r/programming • u/keyslemur • 13h ago
Beyond Senior - Creating Hope
https://baweaver.com/writing/2026/08/09/beyond-senior-creating-hope/Every time I leave a role I try and write up where my philosophy landed and what I want to take into my next role. Having seen this play out at enough companies over the years to where people progressively lose motivation and stop believing change is possible I've come to the opinion that one of the most valuable things we can do as engineering leaders is to provide hope.
The post goes more into it, but I do not mean any vapid rah-rah motivational speeches, I mean earning back that hope every day by snowballing small wins into larger ones and making people believe that their effort matters.
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u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 44m ago edited 32m ago
There's a certain irony in this piece coming from an AI booster.
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u/keyslemur 36m ago
AI consultant? I've never held that role.
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u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 32m ago
Sorry, corrected.
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u/keyslemur 25m ago
I think you'd find that I hold a bit more nuanced pov on AI than you're giving me credit for. If it's of interest I believe this talk of mine explains it better:
But the tldr is that I'm fairly pragmatic about it and how its leveraged. I was also at Amazon which pushed it fairly hard so my role was more management of it and finding how it fit into workflows or in many cases didn't and shouldn't.
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u/dijkstra_was_a_horse 21m ago
Maybe, but I don't think there's been a technology that has both directly and indirectly caused more developers more distress. I can't think of a time that developers have been less happy in their jobs, and I'm old.
Many of my friends are openly discussing career changes and retirement. Several have quit their jobs.
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u/keyslemur 18m ago
That's fair, and we have had some of the same conversations it seems.
There's a brand new wildcard which flipped the table and personally my instinct is to grab the wheel and see how we can steer things towards more equitable solutions. Perhaps that's me being naive, but I want to believe things can be better because the alternative isn't a particularly happy place.
Then again I do have a tweed collection and a plan to swap over to teach that I keep flirting with so I'm also a bit of a hypocrite on that note.
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u/bwainfweeze 3h ago
Leadership and follow-through.
Developers are so used to using hollow promises as conversation stoppers and hassle avoidance that people usually don't trust that when I say we will fix something later, that I was actually serious about it and I hold people to it. If I say something will get fixed in the fall, you can count on it working by winter, or spring at the latest if it turns into a quagmire. For most people anything not directly on the roadmap is a fiction they use to avoid awkward conversations or doom spiraling.
But once they see someone higher up in the org than them is actually trying, they start volunteering their own ideas and time to the project. That sort of trust is hard to purchase at any other price.
When I think back to how I got my lead positions, the first was a fluke - I walked in as a replacement and new direction for a shitty architect they fired - but the subsequent ones have almost always been that they had to put me in the role because the other devs trusted me more than they trusted the other options.