Abstract
Career progression in engineering has traditionally followed a predictable path: junior tasks teach fundamentals, mid-level work builds judgment, senior roles require synthesis across systems. AI has disrupted this by eliminating the learning opportunities at each rung while simultaneously enabling people to perform above their experience level.
The result is juniors who ship like mids but can't debug like them. Mids who architect like seniors but lack the battle scars. Seniors wondering what their role even is when AI handles the implementation. Our progression frameworks—built for a world of gradual skill accumulation—no longer match reality.
This talk shares lessons from rebuilding engineering ladders during rapid team growth. We'll examine what competencies actually differentiate levels now, how to create learning opportunities when AI handles the traditional training ground, and whether the IC/management split still makes sense when AI shifts what individual contribution means.
Speaker
Alasdair Allan
Scientist, Author, Hacker, Maker, Journalist, and Head of Documentation, CTO @Negroni Venture Studios, Interim CTO @Evaro
Alasdair Allan is a recovering astrophysicist turned technology troublemaker, and now spends a lot of time gluing things together, or taking them apart. Sometimes those things are companies. He is the CTO of Negroni Venture Studios, and is serving as the interim CTO for the health technology startup Evaro.
He works at the intersection of open hardware, machine learning, data science, and emerging technologies — with expertise in electronics, especially wireless devices, distributed sensor networks, and embedded computing. He's particularly known for benchmarking the new generation of machine learning accelerator hardware and, somewhat inexplicably, for hacking hotel radios.
He previously worked as the Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi where he led the team responsible for documents that ranged from beginner-friendly tutorials to register-level documentation of new silicon. He was, in other words, the person responsible for writing things down.
He has been an author on over a hundred academic papers, eight books, and has authored several standards dealing with real-time events and application interoperability. Before he recovered from astrophysics he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of GRB 090423 which — at the time — was the most distant object yet discovered.
In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and been mentioned on South Park. But more than a decade later, he is probably still most well known for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals.
Find Alasdair Allan at:
Date
Tuesday Mar 17 / 11:45AM GMT ( 50 minutes )
Location
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Slides
Slides are not available
