After 16 years building distributed systems and leading engineering teams, here's my honest take on where AI sits in the stack — and what it actually means for your career.
Retention isn't a compensation problem. It's an incentive alignment problem. And the misalignment is usually invisible until it's already too late.
Technical debt doesn't accumulate because engineers don't know better. It accumulates because human psychology makes future pain feel smaller than present friction.
The 10x engineer is real. But the myth version gets the math wrong. It's not about coding 10x faster — it's about making everyone around you 2x better.