Developer Tea

A lot of what we've been talking about lately is durable skills — the abilities that last regardless of how our tools and tech environment change. In today's episode, I want to step back from the AI conversation and focus on one of the most durable skills of all: feedback. We've all been on both the giving and receiving side, and we can probably count on one hand the times someone gave us feedback that genuinely drove a good change — that left us wanting to do better without feeling torn down. So how do we accomplish that kind of feedback, on both sides of the table? That's what this episode is all about.

Start With Your Goal, Not Your Frustration: Before you give feedback, recognize that your gut impulse often comes from a negative emotion — frustration, feeling slighted, feeling disrespected. Those feelings are valid signals that something is off, but they aren't a sufficient reason to give feedback. Effective feedback is goal-oriented: ask yourself what you actually want to change before you say a word.

Premature vs. Mature Feedback: Premature feedback is really about making sure someone knows how you feel — which can quietly turn into an attack so they share your pain. Mature feedback is forward-looking and aimed at improvement. Venting may give you catharsis in the moment, but if the behavior worsens or the relationship is damaged, the net outcome is negative.

Why Asking for Feedback Changes Everything: Even hearing "can we meet for ten minutes, I have some feedback" measurably raises your heart rate and pushes you into a defensive state. But when you ask for feedback, your mind and body register that you're in control — same information, completely different physiological response.

Make It Behavior-Based and Specific: Good feedback is about observable behavior — what a camera would have caught — not someone's core identity. If your feedback violates a person's self-concept (painting a competent engineer as incompetent), they have to change who they believe they are to accept it, and that gap rarely gets bridged in a 30-minute call.

Use a Model — But Add the Intervention: The popular SBI model (Situation, Behavior, Impact) is a strong backbone, but it stops short. Don't just describe the past — partner with the person on what comes next. Think of it as SBI + Intervention: what can you commit to trying differently so the impact changes? That's where feedback becomes coaching.

The Netflix Four A's: Aim to assist, make it actionable, show appreciation, and accept or discard. Lead with the intent to help, get specific about the behavior, appreciate the person's willingness and intent, and recognize that not every piece of feedback will be useful — both sides get to keep what's valuable and let the rest go.

Receiving Feedback Well: When someone hands you messy, un-modeled feedback, you can walk them through the framework — "help me understand the situation, what behavior did you see, what was the impact?" People respect that you're engaging, shift into problem-solving mode, and give you more actionable feedback as a result.

Episode Homework: Pay attention to patterns over time. One piece of feedback shouldn't be attached to your identity — but three or four that point in the same direction are worth introspecting on. Career development and feedback are two sides of the same door; walk through it and you grow.

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi

No matter what you're building, SerpApi is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data—whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker—SerpApi handles it for you. ● Make an API call and get back clean JSON. ● They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. ● They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. ● If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier to build and test your application before you commit. Go to serpapi.com.

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Right now, the questions we have about our careers feel existential. We keep coming back to the same theme: how do you prepare for an industry that's changing this fast, and what mindset actually works in this new reality? One skill keeps surfacing as the answer — your ability to update your own mental models. In today's episode, I want to push on that further and put some of software engineering's most beloved thinking models under scrutiny. Some of these models served you well for years. Some of them now deserve to be challenged, replaced, or thrown out entirely — and learning how to tell the difference is itself the skill that will determine whether you hit a ceiling.

Move Past "So What" Questions: The typical engineering objection to agentic coding is that it produces quality issues. But the people deciding to adopt these tools already accept that. Our job is to stop arguing the surface-level point and start asking the real one: so what do we actually do about this new economic reality?

The Economics of Acceptable Loss: Abstraction always leaves something to be desired. An agent's code may not match what a staff engineer produces by hand over months — but that gap is usually an acceptable trade against shipping something two, three, or four times faster. Understand the cost-benefit picture instead of pretending the cost doesn't exist.

Abstraction Has Always Done This: This isn't new. The calculator dissolved the specialization once required for complex math. Spreadsheets commoditized ledgering and accounting. Agentic coding is the same pattern arriving for our work — making something that required deep specialization suddenly far more accessible.

Roles Are Blurring: As these generic tools raise everyone's ability to abstract, the boundaries soften. You're already seeing product managers open pull requests and engineers making product decisions. The neat lines around "what an engineer is" are not as fixed as they used to feel.

Why Your Hard-Won Wisdom Is the Target: If you've spent years in this industry, your models were bought with blood, sweat, and failed projects. That experience is real wisdom — and it's exactly what I'm asking you to be willing to challenge, because the thing that always worked for you is the thing most likely to become a ceiling.

This Skill Survives Either Way: Even if you think AI is mostly hype and I've been infected by it — fine. The ability to challenge your pre-existing models is a critical skill regardless. It's how you keep growing as you get more senior instead of repeating what used to work.

Models Are Approximations: The whole point of a model is to approximate the reality around us. That's their value and their limitation. When the underlying reality shifts this dramatically, holding tightly to an old approximation stops being wisdom and starts being a liability.

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked

Your coding agents have access to your codebase and probably a lot more — tools connected through MCPs, skills, and more. But access isn't the same as context. Agents aren't great at reasoning across MCPs, and they don't know your architectural decisions, your team's patterns, or why your API is shaped the way it is. So they look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs, and you burn time and tokens correcting them. ● Unblocked is the smart context layer your agents are missing. ● Instead of dumping tons of data into a giant context window and getting lost, it builds reasoning over shared context. ● It turns code, docs, tickets, and conversations into actionable context, so engineers move faster and agents make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and need fewer correction loops. ● If you're running Claude Code, Cursor, or any other agentic workflow, it's worth a look. Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/developer-tea.

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If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. For many of us, this career has always been engaging for deeply creative and intellectual reasons—and that excitement is still here. But our mental models of what it means to be a good engineer, and what it means to keep improving, have gone a little stale. In today's episode, I want to talk about a distinction that I believe will become the cornerstone mistake for seasoned engineers: confusing _practice_ with _adaptation_, and leaning on the wrong one at the worst possible moment.

Two Surfaces Coming Into Contact: Picture your knowledge, skills, and toolset as one surface, and the actual state of the art as another. We've always known the surface area we could learn far exceeds what we can learn, which forces us to place bets on a learning strategy. What's changing is how fast that second surface is moving underneath us.

Improvement by Practice vs. Improvement by Change: Practice is wielding what you've already adopted—smoothing out errors, building muscle memory, refining what you already know. Adaptation is fundamentally folding something new into your repertoire. Both are real forms of improvement, but they are not interchangeable.

The Cornerstone Mistake for Senior Engineers: Later in your career, the time you spend adapting naturally goes down as you settle into practice. The biggest error I'm already watching engineers make is moving too quickly toward practice when the industry is loudly calling for adaptation instead.

Inspect and Adapt—at the Right Altitude: Sprint retros were never really about getting marginally better at the thing you already do. The intent of "inspect and adapt" is to step up one level and examine the system. The trap is treating adaptation like a minor refinement—getting a little better at prompting—when it should mean asking whether you're thinking about prompting in the wrong way entirely.

Question the Ratio, Not Just the Output: Real adaptation looks like asking whether you have the right mix of human and agent on a problem. Are you leaning on the agent for things you shouldn't, or failing to lean on it for the things you should? Have you genuinely thought about how sub-agents or an agent team are working the problem you're producing?

A Spectrum, Not a Binary: On one end, you make micro-adjustments to your refinement process. On the other end of experimentation, you ask whether refinement—or even having engineers plan the work—is the right thing at all. The point isn't that practice is dead; it's that the industry is changing fast enough that the adaptive end of that spectrum deserves far more of your attention than it used to.

Episode Homework: Take something you currently treat as a practice problem—"how do I refine tickets faster?"—and step up a level. Ask the adaptive version of the question instead: "Is refinement even the right thing anymore?"

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi

No matter what you're building, SerpApi is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data—whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker—SerpApi handles it for you. ● Make an API call and get back clean JSON. ● They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. ● They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. ● If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier to build and test your application before you commit. Go to serpapi.com.

📮 Ask a Question

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

📮 Join the Discord

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!

🗞️ Subscribe to The Tea Break

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If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In today's episode, I unpack what that shift _actually_ means — it's closer to a tech lead or architect mindset — and zoom in on a specific interviewing and on-the-job skill that will help you stay employable: how you think about, talk about, and take ownership of failure.

Don't Just Bring Star Stories — Bring Failure Stories: Interviewers don't only want to hear how you succeeded. They want to know what you do when the pressure's on and things fall apart. If every story you tell is a highlight reel, there's a built-in social signal that you're hiding something. Get comfortable telling the other kind of story.

Identify the Real Problem, Not the Proximal One: The most common failure story I hear in interviews is "the knowledge transfer was bad" or "the docs weren't good." That's not wrong — it's just incomplete. The senior mindset asks why that happened. Why didn't we have docs? Why was context insufficient? Walk it back until you hit something actionable but not too abstract.

The Systemic Diagnosis is the Leveled-Up Answer: Fixing the proximal cause fixes this instance. Fixing the root cause fixes the system that keeps producing instances like this. When you connect what you learned to a systemic adjustment, you stop sounding like someone who survived a bad project and start sounding like someone who improves the organization around them.

Ownership Means Owning the Outcome, Not the Task: Use the homeowner metaphor. A homeowner doesn't personally fix every leaking pipe — but the outcome of the home is theirs. As an engineer, your scope of ownership has expanded dramatically in the agentic era. You're now responsible for outcomes of code you may not have even read, and the deciding skill is how you carry that responsibility.

The Word to Pair With Ownership is Relentlessness: Not in an anxious, burn-yourself-out way. Relentlessness means following a thread to its natural end — through escalation, through asking the next question, through finding the right person if it's not you. It's the antidote to "I'll let someone else handle it" syndrome.

You Don't Have to Do It All Yourself: Relentless ownership is not "carry every task across the finish line personally." If you're not qualified, the owner's job is to find who is, communicate risk to stakeholders, and keep the trail alive until the outcome is resolved. That's the differentiator between a senior thinking engineer and a junior one working through assigned tickets.

Failure Is Usually a Lapse in Ownership: If you make a list of five things you've failed at (and you should), you'll often find the through-line isn't lack of skill — it's that you stopped escalating, stopped following up, stopped staying with the thing until it was actually resolved.

Episode Homework: Write down five real failures. For each one, ask: where did I stop being relentless? What system produced this outcome — and what would I change upstream next time?

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi

No matter what you're building, SerpApi is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data—whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker—SerpApi handles it for you. ● Make an API call and get back clean JSON. ● They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. ● They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. ● If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier to build and test your application before you commit. Go to serpapi.com.

📮 Ask a Question

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

📮 Join the Discord

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!

🗞️ Subscribe to The Tea Break

We are developing a brand new newsletter called The Tea Break! You can be the first in line to receive it by entering your email directly over at developertea.com.

🧡 Leave a Review

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What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slow*, and I use it as a springboard to talk about a much bigger skill: knowing how to update your beliefs when reality shifts underneath you. This isn't about throwing out science or losing trust in your heroes. It's about developing the muscle to replace old explanations with better ones — a skill that has never been more important for software engineers.

The Replication Crisis, Briefly Explained: Understand the difference between reproducing a study (re-running the analysis on the original data) and replicating one (recreating the study from the ground up), and why a surprisingly large portion of well-respected psychology research, including studies cited in Thinking Fast and Slow, doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

Base Rates Matter: Kahneman didn't pick uniquely bad studies. If you randomly sampled from the broader academic literature, you'd hit the same failure rate. The lesson isn't about one author — it's about how we evaluate any body of knowledge.

The Beginning of Infinity Framework: Drawing from David Deutsch's book, explore the idea that all progress is rooted in the assumption that we are fundamentally incorrect, and that improvement comes from continually building better explanations on top of incomplete ones.

Beliefs as Calibration, Not Truth: Your beliefs about what makes a good engineer, what makes good code, or what makes a good career move are not eternal truths. They are calibrations to your current reality, and that reality is changing fast.

The Ego Trap of Old Beliefs: Notice the very human, very subtle pull to defend things you previously argued for — not because they're still right, but because admitting otherwise creates a discontinuity with your former self. This is one of the biggest blockers to learning.

Two Competing Explanations of AI Adoption: Walk through a worked example of holding two predictions about AI in tension and asking honestly which one better explains the reality you're seeing — at both a macro industry level and the micro level of debugging a system.

Moving Goalposts Aren't a Conspiracy: A lot of what feels like shifting goalposts in our industry is just goalposts moving on their own. A big part of our job as engineers is figuring out where they are now and predicting where they're heading next.

Episode Homework: Pick one belief you hold strongly about your work — about what makes a good engineer, about a tool, about a process. Try to deconstruct it into its parts and ask whether a better explanation exists for what you're actually seeing.

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: SerpApi

No matter what you're building, SerpApi is the web search API for your needs. If you're building an application that needs real-time search data—whether that's an AI agent, an SEO tool, or a price tracker—SerpApi handles it for you. ● Make an API call and get back clean JSON. ● They handle the proxies, CAPTCHAs, parsing, and all the scraping so you don't have to. ● They support dozens of search engines and platforms, and are trusted by companies like NVIDIA, Adobe, and Shopify. ● If you're building with AI, they even have an official MCP to make getting up and running a simple task. Get started with a free tier to build and test your application before you commit. Go to serpapi.com.

📮 Ask a Question

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

📮 Join the Discord

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today!

🗞️ Subscribe to The Tea Break

We are developing a brand new newsletter called The Tea Break! You can be the first in line to receive it by entering your email directly over at developertea.com.

🧡 Leave a Review

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review!