I used to think that “Trust” was a soft value for HR posters. I thought my job as a leader was to be the ultimate Validator—to verify every line of code, sign off on every decision, and ensure nothing moved without…

I used to think that in engineering, the best logic always won. I believed that because we deal with compilers and hard data, we were immune to the “office politics” of other industries. I was wrong. I realized that my…

I used to think that as long as the Frontend was fast and the Backend was fast, the project would be fast. I treated the “Handover” like a simple baton pass in a race. I was wrong. In reality, the…

I used to think that “Individual Productivity” was simple: the person with the most commits on the chart was my top performer. I looked at the “Line Count” and the “Ticket Count” to see who was moving the needle. I…

I used to think a long, thorough code review was a sign of high quality. I’d see a PR (Pull Request) with forty comments and think, “The team is really being rigorous.” I was wrong. What I was actually looking…

I used to think that “Healthy Debate” was the fuel of a high-performing team. I wanted my engineers to be passionate, to fight for the best architecture, and to never settle for “good enough.” But I realized that many of…

I used to think having a “Go-To Expert” was a sign of a strong team. I felt secure knowing that if the deployment pipeline broke, I could just “Ask Dave.” If the legacy database acted up, I could just “Ask…

I see it everywhere: I hire brilliant people, then I watch their speed vanish because I’ve connected them using High-Latency Human Protocols. It is like buying ten high-end servers and hooking them up with a dial-up modem. The individual CPUs are…