Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

A long time ago, I discovered the Serenity Prayer. For the click-impaired, that is the whole “Strength. Patience. Wisdom.” thing. At the very beginning of my career, I loved to use Strength. I used it for everything, in fact. Patience? Wisdom? Those are choices for sissies. Good old strength!

I used to smash through walls at work with such ease and consistency that it terrified people. There was no problem that Strength could not solve! This remained true for about six years.

Eventually, you do have to try the Patience thing or the Wisdom thing. They are equally effective tools for solving problems, especially when you start to transition out of pure IC roles.

Most of the best C-level people I know are masters of deploying Patience. “Do not make a decision until you absolutely have to” is something I have heard enough times that I just had to try it. It takes a while to get accustomed to it, but now that I have a good mouthfeel for it, I recommend it.

One of the biggest flavors of Patience I have had to learn was Patience with other people. I was very quick to throw people into two distinct buckets that I struggled with: Stupid, or New. This was very easy to do, and forgive me, dear reader, I did this more than was necessary.  I have said my ten Hail Maries and a couple of Rosaries accordingly.

Now that I earned the “Haz lurnt Patience” cheevo, I am proud to say that most places I start, I cheerfully tell people that I would like some help because I am either Stupid or New. This tactic helps you get help for three weeks. After three weeks, you are clearly no longer New, so in the fourth week of working with a new team, I recommend that you scratch this self-deprecating means of getting assistance from your playbook.

Thank you for getting this far. I am almost to where I need to go.

I now give everyone a lot more faith in being New. Especially when they are 100% ethically-sourced artisanally new.

In fact, this has become something I have started to take some pride in. I am very focused on helping people who are New.

If you spend any time sifting through the rubble of my LinkedIn posts, you will see I have four or five years of largely self-therapeutic blog entries. I also have many links to short clips from podcasts and links to presentations and classes, and strong opinions, which are often weakly held.

Over the years, I have taken on dozens of people as mentees. I have been more explicit with some about how much I am mentoring them, and sometimes money changes hands. I do have six kids; I cannot mentor everyone for free as much as I would like to.

This is why I decided to fork over some money to the good folks over at Thinkific and start posting some material for first-time engineer managers.

I am still available part-time as a mentor. I have pricing for people with L&D budgets, as well as pricing for when it is coming out of your own pocket. It is not quite scalable, and I often mentor people for four to twelve months, and then they accomplish whatever goal they were intending, or we have concluded that spending more money on that is throwing good money after bad. I am always happy to spend forty-five minutes with you if this is interesting to you or someone you know.

At the same time, I am also posting some of the parts of the mentoring and coaching that I do at the aforementioned link. I am breaking down all of the things you need to know to be an effective engineering manager, at least by my own measure as an off-again-on-again VP of Engineering.

You can find two samples of that material here:

The first is an overview of the ten-week conversation I have with everyone that I wish to promote to a manager on my own team(s).

The second is the first of the topics covered in the syllabus above, a conversation on some of the bigger challenges you will face in your new role. It was not a lengthy conversation, so I decided to put it out there for free.

In the future, some of these will include a price tag. I am still trying to figure out what makes sense there, because all of the online platforms out there cost not-zero dollars.

In the meantime, now you know about my Leadership Lighthouse, designed to steer you clear of the rocks in your engineering leadership role.

It will also contain random things that help everyone, like how to understand what hiring managers think about when they see your resume.

I hope some of this is interesting to you, and I hope that by the time I start plugging in some numbers for pricing, you will support this project with your dollars in addition to your eyeballs and kind LinkedIn comments.

Thank you as always for your time, and see you next week.

There are a lot of people who repeat things in engineering that sound fair and true and good.

And some of those things are completely wrong.

Have you ever heard someone say a variant of the classic saying, “Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.”

I mean, Elon Musk sure seems to be trying to test this hypothesis.

The problem with this expression is that it is absolute psychobabble.

Software isn’t babies, and if King Solomon was trying to figure out how to identify who owned a software project by splitting it into a bunch of pieces, everyone would look relieved. It would be the worst “You ARE the father” episode of Maury anyone has ever seen.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, that is fine. Soon, you will be old enough to purchase your own alcohol.

This ridiculous expression is meant to give engineering teams a “get out of deadline free” card. And it works because most people find out they are about to miss their deadline when it is too late to do anything about it.

The actual problem with this problem is that software parts are generally interchangeable, so for some value of pregnant moms, you can have a baby in some number of months other than nine.

The real challenge is in the timing.

If you are four months away from a deadline, and you have twenty person-months worth of work, there is a universe where you can actually ship on time.

If you have three people on your team, you can get more than halfway there on your own. A little sixth-grade arithmetic also lets you evaluate the value of adding two more engineers to the mix. The challenge is that they need time to ramp into the project, and you have to give them at least a month.

So you will lose about a week of productivity from one engineer who is evaluating all of their hello world level ramp tasks, and you will also invest one month into each engineer for them to be successful. That still gives you a net add of around six months. Sixteen and six is twenty-two person-months, which gives you a safer path to a successful launch.

The reason we don’t have that super fast nine moms grunting out a one-month baby is that most people do not want to do the elementary school level math to size the impact of extra resources early enough in the project.

By the time you tell your boss the project is going to be late, and he wants you to add someone to the project, the ramp time window alone is going to eat any net gains of a new team member.

I have explained this very slowly to people, using very small words.

Repeatedly.

The average C-level executive will stop day drinking long enough for you to go and make your pitch for extra team members to finish a product on time at least twice, and the first time will be too far away in the future.

Random leaders generally don’t think tactically that far into the future, unless they are doing the math of acquiring themselves a schwaggy new Bentley ride. They work hard daydrinking until 4:59 PM; They deserve those sick wheels.

Hiring two more engineers will bloat the costs of the team, and if it is that far away from the deadline, then bossman will be at risk of losing their own bonus. Suddenly, that five-year-old Jetta is blocking the view of the Bentley. While it is good for the team and good for the product, you are likely going to get vetoed that far away from the end of the project because the average suit would love to roll around town in a Bentley instead of a washed-up Jetta.

There is a point to all of this.

You are likely to get shot down the first time you ask. You have to try. It is okay to be shot down with this kind of request. Once. We all get one turn inside the barrel. The important thing is to capture this data so the next time it happens, you can point out the consequence. When someone finds out that the responsible party for the last failure is looking out at them from a mirror, you can get people approved and onboarded in time to make a difference.

I will also add that you probably don’t want to try this with eighteen person-months of work still remaining and trying to hire 9 people to each do one part of the project. Eating nine months of ramp time is hard. You will likely be able to get away with two or possibly three headcount to solve this problem.

So go ahead and get three people pregnant. In four months, you will have a wonderful baby. Maybe you can give it one of those stupid Elon Musk names.

I gotta go now, HR is on their way after reading this post.

See you next week.

This article was almost called “narc-cissists.”

I have inherited multiple bosses I did not want in my career. Two stand out because they were either bad people, bad at what they were supposed to do, or they did bad things to me. I confess to having bad-blindness on this issue. I frequently second-guess how many “bad” checkboxes they check above.

In one case, it was through corporate activity where one team got eaten by another team in a business-related valuation assessment we affectionately call “thunderdoming.” Two VPs enter, one VP leaves. The good news is “something something efficiency.” The bad news is that I suddenly got a new boss I did not want. They made it clear that most of the intermediate leadership in our organization were employees that they did not want.

The boss I did not want was very vocal about us being employees he did not want. That is a really crummy place to be, honestly. Early in my career, I would have said colorful words and done a double birdflip while moonwalking out of the building with two weeks’ notice, enjoying the plumes of toxic smoke that were visible from space emanating from the bridge I just burned to the ground.

However, John became wiser over time, and he decided that he would do his best to help transition his team and the faithful worker bees (who loved their jobs) into the new organization, and just wait to see what leadership wanted to do to solve the “I don’t want you, you don’t want me” organizational symmetry that existed.

This nearly year-long process saw several people declare “shiny and chrome!” and make a run for glory and eternity on their fabulous exits, and some others who went on “hiatus.” Hiatus meant “I am quietly resigning and no, I am not coming back.”

Some of us gripped the broom handle harder and just mopped more fiercely while avoiding eye contact.

This went on for most of a year, with a group of four or five of us huddling together in our own little self-therapy group.

New leadership decided to try to play some headgames and run us through a reality TV-style experience where they would turn us on each other. Some of the attempts at this were more successful than others. There is nothing like being singled out for negative attention and being told to dance, dance, monkey dance, while people throw burning spears at your feet. The idea of this activity was to flush out my boss and get him to make a heroic run to rescue me. The only thing that guy could do was nothing, honestly, and while I shrieked from the center of the clearing, the real prey of the activity remained hidden. I honestly didn’t realize it at the time, and I was furious that my boss didn’t leap in front of those spears, Gandalf-style, to save me. About three months later, I understood it was all part of the dance.

This kind of thing happens, believe it or not. We were being encouraged to do something, and that something was effectively “fuck right off.”

I lasted about a year doing this. One of the fascinating things I learned about this was about the right way to handle crucial conversations, and I want to share that story because the other party involved clearly did not have the benefit of those learnings, because they were a walking, talking counterexample.

Let’s set the stage, shall we?

There is a delicate balance between product and engineering organizations. Sometimes the product team are great partners. Other times, they like to think of the engineering team as “my bitches” and treat them accordingly. You can guess where this story is going.

One of the roles of engineering leadership is to protect your teams and make sure they are being fed and watered appropriately — emotionally and financially, mostly, often to the point of infantilization, if they are very good as a team. I do my fair share of this, even if some people on my teams remember me as a “Darth Szeder” manager and boss. That name arose from gossip randomly on more than one occasion in my career, and I know that says I make tough decisions on behalf of the Empire. I confess to being red-green light saber color blind. I will swing the blade mostly for the “vwoom vwoom” noise it makes, rather than any particular ethical rationale behind the motion.

On this random occasion, I decided to push back on my “peer” on the product side, who had an unreasonable ask. “Let’s find our shared understanding,” I thought, and “Maybe the crucial conversation we all took here will be put to work, and we will both laugh about this all later.”

Nope.

I pushed back on an unreasonable product request, and less than one hundred seconds later, my Slack lit up from my boss, Emperor Palpatine, rattling off a litany of messages and racking up a huge red notification number.

Ruh, roh, Raggy!

Yes, that is right. My teammate just dumped my reply on my boss and waited for me to self-strap the ball-gag on and crawl back into his good graces through the slightly-too-small doggy door.

This was a valuable lesson.

First, I learned that I never want to be that kind of filthy coward. I am not going to pull punches, and not just because I paid for this later. I am not sure how you get through multiple levels of career promotions without learning how to be a good partner with your coworkers and teams. Apparently, this is a very real thing.

I did what my boss ordered and swung my red lightsaber around a few times, maybe employed a few force chokes, and made it clear that this is the new normal in our Emperor’s beloved Republic.

I did not think much more about this incident other than to make sure that we frequently finger-fed our local magnate enough yummy berries and fruit by hand at a rate to keep them appeased, and that I am not here to build a rapport with my partners so much as to just read their edicts sent to me by pneumatic tube.

This continued until employee review time.

In the week leading up to my employee review, I thought about all of the things that my boss could drag me for. There were three one-off incidents where someone escalated something to them, and I expected to hear about some of them. Interestingly, when the escalation was made, the problem never recurred, and in two of the cases, there was zero attempt made to work it out with me. It went to polite compliance immediately, and there was never a disagreement or fight.

What did I learn? That list of three things was 100% of my end-of-year review. There were a lot of positives in the product, and the team that I had something to do with, but none of that mattered. The goal was to move me out of the organization, and a fully toxic end-of-year review was delivered with the intent of handing me off to a different division and a boss who is not at the same titular level as my current boss.

I won’t spend some time unpacking the resultant “pay cut” that came with that, due to a lack of re-upping my equity participation with the company, or how one-sided the review was. I asked my then-boss for thirty days’ grace to digest his feedback before giving him a verdict, and that was the last we really spoke about anything until I gave him notice after that month. I have always been graceful about giving my boss the choice of my final day of employment, and he said an additional month was fine. I don’t know that I will forever give this much grace to a bad boss, but it seems like it is the right thing to do.

There is not much of a moral to this story. It is a cautionary tale. I was asked recently about how to deal with some individuals in a struggling team dynamic, and I made it clear that you should not go running to someone else’s boss to solve problems. You risk getting “Szedered” if I may make a term for the end-of-year review that came about. You should try to sort things out with your peers, or else ask your manager how to resolve it. If they want to speak to that person or his manager to help get to a good place, then that is probably the best thing to do.

You do run the risk during these moments of having them do you dirty. Let them. It reflects poorly on them for not having good conflict resolution skills. All I can say is that you should just make sure that your contributions to the business are good enough that when you eventually decide that you want to be up to your ankles in toxicity, instead of up to your neck, you will (a) be able to get that hawt new jerb, and (b) be written down in the Big Blue Book of Quitters as a “regrettable departure.”

Phew! This is a long-winded dark story. And it might have actually happened.

Stay tuned in the future for more awkward stories that involve me pointing to parts of a teddy bear where I was touched during the process of just trying to do my job.

I don’t usually do this, but I am going to defer a controversial post for a week. I have my reasons. Singular reason, actually, and if you need to know, ask Nunya Bidness for an answer.

Vaguebooking aside, I got into a conversation on Slack today that wound up generating the response “Several People Are Typing…”

The conversation was around vibe coding and how to do low-code to no-code backend services, especially for non-engineers.

I am going to give this a name: Derploying.

Right now, I have had the pleasure of working with at least three non-technical people on AI supplemented projects.

“You are destroying the jerbs!”, someone might proclaim, but I disagree. Engineering has borne the cross of “it takes too long to get to Product Market Fit” on behalf of product management due to “the passage of time,” “we don’t have the right good ideas,” and “engineering takes time to build all ideas, even bad ones.”

The ability to use tools instead of teams to find product market fit has exposed this for what it is. A lunatic fallacy designed to shift blame.

So much for this being non-controversial.

It is really important to shorten the window to PMF, and coming up with ways to create derployments is really important.

So what can you do?

Replit mostly solves this problem, provided you do not mind being married to the Replit. What is made in Replit stays in Replit. It is hard to take stuff out of Replit. It does some crazy stuff under the hood.

If you are on AWS, you can set up a specific instance where there is a shared SSH login secret in your GitHub organization, and create a script to generate a series of project directories for you at the start of a project. Put them inside a folder for HTML deployments, and another one for server binaries, and then you will need to reserve some port numbers. That means this can only work 65,000 times before you have any serious problems. If your company is generating that many prototypes, I want to learn more. Please slide into my DMs.

If neither of these things work then it is just as easy to go grab an instance from a company like Hostinger or Digital Ocean, and just use that in the same way as the EC2 instance.

The idea is that it takes about an hour of engineering time to set up the repo, put the right derployment script in a deployment branch, and then you can move on.

If you are spending more than 300 bucks a year on this across all of your prototypes, you are doing something wrong.

If you are inside a company and freaked out by the idea of product managers pushing code to a server, don’t be. This is part of the new normal.

There are going to be two classes of product builders in the future, and by future I mean last year.

There are going to be “prototypers” and “scalers”. There will be blended engineering, product, and design percentages that will be required for each of those roles to be successful, and they will vary from person to person.

The most successful organizations out there will split their teams this way, much like teams were split up from “hunter-gatherers” to “skinner-cleaners” in their focus decades ago.

Everyone is trying to predict the arrival of AGI. From “It will be here next year” to “This will never happen.”

As you might expect, I land somewhere between the two. I think we are about ten years away.

We will not get there on LLMs alone. If you wanted to make some kind of comparison, the easiest thing to do would be to compare AGI to a human brain. After all, AGI means that we will be approximating the output of a human brain sufficiently close to a real brain that it will be virtually indistinguishable.

LLM stands for Large Language Model and represents the ability to infer the next possible symbol that makes sense in a chunk of output, based on what has come before, and what the users ultimately asked about.

I decided to Google what part of the brain an LLM compares itself to, and if you were interested in that kind of thing, you can go do that yourself. For our conversation, let’s say it represents some percentage of our ability to process language. Really excited techbros might say sixty percent. Skeptical naysayers might peg that at twenty percent.

In my opinion, we will hit the maximum possible value coming out of LLM optimization within a few years. I don’t have some kind of law or some math words behind this. I am just trusting my own instinct here after watching four waves of technological evolution since the early nineties.

We are already getting pretty good outputs from these models. Where they fall down is in context management. We are constrained by the size of the processing model relative to people’s power consumption and CPU capacity. How big does your context need to be? And how much juice do you have to pour into the magic box to have it emit the things? That number may be marginally getting better, but as I understand it, we are linearly scaling relative to the supply available of each, at best.

As we converge on the best possible output for LLMs, we will start to see people building simulations of other parts of the human brain. And this is what we need to get to true AGI.

In about a decade, we will have four or five different systems that have the complexity of an LLM. Each of these will represent an abstract version of a part of the human brain. More importantly, we will have a governing system that decides which system or systems are needed at any given moment.

That combined set of systems will be reasonably deep, and I think it will behave functionally identical to a human brain. It will have flight or fight instincts, the ability to be pleased with itself, and a vast sum of both contextual knowledge about just about everything that anyone could know, plus some extra wetware to do different brain functions above and beyond hallucination reduction.

This is awfully handwavy. I think that it is the minimum of what we need to accomplish to generate AGI. We will not get there with just LLMs, even if we have experts writing prompts that make people wonder if their computer has the feels.

That’s it. That is the whole post.

Unrelated to that, Friday’s presentation on Tips and Tricks on Hiring in 2026, also known as “something something ai,” was great. We had a small group of people having a highly intelligent and valuable conversation about things we have all seen in hiring, and I think more than one person took away some new tools and tactics to experiment with when interviewing. I also learned that I should be checking the battery level on my Bluetooth headset. They gave up the ghost halfway through the show, and I had to put my giant air traffic control headset back on. I am going to re-record some of it and put it back into my Leadership Lighthouse site as personal coursework instead of a webinar. I will update you all on how those experiments are going.

See you all next week!

This is going to be short this week, and I do not want it to be, but a brother has gotta git payed. The rent check is due on Monday, you know?

If you have been following along on LinkedIn, you will note I am doing a paid webinar this week. I have spent the past six months furiously coming up with ideas on how to effectively, authentically, and musically interview remote candidates so you don’t have to.

I am not going to wax philosophical here about combating interview fraud. If you want to know more about that, come and listen in on Friday. It will cost you a few bucks, but you know, tariffs. Nothing is really free anymore. You can enter “mofactor” for a 25% off code, though, just to let me know that you read the blog. That is a permanent discount for all future products, not like the limited ones I am handing out here and there.

Real talk, I am the world’s worst Amazon Affiliate Marketer… or you people all have busted mouses. I don’t know which version of the story is worse.

If you are a hiring manager, or you play one on TV, you should easily get your money’s worth on tools and tactics for remote interviewing in the AI age.

Okay, I will shut up about the paid stuff.

I did add some free stuff, too, for job hunters. I added a ten-minute rambly monologue on resumes for your enjoyment. Sure, it is probably a lead magnet. I fully intend to never take profit from people out of work, but my ideas on how to fix your resume are SO GOOD that you will want to attend one of my webinars after you get hired, right? I thought so.

Now that we understand each other, go click the links, please. I asked nicely. If you need some help with your resume, I gave you some free advice. If you are hiring people and want some ideas on how to make that process smoother, I have some “less free” advice.

Thank you for your patience. I have big ideas scheduled for the next few weeks, but this week is all about shamelessly plugging my nascent engineering leadership program. I would love your support.

Thank you all, and especially thanks to Casey Rock, who helped me put together some videos this past week. He did a cute write-up of one of my foaming-at-the-mouth rants about hiring and the kids these days.

You should go read it too.

See you all next week.

I finally watched “TRON: Ares” over the past five days, and kept falling asleep and having to restart it. I suppose I should be grateful that I accidentally found it available on Disney+ for free. I have clicked on the movie at least once a week since it became available on demand, with a ridiculous “Buy Now for 19.99” right beside “Buy A TRON Bundle for 17.99.”

I also have about three more weeks of this for “Wicked: For Good.” Yes, I am going to watch it. It is as culturally relevant as the new TRON movie, but it has the correct amount of Jared Leto in a movie for me.

This goes beyond “something something Disney.” HBO Max pooped out the worst finale for a tv show in the history of the universe with the end of Peacemaker Season Two, and then politely emailed me that my rates were going up to that mythical 20 dollars a month. If you want some free life advice, do not ask for money right after you shit in someone’s living room. This is the first time I have unsubscribed from a streaming service, and it will not be the last.

I signed up for Peacock for 1.99 a month (with ads) last year, and when I went to cancel it before it went to regular price, they gave me an offer to resubscribe for 2.99 a month for a year. I could have waited until Black Friday and seen if they would have given me the same deal, but I am not going to fight them for a dollar a month. This is where my SNL is at, if nothing else.

Why are these movies so expensive for so long at home? Is it tariffs? Did the streaming people test the length of the pricing window to optimize revenues? Or maybe it’s tariffs?

I don’t know, but I am getting pretty sick of it. You might find this hard to believe, but I have never pirated a movie in my life. I work in intellectual property, and I do my best to respect its value.

Last week was the first time I thought about it, though… I was not so much excited for TRON: Ares as I was curious about it. My low expectations were almost met.

I managed to get most of a whole page written without saying anything about LLM technology, and I have a few more things before I pop the clutch and jump back into full tech-bro mode; Which is odd, because at my advanced age of fiddy-sumpin, I am more like a tech-poppi than a tech-bro. For real, I do not even lift.

Hollywood, dear sweet Hollywood. You need to blink twice. You are in danger.

The past few years have yielded tepid slates of movies, followed by crazy digital pricing, and flat-out franchise destruction in the eyes of many fans. Star Wars and Star Trek, I am looking at you. There are entire generations of people who are nervously showing people where on the teddy bear their favorite franchises have touched them. I am one of them.

So we covered the insane pricing for digital goods, we covered the movie releases being unexciting, and finally, the fact that there are parties in the street that Kathleen Kennedy has stopped doing whatever it was she was doing to Star Wars. Yes, I did a little dance when I read that.

Let’s add to that some of the franchises that are putting out new content too fast for the franchise. I am seeing both “you should go see 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” and “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has mixed reviews.” With that much mixed signal, it was certainly not going to be a “first week must-see movie” of the kind that Hollywood needs to feed its financial beasts.

And wasn’t it like… March… that we just had an Avatar movie?

Why does this matter?

Because of Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and ATnT in 2007.

Bear with me for a few minutes. Hold off on calling security. I will attempt to explain everything.

Once upon a time, you did not buy your mobile games from Apple and Google. They were put for sale inside your feature phones and charged to your carrier bill. This is one of the places I cut my teeth as a developer, and I had a great time shipping tons of cute little games and helping people with porting from one phone to another.

The carriers were not very good at managing games. They had around 500 games under management each year, and it made them very tired to deal with all of that. So one day, someone woke up and attempted to do some deep reasoning about their business.

They said, “We push out 500 games a year, but only 100 games a year are successful. So… Let’s just release 100 games a year!”

This coincidentally destroyed the whole middle tier of mobile game publishers, who were financed and staffed around getting 10 to 20 slots on a carrier deck for their digital goods. Suddenly, that would be 2 to 4 games.

For yours truly, I was at a mobile company doing a mix of contract work and self-publishing/co-publishing fun little games. We were succeeding with a 1 in 6 hit ratio.

If you divide that number by five, like the carriers did, then we would not break even as a business anymore, so we shut down our company.

Many people got out of mobile games at that point.

The carriers deciding to strangle their games business to death came at a perfect time for Google and Apple. The carriers taught people to play games on their phones, they gave developers an opportunity to make many fun little experiences and figure out how to work within constraints for the devices, and essentially created this massive unfulfilled need between these two groups of people who could not connect through experiences like they used to.

Two to three years after this massive self-inflicted content desert occurred, modern-day smartphones put out their own app stores and started filling the empty hole in people’s hearts and heads where mobile games used to live.

You might see a slight comparison—Hollywood is releasing fewer movies, making them more expensive, and generally taking fewer and fewer creative risks.

They have stopped feeding their audiences the right kind of content, the right amount of content, or the right price for that content.

Here comes my big fat LLM / AI comment.

Much like the carriers salted the earth for mobile games in many different ways, Hollywood is chasing away its fans and customers. They are poisoning the well with consumers, overcharging for windows that are too long, and failing to innovate on value creation.

So when we are all watching AI-generated micro-movies at home to pass the time because we do not want to see a Star Wars movie with Jared Leto in it, I am going to sigh and shrug.

Hollywood is not going to be taken out of business by AI-generated movies. It mostly has itself to blame for its own demise; Hollywood has been slowly strangling itself to death through all of the ways I have described above.

So what is to be done about it? Pretty much nothing, honestly. We will politely smile and nod as we get fewer and fewer big blockbusters and tentpole franchises out of incumbent media businesses. The death spiral has started. Anything they try to do now will be too little too late. By the time people get good at making movies with LLM technologies, we will be so starved for content that we will dive into new shows and formats with both feet.

On that note, I am going to go and check on Wicked: For Good pricing.

See you all again soon!

Ah, yes, Settlers of Catan. What a great game.

My wife and I are convinced that “Settlers of Catan” is what we will write on the line for “Reason for divorce.”

If you are a math nerd and know how to count dots better than other people do, or know why you should count dots, and also love to play the game according to your own twisted, psychotic rules, then this is the game for you.

But what is so special about it?

Quite a lot. Which is why Catan is probably the single most toxic licenseable digital product ever.

“We got a license to Settlers of Catan” is a statement that irrationally exuberant people make when they have spent some kind of money to get a license, sure to drive their adoption.

People like new toys, right?

People like to play familiar games on new toys, right?

So how could you go wrong here?

It turns out that the real fun in Settlers of Catan is not to be found in the joyless rejection of trade offers from randos on the internet.

The real fun of Catan is in knowing the rules for when you can turn over your final victory point to make someone at your local table so mad that they flip the table over as you crush them.

And yes, I have done this before.

I know more than one person who has smugly admitted they have licensed this particular product for a new digital platform.

And for the first few times I heard it, I was impressed. And then after watching a few of these businesses catch fire, fall over, and then sink into the swamp, I began to wonder about that.

It turns out that some things do not transition well to digital.

I was a director of engineering at Zynga Poker for a while, and unless you are playing with the high spending VIPs, playing Texas Hold ’em on your phone is far from playing real poker. The stakes have to matter, and some random person on the internet named FlibertiGibbet6969-420-67 going all in and LOLing with nothing in their hands over and over again just ruins it for everyone.

Intimate social experiences matter for some people, for some experiences. If you want to know what I mean, go put $100 into an online hold ’em poker game and go play on Christmas Eve. I got cleaned out so fast by sharks, it made my head swim. The filthy casuals all have gone home.

And that is what is true about Catan. The casuals do not want to show you, on the teddy bear, where Catan touched them. It is a savage game. It is designed to make someone angry. It is a comfortable destination for sociopaths to flex their math skills and flaunt their superior understanding of psychological warfare.

And all of that is lost on the internet. No one will trade wool for stone. There is no clever barter with people where you reason with them, to cause everyone to start an embargo against you. And there is no ability to make a 3-for-1 trade in someone else’s favor to break that embargo, to make that person suddenly the victim of everyone else’s ire.

So even though we all love playing Settlers of Catan as a board game, the vast majority of the people who have put it online are making a pale imitation of a shadow of a whisper of a dream.

And when that is your strategy to de-risk your business, you are likely to wind up a pale imitation of a shadow of a whisper of a nightmare.

I am become Catan, Destroyer of Platforms. License me and despair!

Welcome to 2026, everyone.

It is time for me to start lining the bottom of my monitor with topics. I have a variety of topics to talk about for the first month. I am so excited, and I just cannot hide it. I am about to lose control, and I think I like it.

That last line isn’t mine. I borrowed it from a song. Do I owe someone a royalty? It seems like that is what fifty percent of the Carl Complainy-pants people who hate AI complain about. I play whack-a-mole with them on LinkedIn, cheerfully, because whack-a-mole is fun, but also because I am trying to help people stay employed.

“I hate these AI tools; they will destroy my job!” is mostly a problem for people who go to work wearing shirts with AI on them featuring a red circle around it and a line through it. When the bean counters come in and say, “We are doing great with the people who have leaned in on productivity-enhancing tools, but we have some redundancies; who is not on the bus to AI-Town?” You can guess who gets in the crosshairs of the pink slip cannon.

But that is not today’s conversation.

Today, we are going to do what I vaguebooked last week.

I want to talk about hiring in the age of AI.

This came up as one of the things I wanted to talk about when last year, I accidentally shot my impressions through the stratosphere on this subject. I have done some successful engagement farming on LinkedIn, but this? This was some next-level stuff.

So it stands to reason that people want to talk about how to hire in a world loaded with AI tools, some of which are designed to foil the hiring process.

So what are the problems?

The first one is the easiest one to solve for, and it is self-obvious enough; I am just going to put my junk on the table.

“A different person showed up to work than I interviewed.”

People are having other people interview for their jobs. How crazy is that?

The best thing to do here is to take a picture at each stage of the interview and post it to a hiring medium (folder, file, Slack channel) so that everyone can see that it is the same person, or not.

Make sure that person matches what they look like when they get to work, too.

It goes without saying that you should never hire a remote worker who will not turn on their camera. I will accept a blurry background.

If you are running your interview in expert mode and are afraid of someone being a bad actor trying to get a job, the easiest thing you can do to enable them is to not look at them.

Camera isn’t working? The interview is over. Next candidate, or reschedule for when the camera is working.

This is an example of the problem, and it is not even the freakiest one. Someone built a tool to sit in on your interview and answer your questions for you.

In 2025, I did not see these problems for about half of the companies I was working with, and I will confess, “I want to interview a bad actor as a candidate” became a bucket list item for me.

Why wasn’t I seeing these candidates? I kind of panicked. It turned into an obsession.

The answer was ultimately not surprising. It was because I was interviewing for hybrid roles. It is harder to be a remote super secret spy angling to get at your digital goodies when you need to show up in Hoboken, NJ, twice a week.

I have recently started helping companies recruit for fully remote roles internationally, and boy oh boy, that is a very different world.

You have a lot of questions that you have to answer, and sometimes people will sneak through the interview. It has gotten crazy enough that when someone is interviewing, I am tempted to take a screenshot of their wristwatch, or a clock in the room, or the reflection of their screenshot to look for what time it is… Some people I have interviewed have lied about their country of origin and making sure they are in the correct time zone by detective work has crossed my mind. Are you in London? Open the windows at noon, I want to hear some church bells.

So to recap:

• People might have other people do their interviews
• People might be in a country other than the country they declared
• People might be cheating in real time on their code tests
• People might be cheating on any take-home assignments

So, how do you hire successfully in 2026?

I have refined a hiring playbook, and I am going to use this as a launchpad for joining the modern-day expert coaching community. I will have more on this later, once I have gone beyond the Ghostbusters “Guys, get her!” level of planning. I have Meetings With Experts on this. Everyone says they want a solution. Let’s see who has some dead presidents for an hour-long conversation on this subject. There is a lot more to come on this subject soon.

Hello everyone. I am back in the blogging business. I had some reasons for stopping last year, and in hindsight, it was a bad decision for me. When you are asked to change something you believe is an important behavior, you should ask yourself, “Who benefits?” In this case, it was not me.

I am going to kick this year off by making some predictions. This is probably the most important thing for anyone who has ambitious goals for the future because the best way to predict the future is to create it.

That being said, I have read about a dozen “predictions” for 2026. And almost all of them are boring and obvious. What is stopping people from making big, bold bets? Probably the same thing that kills a large swath of startups every year: Risk aversion.

We can debate that in the inevitable LinkedIn comments, since as a fractional CTO, I just offended half of my potential employers and customers. Although if you are talking to me about helping your business, you are clearly in the other half of the leaders, right?

Enough pillow talk.

Let’s make some crazy predictions!

In 2026, we will see:

• A billion-dollar company’s valuation decreased by 30% due to issues using LLMs (compliance violations or data corruption).

• The release of a mass-market AR device, which will reach 4m users before EOY. I should caveat this one, because I want this to happen very badly. I have a steak dinner in SF riding on its outcome. If I get this one wrong, it is because the powers-that-be want to see me take someone out to dinner. Possibly two, because I have a double-or-nothing on the bet due to another prediction for 2026 that is audacious, and perhaps will not happen until 2027.

• Two. Billion. Dollars… Of mobile publisher consolidation as the red ocean accelerates in a winner-take-all market.

• The job market retreat will slow and even stop. Jobs will come roaring back, due to AI, and the need to shepherd and grow the LLM-features-to-customer market.

• Sovereign LLMs and on-prem deployments will cause valuation shifts in the big AI LLM providers, due to the first point, and general cost management. The LLM provider counterattack will be in these companies selling LLMUaaS; LLM Updates as a service, and they will have a haven in Docker-style models with a support contract for updates.

Phew! 

I am going to stop there. I only made half as many as a top ten list. But these are meaty, and they pack twice as much of a punch.

Stay tuned for next week.

I am going to make some announcements about products and services for engineering leaders who have 2026 problems.

First up: How to hire in the age of AI.