AI is breaking how your team builds trust
Senior engineers earned influence by solving hard problems. Is this changing?
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
To accelerate your growth see:
Get Hired as an EM (CV & job search to actually get interviews)
AI Behavioral Interview Coach (the best prep for your interviews)
Paid subscribers get 50 Notion Templates, The EM’s Field Guide, and access to the complete archive.
You’ve got a Senior Engineer or Tech Lead who used to be the gravitational centre of your team. When things broke, they fixed them. When nobody could figure out why the service was choking, they found the problem. When architectural decisions needed to be made, people looked at them.
Now they come to you frustrated. “Nobody listens to me anymore.” Or worse, they don’t come to you at all - they just disengage.
What happened is subtle. The mechanism that senior engineers used to build trust (being the person who solves the problems nobody else can) has been undercut. Not elim…
