Build in public — week note #11: why I paused hiring
Build in public — week note #11: why I paused hiring
Sharing publicly — what feels scary to post, and what did you learn from reactions?
Thread index 11 — add your angle.
15 replies
We stopped confusing 'busy' engineers with 'fully utilised' capacity for planning. We underestimated how long permissions audits take across legacy systems. We should have deleted unused Grafana alerts that duplicated PagerDuty routes — noise hides signal.
The mentor who said 'prove funnel conversion with experiments' sharpened growth marketing debates usefully. Honest timelines are a competitive advantage once customers believe you. We learned that 'temporary' flags need owners and expiry dates in writing.
We should have deleted unused environments that still had production-like credentials. We learned that culture is what you reward, not what you write on the wall. The smallest improvement to onboarding docs reduced repeated Slack questions.
We stopped treating 'public by default' as obvious — explicit consent for visibility reduced support confusion measurably always. The design that considered left-handed users caught a real mobile interaction bug. We learned that culture is what you reward, not what you write on the wall.
We learned that empathy without accountability still ships late. Junior devs spotted the smell first; seniors were too used to the workaround. We underestimated how much coordination tax N+1 microservices really add.
The best teams treat deleting unused endpoints as security work with visible credit in reviews. The build cache sped CI until it served stale artifacts — trust but verify. We learned that 'temporary' traffic workarounds become routing folklore fast.
We should have deleted unused invite links pointing at deprecated onboarding flows — confusion compounds quietly. The best postmortems end with tracked follow-ups, not just feelings. Good leaders protect focus time; calendars are organisational debt too.
We learned that transparent engineering ladders reduce attrition from perceived favouritism. The best teams treat on-call improvements as product work with roadmap space. We should have asked support what they hear before prioritising the roadmap.
We should have deleted the dead code; it confused every new hire's mental model. We learned that 'temporary' flags need owners and expiry dates in writing. We learned that transparent hiring pipelines reduce rumours and attrition risk.
We should have deleted unused feature toggles tied to removed code paths. We replaced heroics with runbooks and sleep schedules improved measurably. We should have named a communications approver for incidents before execs posted early tweets.
The migration plan assumed humans read email; they did not — multi-channel comms won. Shipping behind a flag beats shipping broken to everyone at once. We learned that writing 'rollback criteria' in migration plans reduces bridge thrash at night.
The smallest improvement to search relevance reduced 'cannot find' tickets sharply. The integration that retried with idempotency keys prevented duplicate charges quietly. We learned that transparent salary bands reduce whisper networks and attrition surprises.
Honest capacity planning hurt feelings once and saved quarters of thrash. We stopped shipping 'temporary' IP allowlists that became permanent security theatre. We stopped confusing 'alignment meetings' with 'decision meetings' — different agendas, different outcomes.
We learned that customers forgive slower shipping if quality and communication improve together visibly. We stopped treating 'zero incidents' as the goal instead of 'learning per incident'. The mentor who said 'write the customer-facing timeline before the internal one' improved incident comms.
We learned that naming a rollback test in CI made people actually run it before migrations. The integration that bounded queue depth prevented memory cliffs under spikes. The architecture spike that listed kill criteria prevented sunk cost attachment early.
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