Trust But Verify

I have been answering the same leadership questions a lot lately, on applications and in interviews. The answers keep coming out the same, because they are true. So here they are in one place.

The best engineers ask why

The best engineers I have worked with ask why, and ask it the right way. Not as pushback. As a real question. Why are we building the architecture this way? What does the business actually need?

Plenty of strong engineers punch tickets and go home, and their code is fine. The best ones understand the whole system and the bigger picture, and their work is better because of it.

Hire the mindset, teach the craft

I never had the budget to hire engineers at full market salary. So I got creative. I recruited people myself who had the right mindset, people who were not software engineers yet, and taught them the craft.

We got them for less than a market hire, and several of them are still in those jobs today, still going strong. Leadership rises the same way. The ones who want it show it. They mentor, they show up, they help everyone around them. My job was to support people where they were and let ownership spread until the architecture stopped living in one head.

The hard calls are still calls

The hardest people calls cost me hours of struggle before and after. They are done one on one, with clear terms and thirty days to improve. And they still have to be made, because that is the job.

When a developer on my team went through a hard stretch and started missing standup, the answer was guardrails plus empathy. It is still a business. He kept his job, with check-ins, because I could not afford to lose him and I would not let the situation slide either. Both things can be true.

AI does not change the rule

These days I run Eco Moving Utah and build Bin X with an AI agent doing real work every day. The websites, the booking system, the SaaS platform at Bin X, the daily operations at Eco Moving Utah. One person carrying what used to take a team.

The rule on top of all of it is the rule from my whole career as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO): trust but verify. AI-generated code gets the same human review and the same full test suite as anything a person writes, and nothing merges unless it is green. AI never touches authentication, credit, or secure code paths. The engineer who submits the code owns it, whether they typed it or a model did.

That is the whole philosophy. Hire people with the right mindset. Teach them. Ask why. Make the hard calls like a human. And verify everything.