PODCAST · technology
Developer Tea
by Jonathan Cutrell
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: [email protected]
Episodes
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How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering
You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortran in the 1950s, and the spread of autopilot in commercial aviation. Both show how new…
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Fundamentals Will Help You Survive the Constant Acceleration of Software Engineering
Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — and why they matter more than ever in a profession where abstraction moves faster than almost...
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You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control
In 1967, a study on shock avoidance gave us "learned helplessness," and for nearly fifty years that was the prevailing explanation for why people give up. Then the original authors published a follow-up with brain scan data showing they had it backwards. We don't learn to be helpless — passivity…
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Why Reducing Complexity Is A Sign of Seniority
As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, accept certain risks, and reduce the surface area they're responsible for — and what drives that…
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A Pragmatic Definition for Accountability
Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our industry. Many of us have a visceral, negative reaction to it—not because the concept is broken…
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Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler
There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do it constantly — usually without noticing, and sometimes to our detriment. In today's episode, I…
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Your Single Most Important Tool for Managing the Uneven Downsides of Risk
The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventually will. In this episode, I work through why our careers and lives are governed more by avoiding catastrophic downside than by chasing upside, and why the...
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Why Can't You Go Faster With AI? Focus on the Friction to Find Out
If you are a manager, a lead engineer, or anyone growing into more responsibility, this throwback episode is built for you. We keep hearing the same question, now louder than ever: "Why can't this go faster?" AI and agentic coding have made the literal coding step dramatically cheaper, so product...
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Software Engineering Principles That Still Hold Up in an Agentic World - Old Lessons Made New
The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (limiting work in progress, the theory of constraints, test-driven development) are coming roaring back as the fundamentals that will carry you through the...
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Principles Oriented Thinking as a Durable Skill in an AI First World
The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripping away the labels we attach to tools, roles, and even ourselves to see what...
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What the Science Actually Says About Effective Feedback
A lot of what we've been talking about lately is durable skills — the abilities that last regardless of how our tools and tech environment change. In today's episode, I want to step back from the AI conversation and focus on one of the most durable skills of all: feedback. We've all been on both...
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Rebuilding Your Mental Models In the Midst Of an AI Tech Revolution
Right now, the questions we have about our careers feel existential. We keep coming back to the same theme: how do you prepare for an industry that's changing this fast, and what mindset actually works in this new reality? One skill keeps surfacing as the answer — your ability to update your own...
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Practice Isn't Enough for Senior Engineers - Adaptation Is a Key Skill in an AI-First Industry
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. For many of us, this career has always been engaging for...
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Senior Skills to Maintain Employment Through the AI Wave
If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In today's episode, I unpack what that shift _actually_…
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You're Wrong All the Time, But All You Need Are Better Explanations
What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slow*, and I use it as a springboard to talk about a much...
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AI-Proofing Your Skillset - High-Meaning, High-Specifity Vocabulary is the Path to Growth
Why I'm Not "Picking a Fight" on AI: A listener asked if I'm intentionally stoking a flame war by treating agentic coding as a foregone conclusion. The honest answer is that I've used it, the data points one direction, and a show built around pretending otherwise would slowly drift away from...
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Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill
The Coding-Is-My-Value Trap: For years, we've treated the ability to write code as the flagship skill of software engineering. It's concrete, it's teachable, it's the thing big box stores sell kits for. But conflating "what I enjoy about the job" with "what I'm actually valuable for" is…
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Chaos Doesn't Have to Win - Maintaining Order in the Midst of AI Change
If you're an engineering leader right now, everything around you feels like it's changing at once — new tools, new processes, new expectations. It's tempting to accept chaos as the new normal, but in today's episode, I make the case that your job is to go on the offense and *create* order. Not by...
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Mourning the Loss of Coding, Senior Tooling Mindset, and Shaping Your Environment
Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it or not. In today's episode, I explore two principles that senior engineers consistently apply to their workflows, regardless of which specific tools they're...
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Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics
When Good Thinking Becomes Overthinking: Discover why the pursuit of perfect analysis often undermines good decision-making. Loading every caveat, every exception, and every alternative into your working memory doesn't produce better outcomes — it produces paralysis. Heuristics as a Feature, Not…
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Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making
The Bottleneck Is Moving: Borrowing from traditional manufacturing theory, the coding step used to define your team's total throughput. AI tooling hasn't incrementally improved that bottleneck — it has drastically shrunk it, which means the constraint is now upstream in product decisions,...
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What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking
The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, and Daniel Kahneman's Noise, I've been experimenting with printed, physical checklists for repetitive tasks — from producing this show to running one-on-ones. The rigor of writing precise procedures...
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From Software Engineer to Agent Manager - How Work is Changing in A New Software Development Paradigm
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. However, the rapid introduction of new tools can slide...
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AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?
AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how you can use your systems-thinking engineering mindset to...
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Listener Question - Abdul Asks About How to Balance Career Strategy Between Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions
Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work. We are diving into a fantastic listener question from Abdul, a front-end engineer with 10 years of experience who…
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AI-Era Employability and Job Security for Software Engineers - Mental Models for Finding a Competitive Advantage Without Selling Out
I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators. In this episode, I don't offer false guarantees about job security. Instead, I frame the...
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Why Getting Paid Stole Your Drive and How to Get Into the Flow Again (Career Growth Accelerator)
Do you remember the early days of your career? You likely spent hours coding late into the night, fueled not by a paycheck, but by the sheer joy of building. But somewhere along the way, that intrinsic fire faded, replaced by the extrinsic motivators of Jira tickets, performance reviews, and...
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The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth (Career Growth Accelerator)
🎧 Episode Notes: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a morning routine, or a specific productivity hack—it is a...
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Career Growth Accelerator - Promotion Roadblocks and Knocking it Out of the Park During Performance Review Season
It is review season, and you might be finding yourself confused: you received high ratings and "exceeded expectations," yet the promotion you expected didn't happen. In this episode of the Career Growth Accelerator, I break down exactly why high performance doesn't always lead to promotion…
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Career Growth Roadmap - De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities
In this episode, we explore how to de-risk your career roadmap by identifying the hidden vulnerabilities that hold your decision-making hostage. 🎧 Episode Notes: De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities True career growth requires gaining autonomy over your choices. This...
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Career Growth Accelerator - Assessing Yourself - Using a Nine-Block to Map Your Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment
🎧 Episode Notes: Using a Nine-Block for Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment Most career assessments try to paint a static picture of what you can do well with the least effort, but they often fail to provide a practical roadmap for your next career move. This episode provides a simplified,...
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Career Growth Accelerator: Going from Autopilot to Purpose
This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the...
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Announcing - Career Growth Accelerator, Episode Zero - Getting Out of Your Own Way
This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real…
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Announcing: The Career Growth Accelerator Series
Are you a mid-to-senior level engineer or leader who has hit a career roadblock or found yourself stagnated? I'm launching the new Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the difficult, non-obvious hurdles that prevent you from moving to the next level. In this foundational Episode Zero, I...
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Problem Definition As A Path for Career Growth
When you hit a career roadblock, the methods that worked for you before often stop working. Today, I’m diving into why that happens, and why the first and most critical step in progressing past stagnation isn't doubling down on skills, but clearly defining the problem standing in your way.…
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You Know The Hard Thing You Need to Do Next - Here's Why It's Worth Doing Now
We often look for ways to reduce the load on our brains, seeking shortcuts and optimizations to get ahead. Sometimes this works, reinforcing the belief that we can hack our way around every problem. However, this episode addresses the truth that many fundamental aspects of your career require...
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Career Fundamentals - Avoid Career Traps by Focusing on Primary Paths of Improvement
If you're looking to accelerate your career growth, this episode gives you what may feel like hard truths about the path forward. So many engineers fall into traps of overthinking, chasing minor optimizations (like 5% or 10% productivity boosts), or playing the games of politics and networking....
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Getting to Senior - Taking Ownership Without Leading Projects
If you're an engineer looking to move into a senior role, you have likely heard that you need to demonstrate "ownership". Unfortunately, this crucial term is often poorly defined and leads to a major misconception: that ownership means being assigned a full project or a Tech Lead role. I want to...
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Part Two - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between
Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into…
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Part One - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between
Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. It's been quite a while since I've had a guest on the show. Today, I'm joined by Bryan McCann, CTO at you.com. We dive into a wide-ranging discussion, exploring the philosophical origins of his career—from studying meaning and language...
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Going to War with Burnout - Less Hours Isn't Your Only Option
I'm tackling a massive challenge today: burnout. While the standard advice usually involves working less, I want to show you a practical dimension of burnout you have more control over, focusing on increasing your agency and autonomy to manage chronic workplace stress more effectively. Burnout is...
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The Good and Bad of Choosing Measurements - Traps and Opportunities of Measuring What Matters
In this episode, I dive into the management mantra that "what is measured is managed" and explain why this simple assertion often leads to a complex trap. We discuss why the act of measuring team productivity is never neutral—it's an intervention that immediately changes behavior, often resulting...
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Engage in Deliberate Practice to Level Up Your Engineering Leadership Skills
I want to dive into the concept of Deliberate Practice, which sets the greatest apart in fields ranging from sports to writing to engineering. I’ll explain why it’s much more than just repetition or experience, and why applying it to your career can lead to rapid improvement. Most importantly, I...
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Shift Your Locus of Control to Take Charge of Your Engineering Career
This episode explores the concept of Locus of Control and why developing a more internal locus of control is beneficial for your career and life. You'll learn the difference between internal and external perspectives, why one is more useful than the other, and practical exercises to shift your...
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Resumé Driven Development - Your Career is In Your Hands
In this episode we'll discuss why "Résumé Driven Development" is a powerful mental model for building a thriving career. Instead of seeing your résumé as just a job-hunting tool, you'll learn to use it as a guide for setting measurable, impactful goals that benefit you, your manager, and your...
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Forced and Unforced Errors
In this episode, we introduce a simple yet powerful mental model from the world of sports: forced vs. unforced errors. By understanding this concept, you can shift your focus from things outside your control to the simple, foundational behaviours that truly define a successful career. Understand...
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View Your Productivity Through the Lens of Values and Priorities
In this episode, we introduce two fundamental thought experiments to help you uncover your true priorities and core values. By exploring scenarios of scarcity and abundance, you'll learn to align your daily actions with what truly matters, leading to a more satisfied career and life. Uncover Your...
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This One Skill Signifies Seniority For Software Engineers
This episode explains what is arguably the best career advice you'll hear this week: the one skill that signifies seniority in software engineers is the ability to synthesise and optimise for multiple factors at once. Instead of focusing on a single factor, such as performance or maintainability,...
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Backup Plans and Risk Reward Curves
This episode focuses on the critical importance of having a backup plan, not just for technical redundancies but especially for situations involving human error, which are highly prevalent in one's career. The core argument hinges on understanding risk and reward curves, highlighting the...
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Second Order Consequences and Forcing Functions
Todays episode delves into understanding and leveraging second and third-order consequences – the ripple effects that occur after an initial action – and introduces forcing functions, which are an inverted way of thinking about these consequences, designed to drive desired outcomes by first...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: [email protected]
HOSTED BY
Jonathan Cutrell
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Developer Tea have?
Developer Tea currently has 1000 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Developer Tea about?
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15...
How often does Developer Tea release new episodes?
Developer Tea releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 1000 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Developer Tea?
You can listen to Developer Tea on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Developer Tea?
Developer Tea is created and hosted by Jonathan Cutrell.
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