Software engineers don’t just code; they plan, design, and can even manage teams. One former Uber engineer leader advises tech workers to stay close to the fundamentals.
Joakim Recht spent nearly nine years climbing Uber’s engineering ladder, from senior software engineer to distinguished engineer. On “The Peterman Pod,” Recht said that all engineers — even those in management positions — should be writing code.
“A software engineer needs to write code,” Recht said. “I know that some people find that pretty controversial for some reason.”
The engineering philosophy applies to “any level,” Recht said. “If your title includes engineer, you should be writing code.”
It can be easy for an engineer’s contributions to move away from actual code as they advance in their career. For example, Amazon’s Carlos Arguelles wrote that his role as a principal engineer led him to “lead without writing code” because he “knew the codebases inside out.” That trend could also accelerate with AI vibe-coding, as software engineers spend more time managing tools and less time writing lines of code.
In an email to Business Insider, Recht wrote that it’s “even more important that senior engineers keep in touch with coding,” whether handwritten or via AI.
“Otherwise, there’s a risk that all the learnings from building reliable software at scale will just be lost and replaced by cool but useless prototypes,” Recht wrote.
In his podcast interview, Recht was firm that leaders should continue coding. “It might be different how much code you write, but usually you’re writing code on a regular basis. For me, a regular basis means every day,” he said.
Continuing to write code also keeps high-level engineers and engineering managers closer to the general staff, he said.
“If you’re not writing code, you lose touch with the system,” Recht said. “The system evolves, and you forget how it is.”
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Recht warned against having too high-level of a “view of what’s going on inside the machine.” Not being low to the ground will make it hard to “design for the future.”
Some of the biggest names in tech and AI are employing a similar strategy — even those without “engineer” in their title.
In September, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said that he vibe-codes new prototypes to save his tech team some time. Google cofounder Sergey Brin is back in the office amid the AI arms race and trying out AI coding tools.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Business Insider that he doesn’t write code much himself anymore, but that he’s a “better CEO” because he knows how the company builds software.
Coding might even benefit non-technical employees. “People that code, be it CEOs and marketers, recruiters, not just software engineers, will really get more done than ones that don’t,” said Andrew Ng, the founder of Google Brain.
Recht said that maintaining a consistent diet of code writing has its advantages.
“There’s a big overlap between the writing of code and the ability to perform at any level,” he said.
