Engineering Leadership

Four years ago, I started moving from an engineering role into management and leadership. I have written before about my journey from Senior System Engineer to Team Leader and the importance of moving from delegation to ownership. Another transition is happening in parallel. AI coding agents are changing how experienced engineers build software. A recent X post from Lingxi Li, a SpaceXAI engineer working on Grok Bot, gave me one of the clearest examples I have seen so far. ...

It is a sunny Sunday, even here in Ireland. While my wife is going through articles to find her next career path, I find myself wanting to write down some reflections about a few reports I have been reading lately, and how clearly they mirror what I experience in my daily working routine. McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026, published in May, makes something very explicit that most senior leaders already sense but rarely act on: middle managers are the primary carriers of organizational culture. They are the ones who translate strategy into daily behavior. They decide, in practice, what gets celebrated, what gets tolerated, and what gets ignored. No amount of executive messaging overrides what an engineer experiences in their one-to-ones, in sprint reviews, or in the way their manager handles failure. ...