Big Picture
Adoption strategy, trends, team impact, opinion.
61 posts · showing 11–20
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Hiring Engineers When Take-Home Tests Are Meaningless
The signals didn't get noisier — they stopped measuring what they proxied for. The replacements test the right thing and are more subjective, which is a cost that lands on specific people.
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Estimating Work When Implementation Speed Is Unpredictable
Estimation always worked badly and consistently, which is what made velocity useful. The consistency is what broke — the mean fell and the variance rose, which is the worst combination for planning.
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What Changes for Engineering Managers
Four management assumptions break at once: that output tracks effort, that capacity is headcount, that people learn by doing, and that review is a small tax. Each breaks differently.
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What Changes for Product Managers
A role that existed partly to ration scarce engineering capacity changes when capacity stops being scarce — and the discipline of saying no gets harder, not easier.
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Why "Just Add an Agent" Fails as a Product Strategy
Usage goes curious, then low, then the feature sits there — and the team upgrades the model, which doesn't help, because capability was never the problem.
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Data Work Gets More Valuable, Not Less
The buffer between bad data and consequences was a person who noticed the number looked wrong. Agents act on it — which turns data quality from an analytical property into an operational one.
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The Jobs That Get Created Are Hard to Name in Advance
"New jobs will be created" sounds like faith because the examples are missing. There's a structural reason for that — and one observable signal that's better than any forecast.
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Which Jobs Go First: A Framework Rather Than a List
Lists of at-risk occupations age badly because exposure operates on tasks, not titles. Four properties score any task — and two people with the same job can land on opposite sides.
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The Career Risk of Being Excellent at the Thing Being Automated
The most exposed engineers are often the best ones — not despite the skill but because of what the skill is. And the feedback stays good right up until the market for it changes.
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If There's a Bubble, What Survives the Pop?
Whether it's a bubble is unknowable from here. More useful: assuming a correction, which parts survive — and previous cycles have a consistent answer about what separates the two.