Why Your Two Best Engineers Hate Each Other
And how to finally end the war
A quick note:
If you prefer a listening experience, you’ll be glad to know that I've invested exclusively in this post to sound as I hear it in my head, and I think you’ll like what you hear. Press Play.
So you’re the boss. You manage a high-performing engineering team. Good for you.
You’ve got two senior engineers. We’ll call them Sarah and Mark.
Sarah is a brilliant architect. She sees the whole system. She sees problems that haven’t even been born yet. Her thinking is deep, strategic. She’s playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
Mark is the other kind of brilliant. He’s a savant, a building-fool. His code... it just works. It feels alive, like it knows what the user wants before they do.
They are, no question, your two best people.
And they hate each other’s guts.
Design reviews aren’t reviews; they’re proxy wars. A pull request isn’t a PR; it’s a passive-aggressive bloodletting.
Sarah says Mark builds tech debt like the stack is ending tomorrow. Mark says Sarah is a pain in the engineering bottleneck.
Neither of them is wrong. Neither of them will budge.
So you do what the management books tell you. The happy crap. One-on-ones, mediation, “perspective sharing.” You try to force them onto a joint project, thinking a shared stake will make ‘em hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t.
The hostility just... mutates. It goes underground. It’s in the Slack threads. It’s in the sarcasm that hangs in the air during a meeting. And it’s in the code. Always in the code.
You sit there, sipping your cold coffee, and you think, Why can’t they just grow up?
Here’s the truth: They are not acting childish. They are acting human.
And you are not managing a project problem.
You are managing an evolutionary one.
A few years back, some evolutionary psychologists—guys who get paid to figure out why we’re all wired the way we are—did a study. They looked at high-trust groups: surgical teams, tribal hunters, elite military units.
You know what they found? Cooperation doesn’t collapse when people disagree. It collapses when the hierarchy is unclear.
Let me say that again, simpler: We do not need everyone to agree. We need to know who is in charge.
The human brain, yours and mine, evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups. In those groups, not knowing who was who... that was dangerous. It meant uncertainty. It meant slow decisions. It meant the group failed.
So we evolved, real fast, to resolve that ambiguity. Posturing. Undermining. Chest-thumping. Conflict disguised as “feedback.”
Sound familiar?
Sarah and Mark are not dysfunctional. They are in a status duel. Their big, beautiful, high-powered brains have been hijacked by something older, something limbic, something territorial.
They aren’t fighting about tabs versus spaces. They are fighting to see who the tribe will follow.
This is where most leaders—and I’m probably talking to you, bucko—screw the pooch.
We panic. We think we have to fix it. We step in like a strip-shirted referee. We whistle and wave our arms. We talk about “team values” and “mutual respect.”
We miss the entire goddamn point.
This is not a code review issue. It is not a communication issue. It is not even a culture issue.
It is a vacuum of purpose.
When there is no clear, emotionally-charged, external Why, people will invent their own. And the simplest, oldest Why is this: Win.
In the absence of a meaningful, shared threat, Sarah and Mark have become each other’s threat. It is not petty. It is adaptive.
And it is your fault.
There’s a story they tell in military psychology circles. Two soldiers in a trench. It’s cold, it’s wet, it stinks. They’re arguing over food. One accuses the other of stealing a protein bar. It gets hot. Shoving. Threats. It’s about to be a fistfight.
Then the sky rips open.
A mortar lands near the camp.
In one-tenth of a second, the argument is gone. It doesn’t exist. They are no longer two guys fighting over a candy bar. They are a unit.
The Why changes. The Why is no longer “win the bar.” The Why is “survive the night.”
The fight doesn’t get resolved. It’s rendered irrelevant by context.
Most engineering conflict is just contextual starvation. Your best people will always generate tension. They’re fissionable material. But that energy, left aimless, just becomes a meltdown. The leader’s job is not to suppress that energy. It’s to aim it.
You don’t need better mediation skills. You need to give the team a Why that makes the feud small.
When I first started at Walmart, I had a mentor, an SVP on the business side. He was giving me the tour of a Supercenter, and we were out back by the loading docks. He pointed to a single shipping container sitting by the fence.
“See that?” he said. “That’s our fail-safe. Emergency supplies, just in case. Three years ago, you would have been standin’ in a sea of ‘em. We averaged forty-five, right here. Forty-five containers, just... spillin’ over, for this one store.”
“How’d you get it down to one?” I asked.
He gave a little chuckle, like that was the real question. “We finally gave the engineers a reason to stop fighting us.”
He told me he’d had this team. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
“They’d been buildin’ these backroom inventory tools for months,” he said. “Lord, they were pretty. Fast, clean code... and useless. Because nobody told ‘em the real metric. They figured they were buildin’ inventory tools. They were just movin’ pieces around while the problem stayed the same.”
“So,” he said, “I pulled ‘em all into a room. No slides, no charts. I just told ‘em the God’s honest truth.
I said, ‘Y’all listen up. If a customer walks into one of our stores three times—just three—and he can’t find that one thing he’s lookin’ for, I reckon there’s a seventy percent chance he ain’t ever comin’ back. Not just to this store. To any of ‘em. For good.’”
He looked back at that single container. “You could’ve heard a pin drop. All of a sudden, they weren’t workin’ on ‘inventory tools.’ They were workin’ on customer salvation. They weren’t fightin’ about code. They were fightin’ to keep this company from bleedin’ to death, one tube of toothpaste at a time.”
“Those containers?” he said with a little smile. “Hell, they fixed themselves. They were just a symptom. The disease was a broken ‘Why.’”
Leaders who get this... they don’t referee the fight. They change the arena.
So, what’s it going to be?
Are you going to keep trying to separate the fighters?
Or are you going to finally give them something real to fight for?
Follow me on LinkedIn for daily insights shared with 80,000+ incredible minds.
If you’re looking to grow your career, here are five ways I can help you:
The Resume Ghostbuster: Join 5,000+ people who’ve transformed their resumes into recruiter magnets. Use the robust AI script to transform your resume into the template of your choice. Includes LinkedIn profile update and job search strategies.
The Top Engineer Method: Join 1,000+ engineers worldwide and master the skills AI can’t touch. Learn to showcase your work, build influence, and navigate politics to keep your career in your control.
The Top Tech Leader Method: Join 500+ engineering leaders across the globe inside The Top Tech Leader Method. Learn the People Intelligence skills I used to lead high-performing teams, influence executives, and grow into an engineering executive at startups and top-tier tech companies.
Personalized 1:1 Coaching: Work with me directly to debug your inner system, reset your operating state, and break the cycle of high-functioning burnout. This is where we do the deep work.
Visit Taha’s Method: For more courses, tools, and practical guides.
This is absolutely brilliant! The mortar landing story perfectly illustrates how external threat eliminates internal conflict.