engineering culture

The Byzantine Colleague - Why the Node That Won't Stop Is Worse Than the One That Dies

The industry keeps the wrong failure model for its worst people. A machine that crashes is honest and cheap. The expensive failure is the one that stays up and keeps participating, and we have known this about computers since 1982.

The Cost of Being Indispensable - Why Great Employees Might Get Stuck in Their Role

How thousands of sensible decisions quietly turn an exceptional employee into a load-bearing one, and why becoming indispensable is the surest way to never get promoted.

We Gave Every Engineer a Bigger Brain and Forgot the Company Needs a Nervous System

Or, the Quiet Horror of a Thousand Geniuses Generating Legacy Code in a Vacuum.

We Finally Made Code Easy Enough That the Human Part of Engineering Became Impossible to Ignore

AI increased output. It also made coordination, trust, and emotional intelligence the limiting factor in engineering teams