Spent years chasing impressive titles

"senior engineer" "lead developer" "principal"

None of it mattered

What mattered: could i solve expensive problems?

Titles get you interviews
Problem solving gets you paid

"señor engineer" doesn't mean writing more code

it means writing less code that does more

automating the boring parts
architecting for maintainability
teaching others to solve problems

if you're still just grinding out features you're stuck

The best automations make you obsolete

At HP i automated myself out of a 3-month project

They almost hired me full time because of it and it's still being used after almost 11 years

Make yourself so efficient you're either promoted or redundant

Both beat staying stuck

Claude code now runs agents async

Game changer for automation

Spin up multiple subagents in background to explore your codebase and your documents

You keep working. Zero interruption.

Subagents finish → wake up main agent → report results, you are happy

This is what i mean by "lazy engineering"

Nobody talks about automation maintenance

The script that saves you 2 hours/day?

Breaks every 6 months when APIs change

Real cost isn't building it
It's keeping it running

Build for maintainability with grace and not just functionality for self satisfaction.

The biggest automation mistake: automating broken processes

If a process sucks manually, automating it just makes it suck more and faster

Fix the process first
Then automate the fixed version

Automate efficiency not inefficiency

Remember: Garbage In Garbage Out

17 years in tech

Biggest lesson: problems are the same everywhere

different companies but chaos follows everywhere

The folks who win are the ones who build systems to handle the chaos

not the ones who just work harder

17 years in tech

Biggest lesson: problems are the same everywhere

different companies but chaos follows everywhere

The folks who win are the ones who build systems to handle the chaos

not the ones who just work harder

Everyone wants to build fancy AI agents

meanwhile businesses are paying for:
- automated data entry
- email classification
- document processing
- report generation

Boring AI makes money
Fancy AI makes X threads.

Don't get me wrong, I like fancy agents too, as long as they translate into returns.

I've heard this time and time again:

if your business breaks when you take a weekend off

you don't have a business

you have a job you created for yourself

automate until weekends are actually weekends

now that also goes for everything that you build at your job as well. Let that sink in.

I measure success by how little i do manually

Right now: 3 manual tasks per week
Used to be: 50

That's not lazy but me automating my workflows.

Where are you guys at in your automation.

P.S.: Not talking about n8n

2017

HR couldn't hire for 2 months.

Manual screening wasn't working.

I built an automation:
- Targeted candidate profiles
- Skill filtering
- Screening questions
- Simple ranking

0 → 20 hires in 2 months.

They called it magic.

It was just automation.

In 2018, my manager said: "Complete 3 years of manual work in 3 months."

I said: "Give me 2 months to automate it. If I fail, I'll do overtime to finish manually."

Delivered in 1 month and 1 week.

That's when I learned: the laziest solution is usually the smartest one.