I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete.

Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat.

Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering.

Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your “fastest” engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!