Coleton Gorecke

Mine has fifteen repos, three years, and $1,608.35 to show for it. A repo nobody uses and a paycheck from one company dry up the same way: the day somebody decides you aren't needed. A graveyard is not a backup plan.

The job was never about the code. It was always about what the code unlocks. The code just got cheap. The unlocking didn't.

Everything between the idea and the working product is approaching free. The bottleneck moves upstream.

It belongs to people who can sit with a customer, hear the thing they didn't say, and know what's worth building before anyone else does.

The next decade doesn't belong to the best coders.

The first one gets feedback on day two. The second one gets feedback never, because the thing they built was wrong and nobody told them until it was too late. Ship before you're ready.

"Here's a rough version. Does this solve the problem?" That's the product engineer posture. The ticket-taker posture is "I'll let you know when it's done."

Velocity is a measure of motion, not direction.

Stop measuring your week in tickets closed. Start measuring it in problems solved. If you shipped four features and none of them moved a metric, you didn't have a good week. If you shipped nothing but figured out why a feature wasn't landing, you did.

You'll learn more in twenty minutes than you will in a month of grooming sessions. The PM's summary of a user conversation is not the conversation.

Talk to a user this week. Not through a PM. Not through a survey. A real conversation. Ask them what they were trying to do the last time your product frustrated them.

The companies that win now aren't hiring better coders. They're hiring engineers who refuse to be ticket-takers.

Ramp expects engineers to understand the problem deeply enough to have an opinion. Not "implement the ticket." Not "ask the PM." Have an opinion.

Those aren't product manager bullet points. They're engineering requirements.

Ramp's engineering principles include "build what the customer really needs, not what they ask for" and "build opinionated systems."

If a new hire can't understand the patterns in a day, an agent can't either. Your test suite is the safety net that makes contribution possible for PMs, designers, and LLMs alike.

Clear patterns. Thorough tests. Obvious safety rails. Documentation that's current.

The new engineering job isn't writing code. It's making the codebase safe for anyone to contribute to.