Episode 81: How Do I Invest Engineering Time?

The episode frames engineering as an investment rather than a cost. Mike opens with a parable: leaders who put capital (or engineers) to work create value; those who “protect” resources without progress destroy it. The panel builds on that: impact comes from choosing work that improves tomorrow—planning enough to ship, avoiding ivory-tower perfection, and recognizing that “cheap” talent can be expensive in management bandwidth. Good contractors and senior ICs pay for themselves by shipping and by freeing organizational attention. They dive into technical debt with a pragmatic stance: prefer YAGNI, refactor when the change is hard so the right change becomes easy, and pay down debt “as you go” when you trip over it. Treat debt like a family credit card—budget a consistent tithe each sprint for the top, highest-leverage items and let the bottom 10% freeze or die. Too much debt maxes the card; you end up servicing interest (slow teams, broken features) instead of building. For growth and product strategy, pursue small, adjacent bets that serve existing customers and reduce risk rather than sweeping reinventions. A major throughline is investing in people. Effectiveness scales when seniors make others effective: clear plans for distributed teams, social onboarding, and apprenticeship-style pipelines that move interns, QA, and juniors into productive engineers. Pair programming and XP practices are championed as systematic knowledge transfer—training juniors up, spreading domain context, and keeping work flowing despite constant change. The most rewarding ROI, they argue, is the compounding payoff of people who grow, stay, and ship. Transcript: MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'll be hosting again today. With me, I've got Dave. DAVE: Hello. MIKE: Eddy. EDDY: Hello. MIKE: We've got Will. Yeah, we’ve got Will Archer. We've got Jordan. JORDAN: Hello. MIKE: We've got Justin, and we've got Ramses. RAMSES: Howdy. MIKE: I'd like us to start off with a story. This time I'm going to go biblical. WILL: Oh God. MIKE: [chuckles] So, [inaudible 00:00:51] I’m going to tell an old story in a new context. No religious context, but I think it applies here. So, a boss is going to go on a year-long sabbatical, maybe not that realistic, but, you know, humor me here [chuckles]. And they're going to leave, you know, put some employees in charge. And they're going to put them in, you know, these are, you know, leaders, leaders of the company, and they're going to give one person responsible for 10 million worth of funds, another one 5 million, the third one 1 million. So, they're going to be responsible for some funds here while the boss is on sabbatical. A year later, the boss comes back, and she asked each of the employees how things went. And the first employee, well, they've hired a new team, and they’ve built a new product that's going to bring in $10 million a year. So, "Well done," she says. So, the second employee has invested their millions in acquiring a small dev shop, brought them in, and they've increased the size of the dev team. And they expect that to contribute to $5 million in projected annual growth. So, "Well done," she says. So, the third employee let go of some of their developers because they wanted to save their money. They wanted to make sure...I've only got a million dollars. I got to make sure that it stretches for this year. Customers are complaining because now there's not the support on the product. The product's been losing users because everybody's complaining. Reviews are going down online. And the boss says, "You know, why didn't you invest the money? You could at least put an investment account. You just sat on it." And the employee says, "You know, I was just scared to lose the money. So, I made sure I kept it all." The boss says, "You're fired [laughs]." And she gives the money to the first employee. So, we hire engineers as an investment, right? Engineers are builders. And we build stuff because it makes companies money. You know, we're doing this on our own. We do it because we're trying to make money. I mean, we enjoy the job, but the reason that we get paid is so we can make the company money, and I think it's critical to remember that. Every minute we spend is an investment. And is it a good investment [chuckles]? Was it worth investing in us? When we get to next year, is the boss going to look at us and say, "Was it worth having them as an employee? Did we actually do better because of that?" And it also affects the way that the company sees the engineers. There's sometimes a mindset where we're seen as a cost, just net cost. Like, "Oh, they're just the cost we have of doing business." And I think that's a dangerous way to think because it doesn't appreciate that you've got to spend some money or, you know, I got to put in some risk to make money. Money doesn't just come walking in the door. It happens ...