6 posts
The instinct when you're new on a team and hit conflict is to win the argument. Every time I've tried that, it made things worse. The fix is almost never about being right. It's about building the process that should have existed before you got there.
Junior engineers can write code. What they can't do is tell you things like why a build failed, write a useful commit message, or handle the case where everything goes wrong. That gap doesn't close on its own.
Most candidates treat this as a warm-up. Hiring managers treat it as signal. Here's how to use it.
The question isn't whether to fix tech debt. It's whether fixing it right now will create more value than anything else you could do with those engineer-hours.
Most teams skip architecture reviews because they feel slow. The cost of that decision compounds in ways that don't show up until it's too late to fix cheaply.
20 years of building software, leading teams, and sitting across the table from candidates. Here's what I'm doing with all of it.