The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. - Shunryu Suzuki

Eng org seniority-mix model

• 🧩 The article explores a systems model for managing engineering seniority mix — balancing junior and senior engineers to control costs while maintaining organizational health.
• 📊 Without deliberate policies, engineering organizations naturally become top-heavy — more senior engineers accumulate over time if departed employees are replaced at the same level.
• 💰 This top-heaviness presents a financial challenge — senior engineers cost significantly more, impacting a company's ability to maintain free cash flow growth expected by investors.
• ⚖️ Simply implementing a “backfill at N-1” policy (hiring one level down when someone leaves) isn't enough — it slows but doesn't prevent the organization from becoming senior-heavy.
• 🛑 The most effective approach combines three policies — “backfill at N-1” + stopping external hiring at senior levels + capping the maximum number of people at the senior-most level.
• 🔄 The author uses systems modeling with stocks and flows to demonstrate how different policies affect the organization's composition over time.
• 📈 The modeling shows that without intervention, the ratio of senior to junior engineers becomes financially unsustainable — ideally there should be about five junior engineers for each senior one.

Decision-Making Pitfalls for Technical Leaders

🚀 Tech has a habit of promoting programmers into leadership roles with “zero transition coaching” — leaving them unprepared for the different decision-making requirements of leadership.

• ❓ Pitfall #1: Assuming Context — blindly following “best practices” without understanding why they exist or if they apply to your specific situation.
• ⚖️ Pitfall #2: Treating Everything as an Optimizing Metric — creating long lists of characteristics that all must be maximized, making decisions impossible since most choices involve tradeoffs.
• 🔥 Pitfall #3: Manufacturing Emergencies — creating artificial time pressure through poor planning or exaggerating consequences, burning out teams and degrading code quality.
• 🧠 To avoid Pitfall #1, leaders should “know what specific cases benefit from a candidate solution” — and be able to justify choices based on specific context and tradeoffs.
• 🎯 For Pitfall #2, separate metrics into “optimizing” (where more is always better) and “satisficing” (where good enough is good enough) — focus on maximizing just 1-2 key metrics.
• 🛡️ With Pitfall #3, recognize that “almost every urgent situation that a technical contributor has ever faced... is manufactured” — aim to shield your team from unnecessary pressure.

🧑‍🍳 The author contrasts two head chefs: one who runs a calm kitchen where staff can learn, and another who creates constant stress — tech leaders who “cosplay freakout chefs see much worse results.”

The Measurement Trap

• 📊 The popular saying “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it” is often misattributed to Peter Drucker — who actually warned about measurement's dangers: “What gets measured gets managed — even when it's pointless to measure and manage it.”
• 🏢 Nike provides a cautionary tale — under CEO John Donahoe, the company prioritized measurable outcomes (DTC sales, digital metrics) over harder-to-quantify elements like brand loyalty and product innovation.
  • 💰 The results were disastrous — Nike lost $25 billion in market cap in a single day as their strategy of eliminating product categories, shifting to DTC, and focusing on data-driven marketing backfired.
• ⚠️ This problem has been recognized for decades — as early as 1956, V.F. Ridgway warned about the “dysfunctional consequences of performance measurements” when used indiscriminately.
• 🧠 Both Drucker and quality expert Deming understood the limits of measurement — Deming noted that “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable.”
• ⏱️ Short-term metrics often overshadow long-term value — metrics like conversion rates are easier to track than customer lifetime value, but may not capture what truly matters.
• 🔬 The author values “experiment velocity” — tracking how many experiments teams run and their outcomes, while acknowledging this doesn't capture everything they're learning.

🧩 Great leadership requires balance — metrics are valuable tools but shouldn't be the sole driver of decisions, as they often miss intangible elements like team morale, creativity, and quality of decision-making.

Solving staffing challenges with concentric circles

🔄 Engineering leaders with hundreds of team members face constant staffing challenges — never having enough people with the right skills in the right places.

⚖️ When teams request more people, the obvious solution might seem to be prioritizing work through “stack ranking” — but this becomes incredibly complex at scale.

🏢 Most large organizations operate on a “pool of investments” approach — maintaining a balance of resources across products, rather than simply allocating everyone to the highest priority projects.

🎯 The author proposes solving staffing requests using “concentric circles” — starting from the innermost circle (the requesting team) and working outward.

⭕ Circle 1: Work with the requesting team to see what can be stopped, delayed or de-prioritized to free up capacity without adding people.

⭕ Circle 2: Look to the team's immediate neighbors (with shared manager) to see if people can temporarily move between sibling teams.

⭕ Circle 3: Explore moving people between teams in your broader organization (the traditional approach most managers jump to first).

⭕ Circle 4: As a last resort, work with peers to move people between organizations — the most disruptive option.

📚 This approach often solves problems by the second circle — making solutions faster and less disruptive while teaching managers to solve staffing problems with peers before escalating.

Lead By Example, Especially When No One’s Watching.

• 📊 Leaders operate under a “persistent delusion” that some actions go unseen — when in reality, teams maintain a constant “invisible scorecard” of your behavior.
• 🧠 Your team “doesn't hear what you say nearly as clearly as they see what you do” — the gap between preached values and actual practice creates a “credibility tax” on everything you say.
• ⏰ The “After-Hours Test” reveals your true leadership principles — examining what you do when no one would know if you took shortcuts or when integrity is inconvenient.
• 🔄 Great leaders don't have separate public and private behaviors — they follow the same standards alone as they do with the team, not as performance but as habit.
• 💸 Leaders pay a “leadership tax” that individual contributors don't — following rules more rigorously and upholding values even when inconvenient.
• 🌱 Leadership character is built through small, often invisible decisions — admitting ignorance, giving credit to absent team members, and upholding quality under pressure.

🔍 “The true measurement of leadership isn't what happens when you're in the room. It's what happens when you're not” — your principles should become embedded in the team's DNA.

Why startups should hire recruiters much sooner than they think

• 💼 Startups should hire a recruiter among their first 10 employees — this may seem counterintuitive, but is critical for early-stage growth.
• ⏱️ A dedicated recruiter saves founders substantial time — managing 50-100 outreach messages and 60–150 interviews for just two engineering hires would otherwise consume a founder's limited bandwidth.
• 💰 While hiring a recruiter seems expensive upfront, it saves money long-term — product delays due to slow hiring can cost 6–8 months of momentum and allow competitors to “eat your lunch.”
• 🌟 The founder remains a “talent magnet” but in a more strategic way — focusing on creating compelling content about the company's technical challenges rather than managing every recruiting email.
• 🔍 Great recruiters demonstrate hustle, organization, and passion for the mission — they're proactive with sourcing strategies, meet candidates after hours if needed, and have impeccable follow-through.
• 🛠️ Look for recruiters with experience in competitive environments — such as sales, recruiting agencies, or customer support roles with high talent bars.
• 📈 Between hiring waves, recruiters can handle other HR functions — including onboarding, cultural initiatives, performance reviews, and organizing team offsites.

That’s all for this week’s edition

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See y’all next week 👋