Week 25, 2025 - 10x Teams
Summer is coming in full speed to Hungary. I’ll launch this short edition, then head out to meet a friend to share some beers on a terrace.
This week on LeadTime.tech I wrote about a difficult challenge: how to approach having to lay off a well-performing developer. In this “age of efficiency” (I started to prefer this term to the “wartime” or “high-stress” ones), it’s not uncommon for companies to cut back on costs, including staffing. This, together with the advancement of AI in the workplace, often creates a deadly combination for junior developers. So, I came up with a scenario where the EM of the team needs to part with a junior developer who’s otherwise performing according to expectations, due to the financial state of the company. I shared my approach here.
Coincidentally, Sean Goedecke just wrote about the future of junior developers this morning. He’s doing a good job describing all the arguments for still hiring junior developers, but I think he missed an important one: team dynamics. A team that’s diverse in experience can be more resourceful, flexible, and resilient; and for a senior, mentoring a junior peer is not just greatly satisfying, but an important step towards an even more senior, technical leadership role. Sean also ends on this note:
I personally really like working with juniors. It’s just nice to work with smart, motivated people who are new to the industry.
But he misses the opportunity to make the point that this is not just a personal preference, but an important part in career development, for both parties!
🤔 Articles that made me think
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers
I recommended a shorter version of this article before, but I wanted to bring it up again, because Charity Majors has now published her original version, which was also the base of her talk during CraftConf earlier in Budapest. It's such a great encapsulation of how I think about software engineering. I’ll copy the key point of the article here:
The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team.
That's it. Everything can be deduced from this statement.
What is it like to write a book in the age of AI?
Will Larson will also sell his new book (on Engineering Strategy) as a “datapack”, an LLM-optimized format ready to load into your favorite AI chat’s project context, and ask questions from, or interact with it as you please. I love the pragmatic, forward-looking thinking of what the AI age means for authors. Not sure how this will work out, though. Is it truly a game-changer, or just a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable?
I have an analogy in mind: Netflix was a DVD-via-snail-mail distributor initially, before realizing that media consumption is slowly but surely shifting away from physical media, and fully pivoted to what they are doing now. Are we seeing something similar starting to happen? If so, what will the AI-optimized long-form writing business look like after the shift?
Anyway, interesting experiment.
A friend of mine asked what “LLM-optimized” means exactly. I couldn’t answer him confidently besides “I guess markdown, json, xml or some other structured text… LLMs are good at picking up structure.” Since then, I learned there’s an ongoing proposal to allow website owners to publish their content in formats better parsable by AI agents, a bit similar to sitemap.xml or robots.txt.
No news about AI company support, though.
2x Engineering Teams
I love the approach to the “AI-first software development” in this internal memo from Intercom, because it’s not just saying what dozens of other executives do nowadays, about how AI competency is a concrete expectation going forward. Added to that, they also detail how they are creating the time and learning opportunities for this change. (Plus, thanks to this post, I discovered this old article that I haven’t read yet, about how high expectations and overwhelming support are not the two ends of a spectrum, but something that ideally goes hand in hand. Great read!)
That’s it for today, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, enjoy the longest sunshine of the year during the weekend,
Péter