The Multiplier Mindset
The goal of engineering leadership is not to be the best engineer on the team. It is to make every engineer on the team better than they would be without you.
This is the multiplier mindset. It changes how you spend your time, what you prioritise, and how you measure your own success.
Hiring Signals That Actually Predict Performance
After hiring dozens of senior engineers, the signals that consistently predict performance are not the ones most interviews test for:
Strong signals:
- How they talk about systems they have broken in production - specificity, ownership, and what they changed
- Whether they ask clarifying questions before solving - senior engineers know that the stated problem is rarely the real problem
- How they handle disagreement - do they engage with the argument or the person?
Weak signals:
- LeetCode performance - correlates with interview preparation, not engineering judgment
- Years of experience - a proxy for exposure, not capability
- Familiarity with your specific stack - learnable in weeks
Technical Standards as Culture
Technical standards - code review expectations, testing requirements, documentation norms - are not bureaucracy. They are the mechanism by which a team's collective judgment becomes reproducible.
The key is that standards must be:
- Written down - unwritten standards are enforced inconsistently and create anxiety
- Reasoned - every standard should have a documented rationale. "Because I said so" is not a standard
- Revisable - standards that cannot be challenged become dogma
The Autonomy Ladder
The goal is to move every engineer up the autonomy ladder:
| Level | Characteristic |
|---|---|
| Dependent | Needs direction for every task |
| Guided | Works independently on defined tasks |
| Autonomous | Defines and executes their own work |
| Strategic | Shapes the work of others |
Your job as a leader is to identify where each person is and create the conditions for them to move up - not to keep them dependent on you.