Oh engineering leaders, gather around. Part 565 of 45345 🍿
You read the same three books, implement the same quarterly theatre, and dont get me started on your hiring problems. You cargo cult the same radical candor frameworks while being neither radical nor candid. You talk about psychological safety in all-hands while avoiding the actual conversation with the actual person on your team.
I know this because I've seen all of it. 25 plus years in the game. I run a regular group with engineering leaders who have another century of experience between them, spanning the country. Not your same local clique. We compare notes. The same broken patterns keep showing up, rebranded just enough to feel new. (Sure, we also talk about your terrible interview process. I've died on that mountain many times.)
The engineering leadership script exists because the script is safe. Nobody got fired for copying Google's engineering ladder. Nobody got put on a PIP for running another retro that changes nothing. (I gave a presentation to Twitter upper leadership that mentions this. I'll post it some day.)
Here's what kills me. These are smart people. Genuinely smart. They can architect systems that handle millions of requests. Debug race conditions at 2am. Navigate gnarly technical tradeoffs with actual nuance.
But ask them to understand why their senior engineer has been quietly disengaging for six months? Why they're leaving? Blank stare. That requires a different kind of pattern recognition. One the industry never selected for.
You treat people like config files. Change the inputs, expect predictable outputs.
People are not config files. People are legacy codebases with undocumented behavior, emotional state that persists across sessions, and error handling that makes no sense until you read the commit history.
Reading the commit history takes time and effort. Time doesn't scale. So you reach for the script instead. You optimize for your own "efficiency" rather than the system's resilience.
That's the trap. If you can't step away without everything collapsing, you didn't build a team. You built a dependency. npm install self. That's not leadership. Job security cosplaying as impact.
The script teaches you to accumulate. Headcount. Scope. Meetings where you're the bottleneck talking about change (politics). It never teaches you to become replaceable. But replaceable is the goal. Replaceable means you built something that outlasts your calendar.
Stop accumulating. Start building teams who don't need you.
You could run thirty ceremonies a week. Doesn't matter. If you've never sat with someone and asked what they actually need, what's blocking them, what's keeping them up at night, you're not leading. Remove yourself if this is you. npm uninstall self.
You're a microwave with a recurring calendar invite.
Go make me some popcorn.
❤️
Jake