The Perfect Hire Is Killing Your Team
The whiteboard coding interview rewards memorization and pedigree — the weakest predictors of real performance. Hire for trajectory, not the perfect match.
Writing · Tag
Posts tagged engineering leadership
13 posts on engineering leadership. Or browse the full writing index →
Posts tagged engineering leadership
We're About to Stop Making Senior Engineers
The path to senior ran through the grunt work AI now does in one prompt. The knowing-vs-doing gap hits juniors first — and how to grow architects anyway.
Nadella Is Right About AI and the Firm. Mostly.
Satya Nadella's 'token capital' framing is right that AI amplifies human judgment — but it's enterprise advice that skips the small teams who feel it first.
A Professional Owns the Whole Outcome
Professionalism in software isn't process, titles, or looking the part. It's owning the whole outcome — the cost, the failure, the 3am page, the wrong call.
Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
Most engineers prompt Claude one sentence at a time. Anthropic's own engineers don't — they prompt skills. Four rules from their recent talks, with the operator nuance the talks left out.
An AI Just Deleted a Production Database in Nine Seconds. Hire More Engineers.
Replit's AI agent ignored a code freeze, wiped a production database in nine seconds, then confessed it violated every principle it was given. The strongest case yet for hiring MORE senior engineers in the AI boom — not fewer.
AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One
Every company rolling out AI is about to discover how much work they were leaving on the table. AI doesn't replace headcount — it surfaces the backlog you never had bandwidth to touch. The math behind why velocity creates surface area, the failure mode that follows, and why the companies cutting headcount now are about to get outpaced.
AI-Assisted Engineering Isn't Faster Coding. It's a New Workflow.
Most engineers using Claude Code see a 10–15% speedup. The teams seeing 40–55% aren't typing faster — they're sequencing work differently. The four modes I use AI in, what to never delegate, and how to get a skeptical team across the line.
How I'd Hire a Staff Engineer at an AI Startup
The title 'Staff Engineer' means three different things at three different companies. At an AI startup pre-Series-A, only one of those three is what you actually need. The screen, the take-home, the interview loop, and the AI-fluency calibration that's now table stakes.
From One Engineer to Fifteen: What Co-Founding Taught Me About Engineering Leadership
I went from sole engineer to running a 15-person engineering organization over four years at a startup I co-founded. The hardest lessons weren't about code. The six things I'd tell my younger self.
The Pre-Series-A AI Startup Hiring Plan: Who to Hire, in What Order, and Why Most Get It Wrong
Most pre-Series-A AI founders hire in panic order, not strategic order. The result is a team that can't ship the product the company actually needs. The hire-by-hire plan I'd run, who comes first, and why hire #4 isn't another engineer.
How I Triage a New Codebase in 90 Minutes
A fractional engineering engagement starts with a codebase you've never seen. You have ninety minutes to form a useful POV before the kickoff call. The seven-step triage I run, the two questions I bring back to the founder, and how AI tooling has accelerated the process.
How to Manage a 4-Person Engineering Team Without Becoming a Manager
A 4-person engineering team is the most overlooked unit of management in startups. Big enough that the lead can't write all the code. Small enough that hiring an EM kills velocity. Five rituals that work at this size, three traps to avoid, and the signal that tells you it's time to evolve.