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The AI Productivity Paradox
3–5 minutesIn this post, I will talk about where engineering productivity actually gets stuck. Similar posts can be found here. AI Made Coding Faster. That was never the Bottleneck. Over the last year, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to measure AI adoption in engineering. Initially, the question seemed fairly obvious. Are… Read more
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Letting Go to Grow: A Lesson in Leadership
1–2 minutesToday’s post is a short one. The younger Engineering Manager in me took pride in being the center of everything. My leadership style was all about leading from the front. Combined with a strong bias for action, it felt good, and it worked well enough to get me to Senior EM. I remember once, right… Read more
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The Unexpected Outcome of a Faceless Instagram Experiment
4–6 minutesA few months ago, I started what was supposed to be a simple experiment. The original goal was not to build a social media channel. It was to leverage AI and see where this journey would take me. Read more about the faceless Instagram experiment here. I was writing a book. The question I wanted… Read more
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Bias, Burnout & Engineering Culture in the Age of AI
7–11 minutesI wanted to become a team lead for a very specific reason: I wanted to get into a privileged position. I wanted a role where I would no longer have to constantly explain the need for what I was doing, and where I actually had the leverage to influence culture. Power dynamics are very real.… Read more
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What Engineering Leaders Should Measure
4–6 minutes“You need to finish ten tickets this sprint.” In all my years as an engineering manager, I have never uttered those words. Counting tickets is a fundamentally flawed way to measure developer productivity. If you want to build a high-performing engineering organization, performance evaluation has to start with the business value we deliver, and it… Read more
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How to Rebuild Your Career Loop
3–5 minutesRead similar posts related to my career transition and career loop here. One of the most brutal lessons in a senior career is accepting that merit and advancement are related, but they are absolutely not the same thing. Merit is your capability, your judgment, your impact. Advancement is a game of organizational bingo: does the… Read more
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