Two Captains, One Ship | Exec Engineering #193
Also: the hidden cost of one bad hire, how bad code spreads like a virus, and why the industry keeps swinging between the same org design extremes.
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The Digest
Minimally Viable Consistency (Part 3) (John Cutler / The Beautiful Mess)
Every scaling org hits the same wall: too much standardization kills autonomy, too little makes coordination a nightmare. Cutler maps this out with a sharp distinction between what must be locked down, what just needs shared intent, and what can vary as long as it’s named. The framework alone is worth the read.
A Lesson From the Cockpit (Subbu Allamaraju)
When you automate the hard parts of a job for long enough, the people doing that job gradually lose the ability to handle those hard parts without the automation. Aviation learned this through crashes and built mandatory unassisted training to counter it. Software engineering is heading toward the same wall and has built nothing equivalent yet.
Why engineering teams swing between process extremes (Dunya Kirkali / Incremental forgetting)
The worst time to adopt a trend is when everyone is talking about it. By then, the pendulum is already preparing to swing the other way. Dunya Kirkali’s piece is a useful reminder that most of what looks like progress in our industry is actually oscillation, and the job of a good engineering leader is to stay aware of the motion, not get swept up in it.
Two Captains, One Ship (Alex Kurilin)
Co-founder advice usually comes in two flavors: inspirational or cautionary. This is something rarer. It’s an honest, experience-dense account of what the CEO/CTO relationship demands from both sides, written by someone who has been in the seat enough times to know what actually matters.
Can one bad apple ruin your team? (Bruce Daisley / Make Work Better)
Most team performance conversations focus on the best people, who to promote, who to retain, who to stretch. But the data points in the opposite direction, showing that the biggest predictor of team performance isn't your strongest engineer but your weakest cultural fit, and how long you let them stay.
Leadership in AI-Assisted Engineering (Justin Reock / InfoQ)
Teams go through a rough patch when they first start using AI, productivity dips, code quality drops, and engineers feel the friction of rewiring how they work. This is a predictable stage, not a failure. The leaders who know it’s coming, communicate it clearly, and give their teams time to push through it are the ones seeing real gains on the other side.
Bad code is contagious (Jeff Foster / JoT)
Bad code has always spread through codebases by imitation. AI just made that process dramatically faster. This is one of the more original ways I’ve come across to think about technical debt, applying epidemic modeling to code quality, and using it to figure out where engineering interventions actually matter.
”Engineering leaders spend a lot of time thinking about how to produce more code. The more useful question is how to ensure that the code you produce does not contaminate the code you already had.”
The Transitional Instability of AI Engineering (Peter Spellward / Refactoring Leadership)
AI conversations in engineering usually focus on speed. This one focuses on what gets quietly lost as speed increases, the organisational understanding, ownership clarity, and control systems that took years to build and can erode in months. That’s the transition worth preparing for.
Dialog
Vincent Chu, VP of Engineering at Visier Inc., shares why distributed teams don’t fail because of weak async documentation, but because they lose the informal signals that reveal who’s stuck, overwhelmed, or quietly disengaging.
He also breaks down why distributed teams only work when each site owns a problem space end-to-end, how AI shifts the bottleneck from coding to code review and comprehension, and why engineering leaders who stop coding lose touch with what’s actually practical versus hype.
Check it out here:
More reads
When Everyone Is a Key Person in Your Company (Tomasz Tunguz)
Amazon’s Durability (Ben Thompson)
Don’t Say Umm – Public Speaking Exercises (Michał Poczwardowski)
Apocalypse No (Scott Galloway)
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About Exec Engineering
I’m Yassine 👋 I spend a big chunk of my time digging into engineering management and talent acquisition, especially where the two overlap. I share the most interesting resources I come across in this newsletter, all curated by hand.