I recently sat down with Brett Berson for a wide ranging conversation about engineering leadership for First Round’s In Depth podcast.

It was fun to be back roughly a decade after I gave a talk on the work Marc, myself and others had done to increase the gender diversity of Etsy Engineering (a talk that became the first article in the First Round Review series). I’ve always admired the First Round content, and I thought Brett asked great questions, and I occassionally even gave some good answers.

I talked a bit about what I think has changed about engineering leadership, and what’s changed about my approaches. Touched on leading with curiosity which is something I speak about a bunch, and also the balance of caring and detatchment which comes up a lot in my coaching work, but don’t know that I’ve spoken about publicly much in depth.

Touched on some of themes from my software and its discontents series, though I was glad we covered new material.

Brett got me to speculate about AI, which is a topic I’m not really qualified to talk about, but my hot take is that we’ll need less software in the future, we’ve got a bunch of custom solutions being built where in the future we’ll have a more generalized toolbox that we can use to solve a problem without custom development.