.
🤖 Mentoring in the AI era starts with "don't vibe code."
His advice for juniors: reverse-engineer. Don't rely on vibes or autocomplete. Use AI, but understand the shape of the problem. Learn architecture. Learn how systems fit together.
⚙️ Good delegation is a skill.
We talk about how Tudor approaches delegation as a Principal Engineer: how to hand off ownership without micromanaging, and why clear expectations and regular syncs matter more than fancy tooling.
🎤 Also in this episode:
- Vue vs React hot takes
- The “compile it in my head” interview disaster
- A Vim plugin that came back as a fork
- When a cleaning lady caused a prod outage by unplugging a server
Episode Length: 56 minutes of real talk on engineering growth, technical humility, and practical leadership
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