One of the worst parts of being an engineering manager in the 2010s was when you joined the ranks of engineering management, one of the first lessons you'd get was: 'you need to never make a technical decision again.' That's literally what I was told.
Will LarsonCTO, Imprint · Executive, 
Imprint
Press report: The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), October 21, 2026, at Takeaway 10.
Will Larson, CTO, Imprint. Runs engineering at Imprint and says its managers are rethinking how software teams work with agents.
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-07).
Exact match in the takeaways summary, where the quoted text is attributed to Will ('Will recalls:'). Only apostrophe style was normalized.
Will Larson (Imprint), “The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson”, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), 2026-10-21, at Takeaway 10. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-revised-rules-of-engineering Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/imprint-never-make-technical-decision-again-engineering-manager-2026
I tell my teams that I work with now that hiring is the least interesting way to solve every problem. We should almost never talk about hiring.
Will LarsonCTO, Imprint · Executive, Imprint
Press report: The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), October 21, 2026, at Takeaway 6.
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