Nobody photographs the scaffolding
My R&D team's work only ever showed up in other people's numbers, so when delivery became the measure, they went. Making that work visible was my job.
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10 pages
Career
The tech debt you can't fix alone
The engineering argument for paying down tech debt almost never won. What got it funded was a promise, and it tended to be my name on the promise.
Management was never a promotion
Management and engineering are two sides of the same coin, and far too many companies forget the engineering side has no cap.
I went looking for the reason not to build it
The requirements were done and I hadn't written a line of code. So I spent a day trying to talk myself out of the whole thing.
The take-home goes in the bin
Hiring engineers for judgement rather than output, and why every part of a normal interview is measuring the wrong thing.
The campsite was never the point
Ten years on from taking the name: the Boy Scout Rule scales from a function to a team, because it is about intention rather than size.
The rung we sawed off
The junior developer pipeline is collapsing, and the cause is not the thing everyone is blaming. Who is left when the greybeards retire.
Why I still write code
The case for a head of engineering staying hands-on, written as a confession rather than a boast, because the compulsion is the problem.
The greybeards' edge was never typing
Agentic AI gives senior engineers a lift and juniors a drag, which tempts firms to automate away the entry level entirely.
Technical CV writing is still hard, and now a robot reads it first
My CV stopped landing because a machine reads it before a person does. Reworking the structure for the filter without losing the voice.
