Developer Tea

In 1967, a study on shock avoidance gave us "learned helplessness," and for nearly fifty years that was the prevailing explanation for why people give up. Then the original authors published a follow-up with brain scan data showing they had it backwards. We don't learn to be helpless — passivity is the default. What we learn is control. In today's episode, I explore what that reversal means for anyone facing a hard problem right now, and why a single small action can shift your entire orientation toward a challenge you haven't solved yet.

As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, accept certain risks, and reduce the surface area they're responsible for — and what drives that shift underneath the surface. Understanding the reasons behind the trend is what lets you get there on purpose instead of waiting a decade to arrive there accidentally.

Early in your career, output goes up fast. You're building more than ever, especially with AI in the mix, and a lot of what you bu...

Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our industry. Many of us have a visceral, negative reaction to it—not because the concept is broken, but because the companies and people we've worked with have bastardized its meaning. In today's episode, I want to strip away the scary parts and offer you a pragmatic, working definition of accountability: one that a good engineer would actually invite rather than dread.

What We Cover

There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do it constantly — usually without noticing, and sometimes to our detriment. In today's episode, I make the case that you can take this same shortcut your brain already runs automatically and start using it intentionally to break decision paralysis and get moving.

The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventually will. In this episode, I work through why our careers and lives are governed more by avoiding catastrophic downside than by chasing upside, and why the single best tool for surviving a bad event isn't testing, insurance, or money — it's genuine trust with the people around you.

Here's a question to sit with: what is the most important tool you have as a software engineer and as a leader? Most of us reach for...

If you are a manager, a lead engineer, or anyone growing into more responsibility, this throwback episode is built for you. We keep hearing the same question, now louder than ever: "Why can't this go faster?" AI and agentic coding have made the literal coding step dramatically cheaper, so product leaders reasonably expect the whole pipeline to speed up. But it hasn't—and in today's short, focused episode I explore why. The answer isn't new at all. It's the theory of constraints, and it has everything to do with friction you may not be looking at.

The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (limiting work in progress, the theory of constraints, test-driven development) are coming roaring back as the fundamentals that will carry you through the agentic shift. The bottleneck has moved, and knowing where it went changes how you should work.

A lot of what we're learning about building with agentic tooling isn't new at all — it's a re-emphasis on lessons software engineers learned twenty years ago, just arriving in a new form. In today's episode, I wa...

The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripping away the labels we attach to tools, roles, and even ourselves to see what something actually does at its core. It's the difference between handing your coding off to an agent and rethinking your entire workflow around what these new materials are truly capable of.

If you've been following along with our recent focus on durable skills, you know we've been hunting for the ab...

A lot of what we've been talking about lately is durable skills — the abilities that last regardless of how our tools and tech environment change. In today's episode, I want to step back from the AI conversation and focus on one of the most durable skills of all: feedback. We've all been on both the giving and receiving side, and we can probably count on one hand the times someone gave us feedback that genuinely drove a good change — that left us wanting to do better without feeling torn down. So how do we accomplish that kind of feedback, on b...

Right now, the questions we have about our careers feel existential. We keep coming back to the same theme: how do you prepare for an industry that's changing this fast, and what mindset actually works in this new reality? One skill keeps surfacing as the answer — your ability to update your own mental models. In today's episode, I want to push on that further and put some of software engineering's most beloved thinking models under scrutiny. Some of these models served you well for years. Some of them now deserve to be challenged, replaced, or thrown out entirely — and lear...

If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. For many of us, this career has always been engaging for deeply creative and intellectual reasons—and that excitement is still here. But our mental models of what it means to be a good engineer, and what it means to keep improving, have gone a little stale. In today's episode, I want to talk about a distinction th...

If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In today's episode, I unpack what that shift _actually_ means — it's closer to a tech lead or architect mindset — and zoom in on a specific interviewing and on-the-job skill that will help you stay employable: how you think about, talk about, and take ownership of failure.

What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slow*, and I use it as a springboard to talk about a much bigger skill: knowing how to update your beliefs when reality shifts underneath you. This isn't about throwing out science or losing trust in your heroes. It's about developing the muscle to replace old explanations with better ones — a skill that has never been more important for software engineers.

Why I'm Not "Picking a Fight" on AI: A listener asked if I'm intentionally stoking a flame war by treating agentic coding as a foregone conclusion. The honest answer is that I've used it, the data points one direction, and a show built around pretending otherwise would slowly drift away from reality — and away from being useful to you. Respecting the Misgivings, Without Getting Stuck in Them: Ethical concerns, skill atrophy worries, and questions about long-term effects are all legitimate. But the goal of this show is practical applicability, so we focus on mental models you can use Monday morning ra...

The Coding-Is-My-Value Trap: For years, we've treated the ability to write code as the flagship skill of software engineering. It's concrete, it's teachable, it's the thing big box stores sell kits for. But conflating "what I enjoy about the job" with "what I'm actually valuable for" is dangerously reductive — and AI is now exposing that gap. The Skills You've Been Discounting: Domain expertise, systems thinking, risk and bottleneck analysis, organizational design, tech-lead-level sequencing of work, relational skills that unblock hard moments in a company's life. These have always been where a lot of your real value lived. You probably just we...

If you're an engineering leader right now, everything around you feels like it's changing at once — new tools, new processes, new expectations. It's tempting to accept chaos as the new normal, but in today's episode, I make the case that your job is to go on the offense and *create* order. Not by clinging to old processes, but by becoming the groundskeeper of your team's ceremonies — the regular, repeated actions that give your team a foundation to actually improve from.

Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it or not. In today's episode, I explore two principles that senior engineers consistently apply to their workflows, regardless of which specific tools they're using. As our industry goes through one of the most rapid periods of change in the last 20 years, the engineers who thrive won't be the ones chasing every new tool — they'll be the ones who obsess over reducing friction in the work they do most often.

When Good Thinking Becomes Overthinking: Discover why the pursuit of perfect analysis often undermines good decision-making. Loading every caveat, every exception, and every alternative into your working memory doesn't produce better outcomes — it produces paralysis. Heuristics as a Feature, Not a Bug: Your brain is an efficiency machine that creates shortcuts — cached concepts, stored routines, snap judgments. These heuristics are always incomplete, but they let you move through complex problems quickly. The opportunity is to deliberately choose which heuristics to exploit. "All Models Are Wrong, Some Models Are Useful": Useful illusions don't need to be perfectly true. They need to be t...

The Bottleneck Is Moving: Borrowing from traditional manufacturing theory, the coding step used to define your team's total throughput. AI tooling hasn't incrementally improved that bottleneck — it has drastically shrunk it, which means the constraint is now upstream in product decisions, specifications, and prioritization. Engineers who recognize this shift early will redirect their energy accordingly. Sharing Your Opinion Is Not a Free Action: Every time you weigh in on a decision, you're making a transaction. You're asking others to consider your input, and in return, they will update their beliefs about your judgment based on whether you turn out to be...

The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, and Daniel Kahneman's Noise, I've been experimenting with printed, physical checklists for repetitive tasks — from producing this show to running one-on-ones. The rigor of writing precise procedures carries over into clearer communication with both humans and AI agents. Small Interventions, Big Returns: A Brother P-Touch label maker. Reorganizing scattered hobby gear. 3D printing organizational tools with a new Bambu Labs P1S. None of these are revolutionary on their own, but the compounding effect of better organization — essentially building a fast index for your physical life — pays back o...

If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. However, the rapid introduction of new tools can slide quickly from exciting to purely chaotic, leaving you feeling like you are falling behind. In today's episode, I explore how this changes the nature of our day-to-day work, and why the key to surviving this transition is shifting your mindset from a traditional "Software Engineer" to an "Agent...

AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how you can use your systems-thinking engineering mindset to adapt and thrive in this new era.

🎧 Episode Notes: The Engineering Bottleneck Shift

For years, the software development pipeline was designed around one core assumption: engineering is the most expensive and restrictive bottleneck. Because of this, organizations optimized heavily for upstream risk mitigation to ensure we onl...

Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work.

We are diving into a fantastic listener question from Abdul, a front-end engineer with 10 years of experience who has hit a salary ceiling. He is trying to figure out how to pivot into higher-paying domains like backend or AI without making a risky leap that forces him to start over at the bottom rung.

🎧 Episode Notes: Balancing Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions

When you hit a wall...

I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators.

In this episode, I don't offer false guarantees about job security. Instead, I frame the problem through the lens of microeconomics and rational incentives to help you understand how to remain employable. We discuss why you must separate your ego from your current skill set and how to position yourself not as a competitor to AI, but as a force...

Do you remember the early days of your career? You likely spent hours coding late into the night, fueled not by a paycheck, but by the sheer joy of building. But somewhere along the way, that intrinsic fire faded, replaced by the extrinsic motivators of Jira tickets, performance reviews, and ultimately the almighty dollar.

In this episode of the Career Growth Accelerator, I explore why this shift happens and how it might be the very thing keeping you stuck. We discuss the "Overjustification Effect"—how getting paid for your passion can actually degrade your performance—and how to r...

🎧 Episode Notes: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth

In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a morning routine, or a specific productivity hack—it is a meta-habit. It is a specific way of thinking about how you spend your energy and time to avoid the burnout that comes from working hard without seeing commensurate gains,.

It is review season, and you might be finding yourself confused: you received high ratings and "exceeded expectations," yet the promotion you expected didn't happen. In this episode of the Career Growth Accelerator, I break down exactly why high performance doesn't always lead to promotion, helping you identify the structural roadblocks and strategic shifts necessary to move from senior individual contributor to staff, principal, or leadership roles,.

• Understand why your performance review is never conducted in a vacuum and why your manager’s peers—not just your manager—are the "voters" you need to convince with clear evidence...

In this episode, we explore how to de-risk your career roadmap by identifying the hidden vulnerabilities that hold your decision-making hostage.

🎧 Episode Notes: De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities

True career growth requires gaining autonomy over your choices. This episode provides a framework for performing a "pre-mortem" of career failure by identifying the sources of power that currently influence your life and limiting their leverage over your future.

🎧 Episode Notes: Using a Nine-Block for Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment

Most career assessments try to paint a static picture of what you can do well with the least effort, but they often fail to provide a practical roadmap for your next career move. This episode provides a simplified, multidimensional version of a classic management tool to help you prioritise your growth:

This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the specific challenges that will actually move the needle.

🎧 Episode Notes: Going from Autopilot to Purpose

Many of us operate on instinct, chasing goals like "get a promotion" or "make more money" without understanding the "why" behind them. This episode is designed to help you interrogate those...

This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your job ti...

Are you a mid-to-senior level engineer or leader who has hit a career roadblock or found yourself stagnated? I'm launching the new Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the difficult, non-obvious hurdles that prevent you from moving to the next level.

In this foundational Episode Zero, I cover the critical prerequisite for growth: Getting Out of Your Own Way. Our ego often protects our self-worth by blaming external factors for failures, making honest diagnosis impossible,.

• Learn why protecting your ego is the most dangerous way to control your career.

• Discover the fundamental shift: disc...

When you hit a career roadblock, the methods that worked for you before often stop working. Today, I’m diving into why that happens, and why the first and most critical step in progressing past stagnation isn't doubling down on skills, but clearly defining the problem standing in your way.

Problem Definition As A Path for Career Growth

My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This episode is for everyone trying to grow, especially if you have hit some kind of roadblock. Mo...

We often look for ways to reduce the load on our brains, seeking shortcuts and optimizations to get ahead. Sometimes this works, reinforcing the belief that we can hack our way around every problem. However, this episode addresses the truth that many fundamental aspects of your career require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.

This episode details the difficult truths about facing the most essential challenges in your career:

If you're looking to accelerate your career growth, this episode gives you what may feel like hard truths about the path forward. So many engineers fall into traps of overthinking, chasing minor optimizations (like 5% or 10% productivity boosts), or playing the games of politics and networking. While these sideline activities aren't necessarily useless, I want to help you focus on the "big engines" and "primary considerations"—the things that will make the monumental difference in your career building strategy.

• I explain why arguments based on nuance—such as trying to convince your manager that your work is valuable despit...

If you're an engineer looking to move into a senior role, you have likely heard that you need to demonstrate "ownership". Unfortunately, this crucial term is often poorly defined and leads to a major misconception: that ownership means being assigned a full project or a Tech Lead role. I want to dispel that myth and explain why ownership is actually a necessary behavior and mindset shift, applicable in almost every action you take, regardless of whether you’re leading a project.

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into how you can think about relating to and integrating the massive changes that AI is bringing to your job, whether you are a software engineer, manager, director, or product professional. Bryan and I discuss his interests beyond research, including art and organizational design.

Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. It's been quite a while since I've had a guest on the show. Today, I'm joined by Bryan McCann, CTO at you.com. We dive into a wide-ranging discussion, exploring the philosophical origins of his career—from studying meaning and language to working in very early AI research. This discussion is less advice-heavy and more focused on kind of theory and discussion. I hope this is insightful for you and helpful as you crystallize your own philosophies on these subjects.

I'm tackling a massive challenge today: burnout. While the standard advice usually involves working less, I want to show you a practical dimension of burnout you have more control over, focusing on increasing your agency and autonomy to manage chronic workplace stress more effectively. Burnout is classified by the ICD-11 as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

This episode includes practical advice for understanding and addressing burnout by shifting focus from reducing work volume to increasing control and resources.

In this episode, I dive into the management mantra that "what is measured is managed" and explain why this simple assertion often leads to a complex trap. We discuss why the act of measuring team productivity is never neutral—it's an intervention that immediately changes behavior, often resulting in unintended consequences like gaming the metrics. We'll explore how to collaborate with your team to find measurements that truly drive desired behaviors.