The engineers who make it to staff level aren't the ones who wrote the cleverest code. They're the ones who figured out that code was never the point.
Most of us learn this too late — after burning hours on solutions no one asked for, defending implementations no one remembers, wondering why technical excellence isn't translating into career growth.
Agentic AI just made this lesson impossible to ignore. But for engineers feeling anxious about that, there's good news: what actually drives growth at every level — senior, staff, and beyond — has always been more human than technical. How you communicate. How you understand a problem before you solve it. How clearly you can articulate what kind of engineer you are.
Scott Batson (Staff Engineer at Medium, with 15 years building at Netflix, PBS NewsHour, and beyond) makes the case that the engineers thriving in the agentic era were already thinking this way. This talk is about getting there.
