There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on. You cannot conjure a senior in a quarter. We just watched this exact movie with memory: DRAM prices went vertical because demand exploded and you can’t build a fab overnight. Senior engineers are next, and the only hedge is to build your own, starting now. The best thing you can build in the agentic era isn’t your product — it’s another Engineer. I have juniors on my team. This is my problem, right now. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.
You can’t lead From hehind anymore. For twenty years the path to Engineering leadership had a well-worn groove: write code for a few years, get “promoted out of” writing code, spend the rest of your career managing budgets, headcount, and status reports. The further up you went the less technical you were expected to be, and nobody blinked. That era is over. Not ending. Over.
Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
A couple weeks ago I wrote that your organization has to learn as fast as your best AI adopter. Externalize, combine, socialize, internalize. Run Nonaka’s spiral or get left behind. A bunch of you wrote back with the same question: okay, but where does the knowledge actually go?
Everyone is asking the wrong question. “How do we adopt AI agents?” “Which tool?” “What’s the right policy?” Wrong questions.
The right question is: how does your team turn what one person learned on Tuesday into something everybody on the team uses by Friday?
A recent industry retreat of senior engineering practitioners published their findings on where software development is heading. Reading it felt like someone had been reading my mind — and the minds of the people I follow online — and synthesized it all into one document. When a lot of people arrive at the same conclusions independently, that’s signal worth paying attention to. Here’s my take on each major theme.
There’s a reckoning coming for a specific type of software engineering manager. Not the good ones. The ones who turned themselves into human Jira routers. The ones whose primary skill is translating documents into tickets and running standups. Those jobs? Gone. Faster than you think.
I’ve been thinking a lot about excellence lately. Not the motivational-poster kind. The real kind – the kind that gets baked into your bones when you’re twenty-two years old and surrounded by people who simply will not accept anything less. For me, that happened on a nuclear submarine.
The US Navy gave me a solid foundation in leadership and operational excellence. But translating that into the business world requires a few more things.
I’ve been a “leader-of-leaders” for a long time. It’s changed post-covid. But when I talk to some Engineers about the difference between “Leader of Others” and “Leader of Leaders” they don’t know what I’m talking about. So I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe even learn more myself.
A friend was telling me about “Dream Teams” at Netflix and I realized that is exactly what I have been trying to build/encourage around me. That is what I want!
I’ve come to firmly believe that Engineering Leadership has a 3-2-1 principle to create Engineer happiness,
which is a key prerequisite for high performance Engineering teams.