Conrad’s update touched a nerve, where he talked about infrastructure engineering superpowers that aren’t understood by management.

The first is subtle bug analysis which needs almost monomaniacal focus and creativity to solve - and is quite mysterious to less technical folk.

The second is, of course, major refactorings, which result in no discernable difference in functionality of any of the touched components, but which unlock future stability and velocity opportunities.

I’d argue that this is also true for a class of senior software engineers in real codebases.

As a senior tech leader, it was often extremely hard to convince product and financial leaders that this time was well spent!