From Software Engineer to Agent Manager - How Work is Changing in A New Software Development Paradigm

More from Developer Tea

1. 

   E1292 · 1 Apr 2026 · 27 min

   Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics

   Most software engineers believe that having the best thinking — the most complete, most nuanced analysis — is what drives career success. Early on, that belief probably helped you invest in yourself and improve. But at some point, the habit of overanalyzing starts to work against you. In today's episode, I explore why the most useful beliefs in your career aren't necessarily the most accurate ones, and how deliberately leaning into "useful illusions" — heuristics that are technically incomplete but directionally correct — can make you more decisive, more action-oriented, and less likely to…

2. 

   E1291 · 24 Mar 2026 · 39 min

   Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making

   As coding becomes cheaper and faster through agentic tools, the bottleneck in software development is shifting upstream — away from writing code and toward the decisions that determine what gets built and why. In today's episode, I explore why decision-making is rapidly becoming the central activity of your job as a software engineer, and I walk through two common traps that even senior engineers fall into when they start participating more in collaborative, organizational decisions.

3. 

   E1290 · 18 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

   What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking

   If you're a software engineer right now, your feeds are probably overloaded with AI hot takes, tool announcements, and advice about how far behind you are. In today's episode, I take a different approach. Instead of prescribing what you should be doing, I open up about what I'm actually doing — from physical checklists and label makers to agentic workflows and 3D modeling with AI. This is a snapshot of one engineering manager's life in the spring of 2026, covering the small personal interventions, the books, the media, and the AI tooling that's shaping how I work and think right now.

4. 

   E1288 · 3 Mar 2026 · 30 min

   AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?

   AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how you can use your systems-thinking engineering mindset to adapt and thrive in this new era.

5. 

   E1287 · 24 Feb 2026 · 35 min

   Listener Question - Abdul Asks About How to Balance Career Strategy Between Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions

   Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work.

6. 

   E1286 · 18 Feb 2026 · 41 min

   AI-Era Employability and Job Security for Software Engineers - Mental Models for Finding a Competitive Advantage Without Selling Out

   I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators. In this episode, I don't offer false guarantees about job security. Instead, I frame the problem through the lens of microeconomics and rational incentives to help you understand how to remain employable. We discuss why you must separate your ego from your current skill set and how to position yourself not as a competitor to AI, but as a force multiplier.

7. 

   E1313 · 30 Sep 2026 · 17 min

   How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering

   You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortran in the 1950s, and the spread of autopilot in commercial aviation. Both show how new abstractions change the shape of our work without being purely good or purely bad.

8. 

   E1311 · 21 Sep 2026 · 13 min

   Fundamentals Will Help You Survive the Constant Acceleration of Software Engineering

   Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — and why they matter more than ever in a profession where abstraction moves faster than almost anywhere else. If you feel like you can't keep up with every new framework, model, or tool release, the answer isn't to read faster. It's to step up a level.

9. 

   E1310 · 5 Sep 2026 · 16 min

   You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control

   A 1967 study gave us the concept of learned helplessness — but the same researchers later reversed it. Passivity is our default state; control is what we learn. In this episode, I unpack what that neuroscience means for how you face hard things in your career, and why the action you take doesn't have to match the size of your problem.

10. 

    E1308 · 21 Aug 2026 · 15 min

    Why Reducing Complexity Is A Sign of Seniority

    As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, accept certain risks, and reduce the surface area they're responsible for — and what drives that shift underneath the surface. Understanding the reasons behind the trend is what lets you get there on purpose instead of waiting a decade to arrive there accidentally.

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