For the past months I’ve been one of three team leads on CSMM X CSEE. We built an agentic RAG system that digs detailed answers out of 32 TB of project data: documents, specs, CAD files. Big, messy, real. And somewhere between the deadlines and the debugging, a few things clicked for me that I want to write down before I forget them.

Fair warning: there will be a lot of kitchen examples in this post. It started with a hamburger, got a little out of hand, and the whole theme I owe to a tech lead friend from my local gym.

#The cooking got easy

Writing code is not the hard part anymore. Think of it like cooking. A few years ago, half the job was hunting down ingredients. Today the fridge is full, the recipes are free, and every cook suddenly has a sous-chef standing next to them who never gets tired. Every engineer just got wings.

And still: not everyone knows how to stack a hamburger. All the parts are right there on the counter, and somehow it tastes terrible. Stacking is a skill you only learn by making a lot of bad burgers, and the good news is that failing has never been this cheap or this fast.

But that raises a question. If everyone can cook now, what makes a cook valuable?

#The kitchen has to talk

Here’s the unromantic truth I’ve made my peace with: my job as an engineer is to make my team lead's life easier, and the team lead's job is to make the stakeholders happy. That’s the whole chain. The guest orders, the chef calls it out, the cook fires the pan. Nobody in a kitchen is confused about this, and nobody’s ego dies from it.

The most valuable engineer isn’t the one writing the cleverest code. It’s the one you can hand a problem to and then just... stop worrying. You know it will get done, and done well. No chasing, no surprises on Friday at 5pm. Of course we’re human, we’ll burn a steak now and then. That’s fine. What matters is the behavior around it, the way cooks yell “behind!” so nobody collides. Say it early when you’re stuck. Keep people in the loop. Never let your lead learn about a fire from somebody else.

#Own the plate until the guest is happy

For me, ownership means one thing: you own a problem from "we have a problem" all the way to "we never have to think about it again."

Not when the code compiles. Not when the ticket says done. When it’s gone.

A dish isn’t finished when it leaves your pan. It’s finished when the guest is eating and happy. If the plate comes back, you don’t shrug and point at the waiter. And a pull request that’s just sitting there? That's a plate dying under the heat lamp. Nobody is going to run it out for you. Walk over to your team lead, get the review, get it merged. Chase your own plates.

And please, never leave production broken. That’s leaving the stove on when you go home. I don’t care whose turn it was to cook: if the kitchen is on fire, you put it out first and discuss later.

One more: don’t vanish from your station for two weeks without a reason. Vacation is planned, sickness happens, life is life. A kitchen can cover for all of that. But a cook who simply disappears mid-service leaves the whole line covering a station nobody planned for.

Maybe I’m too extreme about all this. Too motivated. But honestly, I believe it’s the right way to work.

#Cook something you’d actually eat

Be passionate about what you’re building. This career is less a sprint and more one very, very long shift, and you can taste it when the cook cared. You really can. One person who genuinely loves the dish changes the mood of the whole kitchen.

Finding that, work that pulls you in and where you can feel your own fingerprints on the result, is not easy. Part luck, part a choice you keep making. But keep looking. For your own sake, and for everyone standing next to you at the stove.

#Hire the best cooks you can find

This last one is for the people staffing kitchens: hire the best cooks you can get, because nothing decides the quality of a kitchen more than who is standing in it. And the hardest part of leading, the part nobody warns you about, is keeping everyone feeling good about the work even when someone is underperforming. Of course I can’t expect every cook to be a head chef. But a kitchen full of people who care beats a kitchen that's just filling shifts, every single service.