Library

Junior Developers in the Age of AI

Companies are ditching junior engineers en masse. They’ll tell you it’s because AI writes better code. They’re right…but also missing the point.
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Why the Wrong People Get Promoted

The skills that would make you good at the job don't help you get the job. People who hesitate over readiness lose to people who don't. Five patterns of self-sabotage to recognize — and a perspective shift that lets thoughtful leaders take the seat.
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The Act of Authenticity

Being yourself isn't expressing every passing emotion — it's acting in alignment with your values. Leadership requires a repertoire of roles, all rehearsed. The most 'natural' leaders are usually the most painstakingly practiced.
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Why Are My Stakeholders So Unreasonable?

Facts, in the face of big feelings, are completely useless. Engineering leaders who pride themselves on logic miss that emotion drives every decision around them — and theirs too. Why being emotionally attuned isn't a soft skill, it's how you see the whole truth.
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The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of AI Doom

AI prophets of doom aren't deep thinkers — they're people with deeply stunted assumptions about human worth. Their prophecies are self-fulfilling because they shape funding, policy, and culture. Don't let them win by default.
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How to Lead When Leadership Won't

Dear Christine: I just stepped into a new engineering leadership role and I'm already seeing a forest full of red flags. Your problem isn't silos — it's getting your project done within a system of silos. A reply on how to be the imp.
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Explain the Business Impact and Other Clichés

Ask any engineer and they'll tell you The Thing that's slowing them down. The Thing doesn't get done because engineering's work is invisible — you can’t see what's bleeding. Technical accounting maps resourcing, architecture, and maintenance so everyone can see The Thing too.
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Developers, Stop Job-Hunting Like It's 2015

The tech job market isn't shrinking — the hiring process is. AI bots have made the spray-and-pray application path useless. The new playbook is taste, intention, and trust: meaningful coffee chats over hundreds of cold applications.
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Not Using AI? You're Not the Problem

AI companies are leaving product management to their users. The mobile era was a buzzy party where hosts cared about the guest experience; the AI era is an awkward room where consumers sit in separate corners while hosts loudly proclaim how great everything is over the PA.
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How Not to Learn AI

A story about two ways of learning a paradigm-shifting technology: Mom in a dark room with a homework assignment, and a nine-year-old too busy playing Neopets to know it was a new thing. The AI hype machine has us all in the dark room.
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How Good Engineers Become Bad Leaders

In most fields, you get promoted by selling a vision, delivering it, and getting credit. Engineers get promoted because they had a Very Good Answer. That asymmetry quietly compounds until the first time a CTO has to sell their work to non-technical peers — and it goes badly.
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AI is Going to Hack Jira

AI code gen absolutely excels at producing byproducts. In Big Agile, engineering = new features = byproducts. Combine the two and you get a CEO who fires their competent engineering team, watches EBITDA jump, and never sees the foundation cracking underneath.
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The Magical Thinking of Busy CTOs

When an overwhelmed CTO promotes a strong IC into management to lighten the load, three outcomes are possible — and all of them are bad. Why "leadership" is a separate job that must be taught, not anointed.
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AI — A Vibe Check

AI will reliably get you ~75% of the way to a job well done. Extraordinary — but the output is still intern work. Why naive AI usage breaks teams without the taste and discernment to spot half-baked output.
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For CTOs, Politics IS the Job

Most engineering leaders don't realize that making perception match reality is their job. A practical, side-by-side comparison of how a CMO and a CTO would lead the same major initiative — and why the difference is more dangerous than ever.
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Dear CTO, It's Not 2015 Anymore

An entire generation of engineering leaders has never had to justify the existence of their orgs. The post-2023 reckoning means it's no longer enough to optimize for retention — CTOs need to own their narratives or someone else will write them.
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Productive Teams Don't Measure Productivity

We spend $200B+ a year trying to quantify engineering productivity. None of it works — and the effort itself is the antithesis of productivity. A look at how the Agile Industrial Complex took us this far off course.
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There's No Such Thing as Developer Productivity

Engineering isn't a cost center. You can't quantify ROI in dollar values. Why traditional productivity metrics don't apply to engineering — and what to measure instead.
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