Moxie Marlinspike's exploration of how curiosity, deep understanding, and vision-engineering synergy define both good engineers and organizations
Moxie Marlinspike argues that the qualities making a good engineer—treating abstraction layers as shorthand rather than black boxes, cultivating bidirectional relationships between vision and engineering, and maintaining curiosity to explore systems deeply—are the same qualities that create effective engineering organizations. The piece emphasizes that true creation requires deep understanding of tools and systems, rejecting both purely autonomous and hierarchical team models in favor of environments that encourage cross-team understanding and collaborative discovery. Engineering leaders will learn why innovation emerges from intertwined vision and technical exploration rather than linear planning, and how organizational structures should enable rather than constrain engineers' natural curiosity about the systems they build.
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