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PJ Evans

Verification Debt Is Your Next Headache

• 🔍 A different kind of debt: The concept of “verification debt” goes beyond standard technical debt — it specifically refers to the growing, hidden burden of manually testing and validating software due to a lack of proper automated systems.
• 🐢 The illusion of speed: Skipping automated tests initially makes an engineering team feel like they are moving fast. However, this creates a dangerous trap — every new feature exponentially increases the time it takes to manually verify that the entire system still works.
• 📈 Compounding consequences: Just like financial debt, verification debt compounds over time. As a product scales, the manual regression testing phase becomes a massive bottleneck, leading to painfully slow releases and a higher likelihood of “unexplained” bugs slipping into production.
• 💡 Automation is an enabler: To escape this vicious cycle, teams must shift their mindset and prioritize paying down this specific debt. Automated testing isn’t a tax on delivery — it is the essential infrastructure that allows teams to maintain their velocity and confidence as they grow.

Say the Thing You Want

• 🗣️ Say what you want out loud — Keeping career desires to yourself gives them no "surface area" for others to help you achieve them
• 😰 Fear holds us back — We stay quiet because asking feels presumptuous, risky, or too exposing — but these fears prevent growth opportunities
• 🎯 Managers can't read minds — Your manager has multiple reports and their own priorities; they can't send opportunities your way if they don't know your direction
• 🗺️ Get a career roadmap — When you voice your goals, managers can provide specific feedback on gaps and concrete steps to get there
• 🪞 Self-assessment has blind spots — You need external perspective to understand your strengths and weaknesses; thinking harder about yourself won't close these gaps
• ⚡ Speaking makes it real — Saying your goals out loud gives them weight and makes you start making different choices and taking different actions
• 🎲 The risk is worth it — If expressing career ambitions gets you punished, that's valuable information about your workplace; three years of hinting is worse than one honest conversation
• 💬 Simple phrases work — Try "I've been thinking about the path to senior. Can we talk about where I stand?" or "I'm interested in leading a project. What would I need to show you?"
• 🚪 Next 1:1 is your chance — When your manager asks "anything else?" — just say the thing instead of rationalizing why you shouldn't

The difference between Manager and Director

• 🎯 Core Evolution Model : Leadership growth follows a "What → How → Why" progression — early career focuses on tangible outputs (What), management emphasizes processes and team effectiveness (How), and director level prioritizes strategy and purpose (Why)
• 👥 Role Responsibility Shift : Directors become strategic filters between business and tech, co-creating company direction rather than just consuming it — they evaluate and prioritize incoming work based on strategic alignment rather than executing all requests
• 📊 Distance from Work : Directors operate further from day-to-day execution and must develop new ways to collect signals about team health — using metrics, visual management tools, and periodic deep-dives across people, product, platform, and process dimensions
• 💪 Power Transition : Leadership power evolves from expertise (knowing the answers) to influence (relationships and trust) — authority from titles is the weakest form, while influence becomes everything at director level
• 🗣️ Communication as Multiplier : Communication skills become increasingly critical and can be the biggest growth blocker — directors need to influence peers, shape strategy, and build other leaders through clear communication
• 🎭 Emotional Rewiring Required : Each transition demands redefining personal impact — from tangible code/features (IC) to team delivery (manager) to abstract business outcomes (director), with longer feedback loops at each level
• ⚠️ Common Anti-Pattern : Directors who remain stuck in "What" mode by coding themselves or micromanaging implementation details — this shows lack of trust and prevents strategic thinking
• 🚀 Proactive Development Advice : Engage with all three dimensions (What/How/Why) early in your career — build relationships with Why and communication skills before the role demands it to ease future transitions

Startup Engineering Team Organisation

• 🏗️ Team Structure Evolution — Startup engineering teams follow predictable patterns as they grow, each solving previous problems while creating new ones
• 💻 Technical Teams Trap — Organizing by tech stack (frontend, backend, mobile) creates silos where every project becomes a cross-team coordination nightmare
• 🎯 Squad Success & Failure — Business-domain squads improve product focus and team dynamics, but technical debt piles up as "core" engineering work gets deprioritized
• 📚 Chapter Conflicts — Adding technical chapters (communities of practice) helps with knowledge sharing, but creates constant battles between product priorities and technical maintenance
• ⚙️ Core Team Complications — Dedicated platform teams solve technical debt but create a "two-class system" where product engineers stop caring about technical quality
• 🎲 Project Approach Problems — One-shot technical projects seem clear but suffer from scope creep, timeline extensions, and knowledge loss when teams disband
• 👑 Staff Engineer Solution — Senior autonomous engineers plus ~20% chapter time provides flexibility, but puts huge pressure on staff engineers and requires rare skill combinations
• 🔄 No Perfect Answer — Every organizational structure has tradeoffs — the key is recognizing when current limitations outweigh benefits and being ready to evolve
• 📈 Scale Matters — What works for 18 engineers won't work for 50 or 5 — team structure must adapt to current size and challenges

Three Bad Managers

• 🎨 The Artist — A brilliant creative leader who valued art over people, couldn't engage with human management challenges, and required extensive written documentation to even sometimes pay attention to team dynamics
• 👑 The Dictator — A passionate but bulldozing leader who dominated every conversation, ignored expert input, and made terrible decisions because they couldn't stop "litigating" issues that were already solved
• 🗡️ The Knife — An inexplicably successful yet completely disconnected manager who pulled actual knives out during meetings, talked about unrelated topics, and was impossible to understand or influence
• 📊 Success vs. Management Skills — All three were objectively successful leaders who generated significant shareholder value, proving that leadership ability (strategy/vision) and management ability (operations/people) are completely different skill sets
• 🔄 Everyone is an Adjustment — The core lesson is that you must adapt your communication style, preparation methods, and approach for each person you work with — you don't get to pick your bosses, only how you respond to them
• 📝 Adaptation Strategies — With The Artist, detailed written explanations worked sometimes; with The Dictator, doing extensive homework and showing you "care deeply" earned respect; with The Knife, staying out of the way was the only viable approach
• 🎯 You Can't Change Bad Managers — The more senior the leader, the less you can influence them, so focus on adapting yourself rather than trying to fix them
• 🧠 Intelligence ≠ Good Management — All three were highly intelligent people who simply had no business managing humans, despite being effective at leading organizations toward goals

That’s all for this week’s edition

I hope you liked it, and you’ve learned something — if you did, don’t forget to give a thumbs-up, add your thoughts as comments, and share this issue with your friends and network.

See you all next week 👋

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