The altitude slider: Knowing when to dive into code vs. drive the strategy
summary
Claims a simple altitude slider helps senior ICs switch between architecture and hands‑on work, with concrete rituals: morning/weekend altitude checks, project cadence gates, and end‑of‑week recovery reviews. Describes building an SDK/platform to let every team ship AI instead of one team, and creating a test harness that puts the system into the right state with a one‑click state flow so iteration time drops; abandons ivory‑tower design for fast prototypes to reveal real constraints.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Altitude slider concept
- 1:05Senior IC's dilemma
- 2:30Personal proclivities
- 3:40Signals to change altitude
- 6:28Signs of high strategy time
- 7:34Low altitude signals
- 9:21Rituals to calibrate altitude
- 11:33Flight plan for staff engineers
- 12:39Q&A
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