When everyone ships and nobody decides
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems that their colleagues have to spend time solving. That’s why many tech companies try to build a small, ludicrously well-paid team instead of a large team of more average engineers, and why so far this seems to be a winning strategy.
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Shape Up will help you break free of “best practices” that aren’t really working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects your team can celebrate.
Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear
In early 2023 at an offsite in Tenerife, our European engineering team did a series of exercises that ended up changing the way we work.
A Guide to Measuring Engineering Team Performance
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While software development practices constantly change, there will always be a tier of truly top engineering teams who stand above…
Why AI Makes Things Worse for Enterprise Teams, by Paul Ford
Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and
The Paradox of Perfection: When ‘Good Enough’ is Actually Better
Exploring the tension between engineering perfectionism and pragmatic delivery. Discover why striving for the perfect solution often prevents us from shipping valuable improvements and how to find the balance.
The engineering manager's attention budget
Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them
Engineering managers have a new job description
Why engineering managers are expected to be hands-on again and how AI tools are making it possible to stay technically sharp while still leading.
The Engineering Leadership Report 2026
Our survey of 600 engineering leaders exploring how the role is evolving, where the challenges lie, and what the future holds for the job.
SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?
SpaceX has built an impressive production site in Texas. Will Starship success follow?
LDX3 London
Join over 2,500 engineering leaders on June 2 & 3, 2026 and explore the latest practices for building effective software engineering orgs.
Resetting on engineering expectations in the age of AI
I’m accepting new sponsorships for The Modern Leader for 2026. If you’re interested (or you think your company may be interested), you can learn more here.
Understanding Forward Deployed Engineering
Palantir is en vogue right now. So of course, folks are cargo-culting elements of its culture, especially “Forward Deployed Engineering”. Lots of companies are trying to imitate this, and some other founders have even reached out to me for advice on whether they, too, should do this model for their startup.
Boris Tane
Coding agents didn't make poor engineers dangerous. They made them unstoppable.
Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix
After spending over a decade in engineering leadership roles at some of the world’s most chaotic innovation factories—Google, Facebook, and Netflix—I’ve learned one universal truth: scaling e…
