"Coding is no longer the bottleneck".
So what you're saying is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Jason Gorman

Operational mechanisms for strategy.

• 🔄 The Strategy-Operations Loop: Strategy and operations are mutually dependent. Strategy creates the context for operations, but operations determines the feasibility of strategy. Larson argues that “strategy without operations is day-dreaming,” while operations without strategy is just “random motion.”
• 🏛️ Structure Your Planning: Effective execution relies on a structured planning process — often a “W-shaped” model where context flows down, plans flow up, integration happens at the top, and final commitment happens at the bottom.
• 🔩 Mechanisms over Mandates: You cannot simply command strategy to happen. You must build specific mechanisms — such as quarterly business reviews (QBRs), headcount allocation, and financial budgeting — to force the organization to align with the strategy.
• 📉 The Cost of “Keep the Lights On”: A realistic strategy must account for “KTLO” work and “strategy taxes” — the ongoing cost of maintaining current systems. If you don't allocate resources for this explicitly, your strategic initiatives will inevitably be cannibalized by maintenance work.
• 🎯 Allocation is Strategy: Ultimately, your strategy is defined by where you put your resources, not what you write in a deck. If the resource allocation process (hiring, budget) doesn't match the strategic document, the allocation process wins every time.

How do AI code reviews impact engineering teams?

• 📉 Smaller Pull Requests: The most significant behavioral change observed was a reduction in the size of Pull Requests (PRs). Developers naturally adapted to the tool by breaking work into smaller chunks to get faster feedback — creating a more iterative and flow-based development process.
• ⚡ Accelerated Velocity: Because the AI provides immediate feedback, the “waiting time” usually associated with human review cycles was drastically reduced. This allowed developers to fix low-level issues quickly before a human ever looked at the code.
• 🤖 Optimizing for the Bot: A potential downside surfaced: developers began writing code specifically to satisfy the AI’s heuristics. The author notes a risk here — engineers might prioritize “passing the test” over genuine code quality or long-term maintainability.
• 🧠 Higher-Level Human Reviews: With the AI handling the grunt work (syntax, linting, basic patterns), human reviewers were freed up to focus on “uniquely human” problems. The conversation shifted from nitpicking code style to discussing architecture, business logic, and complex system design.

Social Capital: The Compound Interest of Your Engineering Career

• 🤝 The Invisible Currency: Career success is often viewed through the lens of “Human Capital” (your skills and experience), but Paez argues that Social Capital is equally important. This is the value embedded in your social networks — essentially, “who you know and how much they trust you.”
• 🏦 Deposits and Withdrawals: Think of social capital like a bank account. You make deposits by being helpful, reliable, and delivering value to others without immediate expectation of return. You make withdrawals when you need to ask for favors, influence a decision, or navigate a mistake. You cannot withdraw if you haven't deposited first.
• 📈 The Seniority Shift: As you climb the career ladder, the relative importance of technical skills diminishes while the importance of relationships increases. Senior leaders rely on “influence without authority,” which is impossible to achieve without a deep reservoir of social capital to draw upon.
• 🌉 Bridging Silos: One of the most high-leverage ways to build social capital is to become a “bridge.” Organizations are full of structural holes (disconnected teams or departments). By connecting these groups and facilitating information flow — for example, translating between Engineering and Sales — you become indispensable.
• 📢 Visibility is Valid: Doing good work in the dark does not build capital. The author emphasizes that self-promotion isn't inherently bad; it is necessary communication. You must ensure your value is visible so that others know they can rely on you, thereby increasing the collective trust in your capabilities.

Aim Small, Miss Small

• 🎯 The Marksmanship Mindset: The concept is borrowed from the movie The Patriot — the idea is that if you aim at a person and miss, you hit nothing; but if you aim at a button on their shirt and miss, you still hit the person. Fisher applies this to tech: aiming for a tiny, precise target dramatically reduces the cost and magnitude of a “miss.”
• 📉 Reducing Variance: Large projects possess a massive “cone of uncertainty.” By breaking initiatives down into small, distinct deliverables, you reduce the variance of the outcome. A 10% estimation error on a one-week task is negligible; a 10% error on a one-year project is catastrophic.
• 🚀 Momentum and Morale: Success is habit-forming. When teams define small, achievable targets and hit them frequently, they build psychological momentum. Conversely, failing to hit a massive, vague quarterly goal creates a culture of failure and burnout.
• 🔍 Specific over General: Vague strategic goals (like “improve customer satisfaction”) are dangerous because they lack a clear bullseye. Leaders should set hyper-specific targets — for example, “reduce page load time by 200ms” — to ensure that even if the team falls short, they have still moved in a precise, positive direction.
• 🔄 Iterative Correction: “Aiming small” forces you to release often. This creates rapid feedback loops that allow you to re-calibrate your aim constantly. If you aim big and wait six months to release, you might discover you were aiming at the wrong target the entire time.

Common problems managing senior engineers

• 🎓 The Imposter Syndrome Trap: A common struggle for managers is feeling “lesser than” their senior reports who possess superior technical skills. The author clarifies that your value isn't technical superiority; it is providing context, alignment, and clearing obstacles. You don't need to be a better coder to be a good manager.
• 🏝️ The “Ivory Tower” Architect: Some senior engineers detach from the reality of the codebase, focusing purely on abstract design or “perfect” architecture. The author warns that this leads to unimplemented designs. Seniors must stay grounded in the implementation to ensure their designs are actually shippable and realistic.
• 🏰 Knowledge Hoarding: A dangerous pattern is the senior engineer who becomes a “single point of failure” by writing complex code that only they understand. The manager’s job is to force them to delegate and document, transforming them from a “hero” into a “multiplier” who elevates the whole team.
• 🔭 Resume-Driven Development: Senior engineers can easily get bored with standard tasks and may over-complicate solutions to learn new technologies (like introducing a complex mesh for a simple service). Managers must rigorously challenge whether the technical complexity creates actual business value or just satisfies intellectual curiosity.
• 🛤️ Alignment vs. Autonomy: You cannot micromanage a senior engineer without causing resentment. Instead of assigning tasks, you must agree on the destination (outcomes) and let them chart the path. If they go off-track, the feedback shouldn't be about the code, but about the misalignment with business goals.

That’s all for this week’s edition

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