Microsoft Is Trading Salaries for Data Centers
Microsoft offered buyouts to about 60,000 people to help fund AI spending. The work didn't shrink. Salaries are just the cost a company can move fastest.
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Posts tagged engineering leadership
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Posts tagged engineering leadership
How to Roll Out Coding Agents to an Engineering Team
Six copyable artifacts for rolling out coding agents to a dev team: review rule, AGENTS.md, handoff, controls, pilot log, and gh baselines. Vendor-neutral.
What a Fractional Chief AI Officer Does for Dev Teams
A fractional Chief AI Officer for a 5-20 engineer team owns the daily agent workflow, not a governance board. The four jobs and the first 30 days, week by week.
Anthropic Moved Its Monorepo to Scion. You Shouldn't.
Anthropic built Scion and moved its monorepo off git in five months. Here is why a small team shouldn't copy it, and where to spend the attention instead.
Narrow Front Door, Visible Back Rooms
Going fractional? Get in the door with one narrow problem, then make the rest of your work easy to find, because the engineers who find you pull you into more.
Your Junior Dev Leans on the Agent. Good.
Telling a junior to use less AI is advice with an expiry date. Move the quality bar off style and onto verification. Here's what that looks like.
The Office Mandate Is a Measurement Failure
Return-to-office mandates are what companies reach for when they can't measure output. Agents just destroyed the last proxies that were limping along.
Every Insane Codebase Was Once Rational
Architecture certainty isn't on the menu. Decide for the horizon you can see, three to six months, and know which doors only open one way.
What I Check When I Inherit a Vibe-Coded App
The consultant's playbook for taking over an undocumented AI-built app after the builder walks away: what to audit first, and how to price it.
Estimating Client Work When Agents Do the Building
Agent-era velocity is bimodal: the same feature can take 20 minutes or 3 days. How I scope, bill, and talk to clients about it honestly.
The Career I Built on Work Nobody Wanted
A career built on the audits, migrations, and offshore coordination nobody volunteered for, because that work maps a company fastest.
What Reverse Acqui-Hires Actually Diligence
What a buyer's technical reviewer checks in a reverse acqui-hire when the code isn't the asset: key-person risk, IP scope, and contribution forensics.