Who's behind the scorecard

I'm Dmytro Kondrashov. I live in Stockholm and I've spent about fifteen years in software. You can check my work history on LinkedIn.

For the last few years I've been on the management side of the table. I'm Director of Software Engineering at Symphony Communications, where I've worked since 2022 — first as an engineering manager, then leading other managers as a director from the start of 2025. Before Symphony I spent two and a half years at Klarna, latterly as a Team Accountable Lead. Earlier than that: Bynder, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and the European Space Agency. My degree is a Professional Doctorate in Engineering in Computer Science, from Eindhoven University of Technology.

The path was the ordinary one — senior engineer, then manager, then managing managers. At every step the hard part was never the code. It was the conversations: telling someone the promotion isn't coming, keeping a strong engineer who's halfway out the door, sitting in the silence after bad news instead of talking to fill it.

Why these scenarios exist

You can't rehearse these with the person you're about to have them with, and rehearsing with a friendly colleague teaches you little, because a friendly colleague doesn't fight back. A model will. The rubric behind each scenario is the part that carries whatever I actually know — it's the checklist I wish someone had handed me the first time.

What I don't claim

I'm not a career coach, and this isn't therapy. I don't know your company, your budget, or the person across the table from you. What I do know is which of these conversations go wrong, and how. The scorecard is opinionated on purpose.