The Curious Engineer

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Jim Grey on software management

dev.jimgrey.net

Engineering management / careersTesting / QASoftware / engineering practice

’15’20’25
Posts
93 from 24 May 2013 to 2 Sep 2026
Posting
weekly (31 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://dev.jimgrey.net/feed/

2026 29

  1. The Engineer Assessment Daemon: Catching performance drift early
  2. What the fitness tracker I built with AI taught me about why your company still needs to buy software
  3. Coach and judge
  4. When agents write the code, what makes us engineers?
  5. AI writing smells
  6. The factory floor metaphor for AI coding agents
  7. The operational risk of AI coding agents in B2B SaaS
  8. You’re about to use AI to build the wrong thing faster
  9. Advice to new grads: take any job you can get in the industry
  10. Engineering the operating model
  11. Why software engineers are grieving
  12. At last, quality engineering might finally happen
  13. 60-amp engineering in a 200-amp world
  14. The inspection model is breaking
  15. Judgment is the skill that matters most in the AI era
  16. Your defect backlog is a retention report
  17. The bottleneck has moved: redesigning the SDLC for AI
  18. The real AI coding revolution: learning speed, not coding speed
  19. AI coding in a traditional company: what it actually takes
  20. The player/coach trap: why Engineering Managers shouldn’t be expected to code
  21. You can’t build loosely coupled software with loosely coupled teams
  22. How to earn credibility with engineers (lessons from a college radio station)
  23. The invisible foundation of engineering transformation
  24. From quality function to quality system: reimagining the Quality Engineer
  25. AI enables more complex systems — and elevates engineering
  26. Quality advisors, test automation, and the work that’s disappearing
  27. The discipline of the light hand
  28. A nine-point framework for rapidly assessing software-engineering organizations
  29. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Automate testing to test early and often

2025 9

  1. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Prevent unplanned work
  2. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Ruthlessly eliminate drag in your processes and technologies
  3. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Use CI/CD to drive real business agility
  4. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Partner with Product to pay down technical debt
  5. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Build less, ship frequently, learn faster
  6. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Drive adoption of AI
  7. Unlocking high software engineering pace: Strictly limit work in progress
  8. Unlocking high software engineering pace
  9. Keep seeking new challenges, keep learning new skills

2024 1

  1. Lessons learned in 35 years of making software

2023 3

  1. To move your career forward, focus on what your company thinks is valuable
  2. The farther you go up the ladder, the less it’s about your technical skills
  3. Surviving the downturn

2022 1

  1. Working in the software industry, circa 1989

2021 4

  1. The hidden reason companies want you back in the office
  2. Nine tips for interviewing over Zoom
  3. Fortune’s careless aim
  4. Changing jobs during a pandemic

2020 4

  1. Ship Mode: Recognizing when it’s time to stop polishing your work and just ship it
  2. You are an impostor
  3. Too soon to declare victory on distributed work
  4. Communication: Throwing the ball so others can catch it

2019 3

  1. The Donald Rumsfeld School of Agile Software Delivery
  2. Sometimes you have the tiger by the tail, and sometimes the tiger has you in its mouth
  3. Your cloudy crystal ball

2018 8

  1. Failing to automate routine tasks is a waste of human potential
  2. The manager infodeck: Quickly helping new teams and new employees get to know you
  3. Love your salespeople because they make your paychecks not bounce
  4. Moving on is a simple thing; what it leaves behind is hard
  5. Knowing when to leave may be the hardest thing that anyone can learn
  6. The good you put into the world often comes back to you
  7. Technical problems can almost always be solved, but people problems are hard
  8. Where have all the 50-year-old software engineers gone?

2017 5

  1. Behaviors and traits of successful software companies (the ones where I’ve worked, anyway)
  2. You’re building a business
  3. Everyone pulling the cart in the same direction is more valuable than having the best product ideas
  4. Informal doesn’t scale
  5. Programming is the number one quality assurance activity

2016 3

  1. If you want your software to keep producing, be prepared to do some dirty work
  2. Stop outsourcing support
  3. How to hire an entry-level tester

2015 10

  1. Don’t piss off your users by suddenly changing your UI
  2. Fast failure recovery lets you take more risk and increase speed
  3. You can’t test it all
  4. The tester’s three mental models
  5. Three things I wish someone had told me when I started my career
  6. It’s remarkable that the “Great Glitch of July 8” doesn’t happen more often
  7. Endangered species: Managers and Directors of Quality Assurance
  8. Software technical writing is a dying career (but here’s what writers can do to stay in the software game)
  9. Myths of test automation – debunked!
  10. Renewing the network

2014 6

  1. Twenty-five years in the software salt mines
  2. A paean to BASIC
  3. When test automation is nothing more than turdpolishing
  4. Three-point estimation is a critical skill you should build right now
  5. If you want to ship software, stay in touch with how much you suck
  6. The power of continuous reestimation

2013 7

  1. Giving testers less to do
  2. “Software engineering” might be an oxymoron
  3. Four critical tips for getting your ideas implemented at work
  4. Multitasking hurts productivity
  5. The difference between quality and excellence
  6. I believe in “A teams” over “A players”
  7. Even a mediocre plan will work if everybody follows it