Why I'm Writing This Series
One engineering manager's signals from Kuala Lumpur.
Earlier this year my boss asked me, mid-week, to weigh in on a decision that had nothing to do with code.
Not a product call. A question with legal weight attached. The kind where the right answer depends on context that most engineering management writing doesn’t account for.
I went looking for writing on how engineering managers handle this kind of decision. There isn’t any.
There is a whole canon of engineering management writing. It assumes your hardest Wednesday problem is a reorg or a missed sprint. Mine wasn’t.
Most engineering management writing assumes a context that doesn’t exist here.
Most of my problems do.
That canon assumes at-will employment, deep talent pools, no resident-director rule, no foreign-currency salary anchoring, no second passport quietly draining your senior bench every quarter toward Singapore or Australia. Those assumptions hold for the people writing. They don’t hold for me, and they don’t hold for the engineers I manage.
When the assumptions don’t translate, the advice doesn’t either. You can read a thousand words on ownership in critical situations and still not know what to do when the critical situation involves a regulator’s portal, a corporate secretary in another office, and a 72-hour window. The frameworks aren’t wrong. They’re out of frame.
So I’m going to write from inside the frame.
This series will be specific. Composite characters, blurred dates, names changed — but the moments are real ones from the chair. A senior engineer testing whether AI-assisted output survives code review. A skip-report whose growth arc nobody documented until it was almost too late. A hiring freeze whose math only makes sense once you know what the ringgit is doing against the dollar that month.
What I won’t write: five-bullet productivity lists, AI-hype takes you’ve read already, frameworks dressed up as insight. There is enough of that on this platform.
What I will write: roughly one piece a week on Substack, with names and details changed, because the people I write about deserve that much.
I’m not writing to teach. I’m writing to think, in public, in the hope that a few other EMs in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh, and the rest of the region will recognise the shape of these problems and push back.
If the lens is useful, follow. The next one is about what happens when an engineer’s output doubles on paper and the review queue tells a different story.
Same chair, same frame, same week.