engineering culture

On-call never shows up in exit interviews. But across half a dozen consulting engagements, I've watched it quietly hollow out engineering teams. The pattern is always the same, and it's always fixable.

A client's React class-to-hooks migration had been "90% complete" for fourteen months. The last 10% contained every hard problem the team had been avoiding. Gradual migrations don't fail at the start — they fail when nobody decides to finish.

A critical notification service was processing 50,000 messages a day. When it started silently dropping SMS, it took a week for anyone to notice — because the alerts were going to a Slack channel that belonged to a team that no longer existed.

We ran blameless postmortems after every incident. We wrote detailed action items with owners and deadlines. Six months later, 78% of those items were still open — and the same incidents kept happening.

The latest DORA report confirms what I've seen on consulting engagements — AI tools amplify existing conditions. If your processes are solid, AI accelerates you. If they're not, you just create technical debt faster.

A consulting engagement where we measured where engineering hours actually went — and discovered the biggest productivity killer wasn't what anyone expected.