Alex Rios Substack

Insights on system design, engineering leadership, and navigating the Staff+ career path from 17+ years in the trenches.

Launched 6 months ago

Stop Pretending You’re a Servant
The leadership metaphor we’ve been using is broken. There’s a better one.
May 19•Alex Rios

The Floor and the Fractures
Fractures that separate the excellent Senior from the Principal, and why the Ethics described the role better than the leadership books.
May 14•Alex Rios

Performative Pragmatism
On the word that ends conversations instead of advancing them
May 5•Alex Rios

There is a reason that caveman is a character from the past
The tokens you cannot see are the expensive ones
Apr 21•Alex Rios

When feedback stops working
AI generates the artifacts. The feedback rituals continue. But nobody's learning anything.
Apr 15•Alex Rios

The burnout that follows you to your next job

The talent topology
Jan 23•Alex Rios

Engineer's cynicism is a symptom, not a personality
Jan 2•Alex Rios

Efficiency in influencing within the Staff+ engineer’s routine
Dec 24, 2025•Alex Rios

The architecture of decisions nobody made
How defaults, copy-paste, and “temporary” choices become your real architecture
Mar 26•Alex Rios

The substitution that isn't happening
What the researches gets right about AI and labor, and what engineering teams already know
Mar 17•Alex Rios

How to size things you have never built
Capacity estimation isn’t about precision. It’s about finding the bottleneck before it finds you.
Mar 3•Alex Rios

The attention economy inside your company
Engineering organizations spend focus like it’s infinite. It isn’t.
Feb 23•Alex Rios

Why reorgs fail
The invisible costs
Feb 20•Alex Rios

Implicit contracts, broken incentives
How unwritten rules drive your best engineers away, and a simple test to fix them
Feb 5•Alex Rios

The organization meta-cognition gap
When organizations lose their judgment?
Jan 28•Alex Rios