'It saves our engineers X hours a week' is the line every AI business case leans on. It isn't a return – it's the start of a question about one, and most teams never ask the rest of it.
Pragmatic notes on engineering leadership
AI lets a small team build what used to take a department – so 'can we build it?' stopped being the useful question. On the token costs you can't attribute, big-bang rewrites you can't measure, and why Simon Sinek's 'why' matters more than ever.
A strong engineer with the CTO's ear ships fast – at real cost to the codebase, to other teams, and to the leader's own credibility. What good leadership looks like when one person seems indispensable.
Having worked at a consultancy and hired contractors into my own teams, I've seen the same problems play out repeatedly. Here's what I've learned – and what to watch out for.
Reducing engineers to their output data misses most of what makes them valuable – and most of what makes performance management actually hard.