I've been thinking about this a lot of recent, and it is in my view, one of the most important aspects of what we do for our engineering teams, or indeed more broadly our companies. I put forward an idea of engineering teams over time, generating a maintenance burden for themselves, that acts as a pressure on their velocity. Hiring is probably an insufficient solution to this, so we need to really open up the conversation about how we learn within teams.

I'm going to preface this with a big old disclaimer; I haven't worked in industry for that long, no more than a few years. However, as I'm sure the more senior engineers reading this may remember, you do start to build an idea for the things that keep you at a company in the longer term, as I have, and for many engineers, progression is at the top of that list. One form of progression I've seen in the wild, that I've come to grow wary of, is being being offered work with a certain framework or programming language. There's nothing innately wrong with it, but I'm starting to question whether it's really nourishing in the longer term.