When delivering tickets stops being enough

Stop rewarding your best coders for their output and start teaching them to engineer the organization itself.

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Your best senior engineer is likely hitting a wall right now. They’ve spent the last eight years mastering the “how” of software development. They can out-code anyone, they know the legacy quirks of your database, and they never miss a ship date. Yet, in your 1:1s, they sound restless. They look at AI tools handling the “grunt work” of coding and feel like their craft is losing its value. They want that Staff title, but they think the path involves getting even deeper into the stack or mastering yet another framework.

The problem is that you might be reinforcing this. If you are still measuring them by th…