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Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.
With over 17 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering leader with over 15 years of industry experience. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Email: developertea@gmail.com
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Three Default Thinking Modes That Can Screw Up Your Planning and Vision
Your brain is constantly trying to simplify the world. It takes a snapshot of what it sees, builds a picture that makes sense, and then works from that picture. Most of the time this works well enough. But when we plan projects, set goals,
Signs You May Have a Regressive Mindset
Keeping up has always been part of the job for software engineers, and with AI it's harder than ever. In this episode, I talk about two signals that you, your coworkers, or the people you manage might have a regressive mindset, which shows
How History Can Inform a Dynamic Understanding of Technological Revolutions Mirroring this Moment In Software Engineering
You're tired of hearing that you need to pick up AI, so today I'm not going to add to that pile. Instead, we'll look back at two moments in history that look a lot like this one: the arrival of Fortran in the 1950s, and the spread of autopi
Fundamentals Will Help You Survive the Constant Acceleration of Software Engineering
Fundamentals get talked about constantly, but rarely defined. In this episode I dig into what a fundamental actually is — the building blocks, heuristics, and core characteristics that don't change — and why they matter more than ever in a
You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control
In 1967, a study on shock avoidance gave us "learned helplessness," and for nearly fifty years that was the prevailing explanation for why people give up. Then the original authors published a follow-up with brain scan data showing they had
Why Reducing Complexity Is A Sign of Seniority
As you grow as an engineer, something counterintuitive happens: the systems you build get simpler, not more complex. In this episode, I explore why senior engineers tend to collapse abstractions, accept certain risks, and reduce the surface
A Pragmatic Definition for Accountability
Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our industry. Many of us have a visceral, nega
Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler
There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do it constantly — usually without noticing,
Your Single Most Important Tool for Managing the Uneven Downsides of Risk
The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventually will. In this episode, I work through why our careers and lives are governed more by avoiding ca
Why Can't You Go Faster With AI? Focus on the Friction to Find Out
If you are a manager, a lead engineer, or anyone growing into more responsibility, this throwback episode is built for you. We keep hearing the same question, now louder than ever: "Why can't this go faster?" AI and agentic coding have made
Software Engineering Principles That Still Hold Up in an Agentic World - Old Lessons Made New
The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (limiting work in progress, the theory of constraints, test-driven development) are coming roaring bac
Principles Oriented Thinking as a Durable Skill in an AI First World
The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripping away the labels
What the Science Actually Says About Effective Feedback
A lot of what we've been talking about lately is durable skills — the abilities that last regardless of how our tools and tech environment change. In today's episode, I want to step back from the AI conversation and focus on one of the most
Rebuilding Your Mental Models In the Midst Of an AI Tech Revolution
Right now, the questions we have about our careers feel existential. We keep coming back to the same theme: how do you prepare for an industry that's changing this fast, and what mindset actually works in this new reality? One skill keeps s
Practice Isn't Enough for Senior Engineers - Adaptation Is a Key Skill in an AI-First Industry
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry.
Senior Skills to Maintain Employment Through the AI Wave
If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In
You're Wrong All the Time, But All You Need Are Better Explanations
What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slo
AI-Proofing Your Skillset - High-Meaning, High-Specifity Vocabulary is the Path to Growth
• Why I'm Not "Picking a Fight" on AI: A listener asked if I'm intentionally stoking a flame war by treating agentic coding as a foregone conclusion. The honest answer is that I've used it, the data points one direction, and a show built ar
Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill
• The Coding-Is-My-Value Trap: For years, we've treated the ability to write code as the flagship skill of software engineering. It's concrete, it's teachable, it's the thing big box stores sell kits for. But conflating "what I enjoy about
Chaos Doesn't Have to Win - Maintaining Order in the Midst of AI Change
If you're an engineering leader right now, everything around you feels like it's changing at once — new tools, new processes, new expectations. It's tempting to accept chaos as the new normal, but in today's episode, I make the case that yo
Mourning the Loss of Coding, Senior Tooling Mindset, and Shaping Your Environment
Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it or not. In today's episode, I explore two principles that senior engineers consistently apply to th
Useful Illusions and Exploiting Heuristics
• When Good Thinking Becomes Overthinking: Discover why the pursuit of perfect analysis often undermines good decision-making. Loading every caveat, every exception, and every alternative into your working memory doesn't produce better outc
Decision Making is Your New Core Skill, So it's Critical to Avoid These Two Traps of Collaborative Decision-Making
• The Bottleneck Is Moving: Borrowing from traditional manufacturing theory, the coding step used to define your team's total throughput. AI tooling hasn't incrementally improved that bottleneck — it has drastically shrunk it, which means t
What's Brewing, Edition 1 - What Jonathan is Learning, Using, and Thinking
• The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, and Daniel Kahneman's Noise, I've been experimenting with printed, physical checklists for repetitive tasks — from producing this show to runn
From Software Engineer to Agent Manager - How Work is Changing in A New Software Development Paradigm
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry.
AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?
AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how y
Listener Question - Abdul Asks About How to Balance Career Strategy Between Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions
Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work. We are diving into a fantastic listener question from Abdu
AI-Era Employability and Job Security for Software Engineers - Mental Models for Finding a Competitive Advantage Without Selling Out
I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators. In this episode, I don't offer fa
Why Getting Paid Stole Your Drive and How to Get Into the Flow Again (Career Growth Accelerator)
Do you remember the early days of your career? You likely spent hours coding late into the night, fueled not by a paycheck, but by the sheer joy of building. But somewhere along the way, that intrinsic fire faded, replaced by the extrinsic
The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth (Career Growth Accelerator)
🎧 Episode Notes: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a mornin
