Most of you operate under a pathetic delusion. You believe your engineers are loyal to your “vision,” your culture, or the bean bags in your breakroom. They aren’t. They are loyal to their own trajectory, and the moment you stop providing upward momentum, they are effectively dead to your organization. You celebrate low turnover rates while ignoring the reality that your best talent is mentally checking out six months before their equity vests. You treat retention as an HR metric—a series of “stay interviews” and “wellness perks”—when it is actually a tactical failure of leadership. If your engineers are bored, they are already gone; you’re just still paying the invoice for their presence.
The Teachers’ Lounge Audit: Tracking the Mentally Departed
The standard approach to managing a scaling engineering org is a mess of story points and velocity charts. You track what people are doing, but you have no idea who they actually are. Krista Moroder recognized this failure by looking at the teachers’ lounge. She saw a “sticker board” designed to track student engagement and realized it was the ultimate weapon for a late-stage startup. While you are busy staring at output metrics, you are missing the “at-risk” talent that is performing well on paper but has no champion within the building. These are the people who slip through the cracks because they have lost interest in your monotonous roadmap.
If you aren’t religiously tracking the engagement of every single person on your team, you are flying blind. You need to know who is leaning in and who is just hanging around until a teacher—or in your case, a recruiter—kicks them out. Moroder’s spreadsheet is an audit of your organization’s future. It tracks rotations, cross-functional task forces, and role changes. It ensures that every engineer hits a new milestone before they hit the three-year mark. If an engineer has been at your company for three years and hasn’t checked a new box, they are a flight risk.
Silos are Cages for the Ambitious
Engineers are fundamentally allergic to repetition. The nature of their job is to automate the mundane, yet most of you force them into a loop of feature-parity updates and maintenance tasks that kill their spirit. You assume the “three-year itch” is about the equity refresh. It isn’t. It’s about the career path. Most engineers leave because they have stopped learning, and a bored engineer is a dangerous liability. They will either rot in place, collecting a paycheck while doing the bare minimum, or they will take their deep subject matter expertise directly to your competitor’s office.
In a scaling startup, specialization is often a death sentence for talent. You build silos, you hire “experts,” and you trap your best minds in a cage of repetitive tickets. The “automatic rotations” of a tiny startup disappear the moment you scale. You trade nimbleness for “efficiency,” but what you’re actually buying is a revolving door. If your engineers aren’t constantly learning, they are decaying. You can either train them up internally or watch them train your rivals.
Rotations as Proactive Risk Mitigation
Most engineering organizations use rotations reactively to put out fires or staff up a big project. That is a waste of a strategic asset. You must use rotations proactively as a tool for retention. You need to map your talent against your highest-priority business problems. If you have a Monolith that needs modularizing or an AI revolution that needs leading, you don’t hire from the outside first. You rotate your sharpest minds into those fires.
This matrix management allows you to be nimble without the trauma of a quarterly reorganization. It forces your engineers to stay sharp by speaking new technical languages. It requires an investment in training, but the alternative is the catastrophic loss of context that occurs when your “anchors” walk out the door. The payoff is an engineer who feels like they’ve had “three careers” at one company. They don’t leave because they don’t have time to be bored.
Irreplaceability is a Terminal Disease
The biggest hurdle to a successful rotation program is the manager who is too cowardly to let go of their “star” players. When a manager says, “I can’t afford to lose this person,” they are confessing to a failure of leadership. If a single individual is irreplaceable, you have a succession crisis, not a high-performer problem. You have allowed a silo to form that threatens the entire organization. Irreplaceability is a weakness, not a virtue.
The approach must be brutal: ask your managers to name the one person they cannot afford to lose, and then take them. Force the domain experts out of their comfort zones and into the company’s most urgent technical messes. This breaks the “Lego protecting” culture that plagues scaling startups. If your managers are fighting to keep their “experts” in place, they are prioritizing their own team’s convenience over the company’s survival. You must hold your leaders accountable to the idea that their primary team is the group of leaders they collaborate with, not the reports they manage today.
Vetting for the Mess: Hiring Beyond the Ego
A rotation system only works if you hire people who are willing to “walk into the mess.” If your hiring process focuses purely on technical chops and ignores humility, you will end up with a team of prima donnas who refuse to collaborate. You need leaders who care more about cleaning up the technical debt than protecting their titles. Low-ego leadership is a prerequisite for a nimble org chart. If your managers are playing politics and building factions, your rotation program will be dead on arrival.
You must vet for team players who understand that their scope is temporary but their contribution to the mission is permanent. You aren’t building Lego castles; you’re working on a group project where the only goal is the collective win. If your leaders aren’t obsessed with upleveling the whole organization, even at the cost of their own team’s short-term goals, they are the wrong leaders.
The Final Ultimatum
You stand at a crossroads. You can continue to play it safe. You can keep your specialized silos, your comfortable roadmaps, and your “inevitable” three-year turnover cycle. You can watch your best talent walk out the door the moment their shares vest, taking years of critical business context with them while you scramble to hire expensive replacements. You will stay “efficient” right up until the moment your organization becomes irrelevant.
Or, you can embrace the friction of the rotation. You can treat your engineers like the dynamic assets they are, forcing them into the fires of your biggest technical challenges. You can destroy the “irreplaceable” myths and force your managers to become true leaders. You can help your people find their next career within your own walls, or you can watch them build it for your competitors. Fix the rot of boredom now, or prepare to manage an empty building. There is no third option.
Leave a Reply