An orchestra conductor's podium stands empty while the conductor, seen from behind, sits among the cellos playing one and nodding the tempo to the players on either side, the whole scene drawn with wide empty margins on every side.

The Pragmatic Engineer

The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson

Gergely Orosz with Will Larson · 21 October 2026

Takeaway

Will Larson, chief technology officer of Imprint, says engineering managers must now make technical decisions again and that hiring is rarely the right answer to a problem.

Summary

Will Larson is chief technology officer of Imprint, a financial technology company, and previously led engineering at Carta, Calm and Stripe. In a podcast with Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, Larson described how the rules of engineering management set in the 2010s have changed. Larson recommends that middle managers go back to managing engineers directly and learn new skills.

Key points

In the 2010s, new engineering managers were told never to make a technical decision again, and more companies now expect managers to be hands-on.
Larson tells teams that hiring is the least interesting way to solve a problem, where managers in the 2010s reached for process, scheduling or headcount.
Orosz reports that engineering managers now often lead 12 to 14 people instead of four to eight, and that managers who also write software are in demand.
Larson is hiring engineering managers at Imprint to use AI agents to rethink how software teams work. Larson also knows one engineer who retired because AI took away the focused flow of the work.

Implication

An engineering organisation can expect its managers to make technical decisions and to lead larger teams of engineers who work with AI agents. The link between AI agents and these changes is an inference and is not the author's claim, since the episode does not describe how Imprint uses AI agents.

Plays

Engineering

Give each engineering manager responsibility for some of the team's technical decisions, instead of leaving every technical choice to the engineers they manage.

Engineering

Put the engineers who build a service on call for it, including the most senior and best-paid engineers.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: I tell my teams that I work with now that hiring is the least interesting way to solve every problem.

Source issue

22 October 2026: as AI agents make building cheap, teams are moving effort to deciding what to build and writing down the reasons where people and AI agents can reuse them.