Marcus Webb

Hiring more engineers feels like the obvious fix for a slow team. It almost always makes things worse before it makes them better.

Winning a tech market and profiting from it are different goals. The company in second place almost always knows this better than the one in first.

Your best engineers leave because competence has a price, and most companies quietly refuse to pay it. Here's why the incentive structure works against you.

Lower prices, higher margins. It sounds like a contradiction until you understand the structural moves that make it possible.

Salary is a cost. Output is a return. Confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make.

Salary is what you pay. Cost is what you get. Most engineering hiring decisions confuse the two, and the math is rarely close.

Most web applications experience peak traffic for a tiny fraction of each day. The servers running them don't care. Here's the economics of that mismatch.

Some SaaS vendors charge higher per-seat rates as headcount rises. It's not a bug in their pricing model. It's the whole point.

Winning a tech market sounds great until you see the cost structure. The company in second place is often running a much better business.

Market leadership costs more than it pays. The economics of tech competition reward the company just behind the leader more than the leader itself.

The number sounds transformative. The reality is more specific, and more instructive.

Being first is expensive, uncertain, and frequently fatal. The companies that dominate markets are often the ones that watched someone else make all the mistakes.

Picking a mid-tier cloud plan to save money often triggers hidden costs that exceed what the premium option would have charged you. Here's why.

Clever code is a liability dressed up as a virtue. The programmer who writes it is optimizing for the wrong audience.

A small startup doubled its engineering team and watched velocity drop. The math behind why is older than software itself.

A column removal looks like a one-line change. It can take weeks, require multiple deployments, and still bring down production if you get the order wrong.

Raising a big round feels like winning. It often isn't. Here's the mechanism by which excess capital turns into a company's undoing.

The XZ Utils backdoor came within days of compromising most of the world's Linux servers. The real story is how close it came to working.