Jens Oliver Meiert

AI: The Real Problem Engineering Leaders Need to Have a Solution For

Published on Sep 24, 2025, filed under , , . (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

When we look around in our field, everyone in Tech seems to focus on one thing:

How can we adopt AI in our tooling and in our processes?

Although this doesn’t solve concerns and problems around AI, that is important.

While our partners in Product ask, how can AI add value to our users and customers, we ask, how can AI make us more effective and efficient.

But I believe there’s an even more pressing question for us as engineering leaders, one we urgently need to answer:

How can we set up our engineers for long-term career success?

It may be tempting to dismiss this as something that wasn’t our concern, given that most if not all of our engineers will spend their long-term career elsewhere. That view I’d challenge as short-sighted and actually irresponsible.

Here’s why:

The ground is literally shifting under our teams’ feet.

Whether we like it or not, AI is reshaping the profile of and expectations for software and web developers.

We Should Be Concerned, in a Sense of Responsibility for Our Colleagues

You may not be scared of AI, even our teams may not be scared of AI, but I think as engineering leaders we should be scared of AI—in a manner of taking responsibility for the careers of the individuals forming our teams, as much as that is possible and reasonable.

What does this mean specifically?

It means that we need to start answering and start monitoring possible answers:

We could go on with variations.

As you can tell, we cannot have all those answers yet—this is precisely why this is so important to get on top of, and it’s also the reason why I say “start answering.”


These current years, the mid-2020s, are one of the most challenging times to be in Engineering. One part of the challenge is that our peers and our teams may not feel like much is going on yet—that is, we need to inform and convince without scaring them.

Yet the point is this: The real problem is not what to use AI for, how—but what this means for the people we’re working with. We have great influence on how they will come out of the AI transformation. Especially when we do nothing.

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on November 9, 2024.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)