Burnout at Scale: What Running 200 Engineers Taught Me
I burned out while leading 200 engineers across four countries through a platform rebuild. What it looked like, what I got wrong, and what helped.
Venkatesan Ramachandran
AI Made Our Junior Engineers Faster and Our Senior Engineers Slower
AI coding tools made our junior engineers faster and our senior engineers slower. What happened, why I think it happened, and what we changed.
DORA Metrics Are Not Enough. Here Is What We Measure Instead.
Our DORA numbers stopped making sense once AI coding tools arrived. These are the measures we added, and how we put them on one dashboard.
Your Board Wants 20% Fewer Engineers. Here Is What to Say.
The board read that AI replaces 20% of engineering work and wants to cut heads. How a CTO can answer with numbers and a counter-proposal the CFO will respect.
70% of Your Engineers Are Using AI Tools You Do Not Know About
One of my engineers pasted a production schema into ChatGPT. Banning AI tools would not have stopped it. A gateway, an approved list and data tiers did.
I Spent Six Months Studying AI Regulations. Here Is What Matters.
I spent six months reading the EU AI Act, DORA, NIS2 and the UK AI Cyber Security Code. Three parts matter most for engineering leaders. Much of the rest less.
How I Learned to Talk About Engineering in Money
Early in my career I could not put a number on what my teams were worth. Running a consulting P&L and leading engineering at Maersk taught me to talk in money.