technically busy, strategically invisible.

Hey {{first name | there}}. Everyone says engineering is about systems. I tell people I’m in the people business. 

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I've started telling people “I'm in the people business”, and the usual reaction is confusion. 

And I get why.. I am an engineer, building a tech company. 

But what I mean is that everything I do runs on trust.

You trust me to deliver value that’s why you subscribed to this newsletter. 

AWS, Atlassian, Incident.io and other companies trust me to deliver value that’s why they work with me.

250+ people trusted that the KCD Nigeria 2026 last weekend would be life changing. That's why they flew from all over the world to Nigeria. 

The part that took longer to see is that engineering runs on the same thing. 

And most of us spend the first few years of our careers acting like it doesn't, because the work that gets measured is the work that compiles.

Look at platform engineering. 

A great internal platform still sits unused if teams don't trust the people behind it. 

Adoption gets decided in conversations, long before anyone opens the portal.

Incidents make it visible in real time. 

Most outages take a minute to fix. 

The other forty go on finding the right person, getting them on the call and keeping updates clear. 

Then comes a postmortem, where people need to feel safe enough to be honest.

For the first couple of years, being good at technical work is most of the job. 

Around year three or four, the problems outgrow one keyboard and need other people to say yes.

That's where the RFC that gets approved, the design review you sway and the migration teams adopt come from. 

None of it shows in your commit graph, but it decides who gets pulled into the room.

It also follows you out of the building. Referrals, invites and job offers come through people who trust how you think.

So when someone says engineering is about systems, remember the systems include people. 

Engineers who accept that become the engineer others come to. The rest stay technically busy and strategically invisible.

Think about how you can build trust with people in your company. 

Maybe invite them for a casual lunch or footie. The gains are beyond your today’s needs.

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