How to lead engineers
You think you’re leading minds. You’re not. You’re trying to lead something older, heavier, and far less obedient.
The room went quiet the moment I walked in.
Not the polite quiet. Not the kind where people pause, look up, then go back to talking. No, this was the other kind. The kind you get in that weird hush at funerals right after someone whispers He was complicated.
It was 2013. I was a principal engineer at Yahoo in Santa Clara. I’d followed the smell of cupcakes and the sound of soft laughter into what I thought was a casual celebration.
It wasn’t.
It was a goodbye party.
Nilo was leaving. Our scrum master. She held four teams together with divine skill, and had a way of asking questions that made you say more than you meant to.
I walked in expecting awkward laughs, sugar highs, maybe a nice moment.
Instead, the room froze. Forks paused halfway to mouths. People stood like they'd been caught mid-confession.
“So reorgs, huh?” I cracked out something safe.
No one laughed.
That’s when I saw Nilo walking toward me. Calm. Poised. Like she’d already walked through this moment in her head a dozen times.
She stopped in front of me. Put her hands under my elbows and said, almost kindly:
“Taha… be nice to people.”
And that was it.
She didn’t raise her voice. Didn’t elaborate. She didn’t point to the fifteen engineers in the room pretending to enjoy cake while quietly plotting my spiritual assassination.
She just... said it.
The Myth of the Rational Engineer
You might be thinking, “Where the hell did you go wrong?”
Well, I used to think engineers were mostly rational.
If you gave them clarity and support, they’d move.
If you pushed them, they’d rise.
Most leadership books won’t tell you this:
You’re not leading robots. You’re leading people. And people are weird.
They get defensive. They feel shame. They fear being exposed. They nod in meetings and quietly shut down for two weeks.
I used to think you could lead engineers with logic alone.
That’s a lie.
The Elephant and the Rider
I didn’t have words for it then. But months later, I found the metaphor that made it all click. It came from The Happiness Hypothesis, a book by Jonathan Haidt.
He writes that your mind isn’t a single voice.
It’s two. One riding atop the other.
The first is the Rider.
It's the part you like to show people.
It plans. It organizes. It speaks in frameworks.
It tells a story about what should happen next.
It feels accomplished when it finishes a slide deck on time.
The Rider is clean. Efficient. It’s the LinkedIn version of your mind.
And it believes, truly, that it’s in control.
(Image Credit: Abhishek Paul on Medium)
Then there’s the Elephant.
It doesn’t talk much. But it remembers everything.
It remembers being ignored.
It remembers the team lead who rolled his eyes.
It remembers every time it spoke up and was pushed aside.
The Elephant is slower, older, and made of memory and muscle.
It doesn't care about roadmaps. It cares about feeling safe enough to move.
And the twist?
The Elephant is six tons of lived experience.
The Rider is 0.1 tons of polite intention.
The Rider thinks it’s in charge.
But the Elephant goes where it wants.
You can explain, incentivize, align.
The Rider will nod.
Take notes.
But if the Elephant isn’t with you?
You’re basically yelling from the back of a very large, very uninterested animal.
You’re not going anywhere.
The Elephant Craves Safety
A year after Nilo left, chaos showed up like it always does: fast, loud, and wrapped in corporate logic.
Marissa Mayer, then-CEO of Yahoo, announced that all software development would relocate to Sunnyvale.
No warning. Just... policy.
Remote teams were given two options:
Relocate or take the severance package.
I was the Principal Architect already in Sunnyvale, reporting to the VP of Platforms.
One of the teams was in India. I joined their weekly stand-up expecting business as usual. But this time, only six faces appeared on the screen, down from twenty.
I asked, “What’s going on?”
Silence.
One guy muted himself. Another adjusted his camera, hoping the motion would cancel out the question.
Then a junior finally spoke.
“Taha… we’re screwed. Half the team’s gone. Leadership has checked out. No one’s talking to us.”
They’d chosen to relocate. But with visas pending and no updates, they felt adrift, caught between decisions and silence.
Normally, I’d have rallied them.
Some peppy version of:
“Everything is fine. Stay focused. Keep shipping.”
Instead, I paused.
Because I remembered something I’d finally learned:
The Elephant doesn’t move when it’s scared.
It freezes.
