What exactly should the author have done differently? It's part of the leadership roles to understand the power structures within your organization. Reading between the lines, a new team was thrusted onto an arguably functioning sub-org to address concerns that they had not themselves raised. Then the expectation was for that sub-org to take a hit on their KPIs to onboard to the new teams platform.
It's not "tribal" to refuse to do something that is misaligned with all your explicit incentives. Otherwise we'd have to pay lip service to every internal tooling team just because they exist. It's the leadership team's job to keep pushing if they strongly believe the sub-org leader is acting in bad faith.
> What exactly should the author have done differently?
Work with the other engineering manager.
This person was angry about the team's appearance, but the other engineering manager who assembled the team is barely a side note in the document.
The way you deal with these situations is by working with the other managers involved and propose better solutions.
This is a weird blog post because it's supposedly from someone in a high up engineering manager position, but it's written with a political awareness that I'd expect from someone who had never managed before or who was a first-time manager without good mentorship.
They had better solution and used it. You cant "work with" people who are not working with you in the first place.
This was not a cooperative situation. Trying to cooperate in this situation will make you walked all over and also will make you the one to be blamed when it fails.
What about expecting them to suck up their pride, work with the other lead for a comprehensive plan that includes possible WONTFIX-es?
Strategy and leadership don’t come to exist on their own. It’s middle management that has the best operational and tactical view bear none. Use that to influence decision making instead of complaining. (Yes, this is a theme in my professional life. Our middle managers don’t know their own worth. Pretty please give me Plans about what you Want to Deliver. Those are so much better than general strategies.)
The best managers I've seen would turn this situation into a headcount request.
The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.
In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.
Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.
For me the next step should explore how to cut out the firing part of the process altogether, pottery looks cool but the process requires a lot of energy. Perhaps it could be done on a piece of wood planed by hand? You can get those fairly flat. Then use copper tape (or laminate your own copper really) with some homemade adhesive?
Actually now that I think about it you could just make pine rosin (pine resin + alcohol) as your adhesive. For the copper laminate this might be harder without steel rollers or a way to cut.
Amusing historical note, that's where the word "breadboard" came from. Wooden cutting boards were readily available, and people would make circuits by screwing down tube sockets and other components.
Bah the other wheels usually die of natural causes if you wait a bit.
I am a big believer in Amazon's "1 > 2 > 0" for "one perfect solution is better than two, but both are much better than no solutions". It's also misunderstanding how Amazon works. If you want to move fast, you can't wait for an SVP 6 levels above you to approve every effort. Instead you build something and then you run it up the chain to have it be adopted at team/org-level.
[X] Tweets and instagram comments presented as "what society is thinking"
[X] Ties Luigi Mangione and the California warehouse fire to Gen Z discontent (about AI?).
[X] Statistics being used to support the title with little to no regards to continuity: "those respondents who said that AI makes them “nervous” grew from 50% to 52% during the same period" => percentage was 52% in 2023, 50% in 2024 and 52% in 2025, seems mostly flat to me, with the real jump being in 2022-2023 with 39%.
I didn't say it was devoid of substance, the poll part is actually interesting (and worth discussing!) it's just that it actually appears *after* the sloppy tweets and "someone pretended to shoot at Sam Altman's house" screenshot as if that was somehow relevant.
Good catch on the 52→50→52 "growth." The actual Stanford report has more interesting data than TechCrunch pulled out - the gap between industry practitioners and academic researchers on safety concerns is arguably the more striking finding, but that doesn't make as good a headline as "public vs elites."
The unwritten thing is that if you need seniors to review every single change from junior and mid-level engineers, and those engineers are mostly using Kiro to write their CRs, then what stops the senior from just writing the CRs with Kiro themselves?
I am not in that specific meeting but it made me chuckle that a weekly ops meeting will somehow get media attention. It's been an Amazon thing forever. Wait until the public learns about CoEs!
Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.
There was nothing mentioned in the meeting or messaging about PRs with AI contributions. There are no extra requirements for review or scrutiny of AI-generated-code. The media reports about this have been excessively misleading about this.
There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.
I think its a question 2 or 3 in a why chain, but 4 and 5 need to be why the agent screwed up, and there needs to be action items that are around giving the ai better guardrails, context, or tooling.
"get a person to look at it" is a cop-out action item, and best intentions only. nothing that you could actually apply to make development better across the whole company
> you could reduce headcount via attrition which is better in some ways
I don't think reducing via attrition is better for the company, for the employees 100%, but attrition would be your people moving to other companies and retirement. It means that you are effectively bleeding your people with options (usually above average) and those with the most experience in favor of "the rest".
It's a nuanced trade-off. It's worse for the company as you said, it may be worse for the employees because some will leave from burnout without severance, those remaining will have more work to do typically.
But my point was that what was presented was a false dichotomy and that framing it as such is disingenuous to employees receiving those comms.
I guess you could consider it that, I read "prolonged bleeding" as more smaller layoffs. That's a fair point. Although then I'd say it's still disingenuous to frame it that negatively when many may see it as a better option.
My pet peeve with AI is that it tends to work better in codebase where humans do well and for the same reason.
Large orchestration package without any tests that relies on a bunch of microservices to work? Claude Code will be as confused as our SDEs.
This in turns lead to broader effort to refactor our antiquated packages in the name of "making it compatible with AI" which actually means compatible with humans.
In my opinion it’s not just compatible with AI its code that now fits in your head. Lots of famous “we can rewrite it later” remarks throughout my career… Well the AI can rewrite it, and now you can understand it.
Always make it write out a plan, write out unit tests that match the codebase as-is, and if adjusted are only changed in how they call the code in the future, giving you confidence that the rewrite didn't break core logic.
It's an interesting world for sure, I maintain a somewhat popular package and got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once.
They seemed genuinely confused when I told them I was not going to fill compliance form and make patching commitments for free. Really makes you wonder how many maintainers are letting themselves be taken advantage of.
The people who maintain open source software are considered "the vendor" by these compliance types. When it comes to open source, the user is really the vendor and the user has responsibility to themselves for compliance (this is pretty much spelled out in the licence and WARRANTY file). The compliance industry doesn't acknowledge how open source works and have tried, since forever, to shoehorn it into a paid vendor model. Open source maintainers creating destination/marketing websites espousing the advantages of their software as if it is a sellable/buyable product doesn't help and perpetuates that perception.
> got a form to fill from a Deloitte consultant about security once.
It could be someone trying to extract free work, but in my experience this person was probably trained by someone else about how to handle vendor compliance for contracted vendors.
Some times the people in these grunt work consulting positions aren't really knowledgable about the space. They're in those positions because they can follow directions and will diligently grind out billable hours. Their default mode for getting things done is to try what worked last time, and if that fails they just start looking for names to send the request to until someone does it.
As others mentioned, you could have said "Compliance forms are $1000, payable to ____" and the consultant may have diligently gone through their mental process about where to direct invoices for work.
Yeah, that's what I do. Anytime anyone from a company sends an email about whatever, who wants me to help them (for their company) in private with something, I ask if they're willing to pay for my time spent on it, maybe 20% says yes. Most of the time they end up getting redirected to use the same venues the rest of the community has access to too.
Assuming you want to. But if you do, understand that accepting payment for services creates obligation to deliver, and possibly liability for poor performance. You may or may not want that.
I do talk with OSS devs about “we need X for security and we are willing to provide X amount of funding”
You’d be amazed how much OSS devs will do for you when your request of something they wanted to do anyways (but had no impetus for prioritization) is matched by a healthy rate
No kidding. I don't maintain anything of enough popularity to warrant being approached like that, but a good hourly-rate answer would be the no-brainer response.
The compliance form thing is wild but predictable. I'm on the other side of that equation now. Companies will pay me to handle their compliance mapping but balk at paying an open source maintainer to fill out a security questionnaire for software they depend on in production. The disconnect is that compliance teams budget for vendors but have no line item for 'critical open source dependency we treat like a vendor but isn't one.
It's not "tribal" to refuse to do something that is misaligned with all your explicit incentives. Otherwise we'd have to pay lip service to every internal tooling team just because they exist. It's the leadership team's job to keep pushing if they strongly believe the sub-org leader is acting in bad faith.
reply