Uncertainty in 2025 requires proactive leadership

2024 gave us something close to stability, or at least, less turbulence than we saw the year before. But don’t expect that to last. Tech is headed into another period of volatility. Economies are still balancing post-pandemic shifts, AI is moving faster than most companies can manage, and global political environments remain unstable. The future doesn’t guarantee clarity. That’s not necessarily a problem, it’s a signal.

Engineering leaders need to be disciplined about what to focus on. Don’t get lost in noise. Prioritize ruthlessly. Anything not tied directly to customer value or long-term product viability should be questioned. Automate what you can, especially repetitive operational tasks, and redirect your efforts toward high-leverage, creative work. That’s where you move the needle.

KellyAnn Fitzpatrick from RedMonk called this the “era of uncertainty.” She’s right. The default state for tech going forward is not calm. It’s rapid shifts, unpredictable market conditions, and constant pressure to adapt. Pretending otherwise is naive. Accept it. Build for it. Resilience isn’t about standing still, it’s about staying flexible while staying focused.

Shifting hiring landscape demands quality over quantity

The hiring environment in tech is changing, again. The days of mass hiring just to hit headcount goals are done. There’s a lot of noise, ghost jobs, performance improvement plans used aggressively, organizations tinkering with flatter team structures. Signs point to fewer jobs, higher expectations, and more scrutiny per hire. Engineering leaders need to change their approach.

Stop thinking scale-first. Instead, optimize for precision. Companies making smarter hiring bets, prioritizing engineers who can think across disciplines and execute with speed, are going to win. Especially when hybrid work divides opinion at every level. Some CEOs push for full return-to-office. Employees resist. Meanwhile, the data tells a different story. According to Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom, remote work will remain flat overall, but internal battles over hybrid policies will continue. Don’t ignore it, manage it deliberately, with awareness of team dynamics.

At its core, 2025 hiring will reward clarity. Clear expectations. Clear skill profiles. Clear performance metrics. The ambiguity that dominated job markets in 2023 and 2024 isn’t going away, but clarity is how you counter it. Forget looking busy. Focus on results. Talent that can perform well in that environment is worth keeping.

Generative AI is evolving from hype to integrated tool

The hype around generative AI started losing steam in 2024. People questioned whether we were heading into another tech dead end, similar to blockchain or the metaverse. But this time, something different happened. Spending didn’t drop. It exploded. According to Menlo Ventures, enterprise investment in generative AI jumped 500% in 2024, hitting $13.8 billion. That’s not hype, that’s operational integration.

This shift means AI is no longer treated as a product feature or side project. It’s becoming part of the infrastructure. Software engineering stacks are beginning to align around AI-supported workflows. Gary Stevens, Engineering Director at Trainline, made it clear: AI isn’t just showing up in tools like GitHub Copilot. It’s pushing deeper, into quality assurance, incident resolution, and debugging. These are systems-level upgrades.

The next phase is Agentic AI, autonomous systems that perform tasks across workflows without repeat prompts. Still early, but it’s gaining traction. Jesal Gadhia, Head of Engineering at Thoughtful AI, expects 2025 to introduce “memory-aware agents”, tools that remember, learn from, and adapt to every user interaction. The underlying architecture matters here. It’s not about just storing data. Teams are moving beyond vector databases into systems that model learning over time, what Gadhia refers to as “temporal knowledge graphs.”

If you’re running an engineering organization, this isn’t optional learning. Make these tools work at the team level now. Doing so forces clarity on your stack, accelerates delivery, and sharpens your ability to scale intelligently. Ignore it, and you’ll lose speed. And speed matters.

Advanced AI capabilities demand new skills and leadership approaches

AI isn’t removing complexity, it’s shifting it. The way we build software is changing. Fast. Leaders need to stop waiting for AI to “mature” into some final state. It’s already here, and it’s producing results. What teams need now are new skills: orchestration, integration, and sharper decision-making. Less focus on just writing code, more emphasis on why you’re building what you’re building, and how it fits into the larger system.

Maxime Najim, Distinguished Engineer at Target, captured it accurately. AI will free up developers to focus on bigger, creative problems. But it also demands more from them, technically and collaboratively. High-performers in 2025 will be those who can work fluidly across functions, communicate clearly, and guide teams through uncertainty without derailing progress.

Technical excellence alone won’t cut it. Adaptability and leadership are what move organizations forward. Engineers with Staff+ responsibilities need to be clearer than ever about the business context behind their technical decisions. They also need to model how to navigate AI’s limitations while making the most of its strengths.

If you’re leading teams now, invest in communication. Build cross-functional fluency. Encourage people to challenge old processes that no longer serve your goals. The future of engineering involves more thinking and less repetition. That’s a net gain if you know how to lead through it.

Emerging technologies like rust, SQLite, and WASM will reshape development

Some technologies have been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2025, they’ll start breaking through. Rust, SQLite, and WebAssembly (WASM) are no longer niche tools. They’re becoming serious platforms for teams that care about performance, safety, and flexibility.

Rust is defining a new standard for memory-safe programming. It’s not just about performance, it’s about reducing security risks by eliminating entire classes of bugs. According to Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst at Forrester, Rust is expected to break into the top 10 of the TIOBE Index, while legacy languages like C and C++ lose ground. That tells us the industry is beginning to factor engineering risk into language choice. Companies are starting to recognize that languages aren’t interchangeable, they carry consequences.

SQLite is also changing the conversation. Simpler doesn’t mean limited. Developers like Kent Dodds and Stephen Margheim have publicly stated that SQLite is increasingly ready for production use, especially as scale becomes less about raw traffic and more about smart data handling. The database space is moving toward flexibility. Leaders should re-evaluate whether traditional stacks serve their teams, or whether lighter options reduce overhead without compromising reliability.

Meanwhile, WebAssembly is on the edge of becoming standard for running complex applications in-browser. Ken Mugrage, Principal Technologist at Thoughtworks, noted that client interest in WASM is rising. The benefits are clear, performance, portability, and the ability to build secure, near-native software that runs in isolated environments. Organizations under pressure to do more with fewer layers of complexity are paying attention.

If you’re leading technical strategy, you don’t need to bet on all of these, but you do need to track them. Choices made today will determine cost, resilience, and maintainability over the next five to ten years.

A growing generational disconnect is influencing engineering culture

There’s a generational shift underway in engineering teams. It’s not superficial, it’s structural. Gen Z is coming in with different assumptions, different methods, and a different pace. They don’t hesitate to use frameworks and tools that abstract complexity. They expect rapid onboarding and work that delivers immediate impact.

Gergely Orosz, writing in his Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, pointed out that picking up new tools “on the go” is second nature to Gen Z. That flexibility is a strength, but it also creates friction with teams built around long-standing practices and deep systems knowledge. Veteran engineers may see this as undisciplined or over-reliant on tooling. But it’s a shift in how developers learn, communicate, and build. That shift isn’t going away.

You can’t manage this with doctrine. Force-fitting one generation’s preferences onto another doesn’t scale. Developer Rakhim voiced this tension clearly, he sees a widening gap between how he views programming and how younger engineers engage with it. This disconnect can disrupt collaboration and affect team productivity if left unaddressed.

Leadership needs to manage this actively. Build team environments where differing perspectives are valued, not dismissed. Create spaces where foundational knowledge can be shared without condescension, and where speed doesn’t come at the cost of quality. The best teams will integrate both depth and agility, experience and experimentation.

Executives who recognize this shift, without resisting it, will unlock the full potential of their engineering organizations. Dismissing it only creates friction. Leading through it builds alignment.

Measuring developer productivity remains a complex debate

Productivity remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in engineering. Most organizations want clear, quantifiable output. But when it comes to software development, applying broad, universal metrics doesn’t work. At best, these measures give a partial picture. At worst, they drive the wrong behavior entirely.

The industry has tried to standardize productivity frameworks, DX Core 4 is one example. But even its proponents are facing criticism. Krishna Kumar, advisor and CTO, called out the effort, asking why we keep chasing metrics that ignore business context. He’s right. Context matters, industry, maturity, culture, team composition. What works for one engineering team may signal dysfunction in another.

Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck echoed this in their response to McKinsey’s failed attempt to define productivity for developers. They warned: if engineering leaders don’t control this conversation internally, someone else, an outside consultant or the CFO, will bring in their own framework. That often leads to misalignment between business goals and engineering priorities.

If you’re managing engineering performance, don’t rely on cookie-cutter metrics. Build a measurement system that reflects your strategy, your values, and your level of technical ambition. Think in terms of team experience, delivery velocity, incident recovery time, and stakeholder trust. These indicators carry more meaning than output counts or commit frequency.

The goal isn’t to track everything. It’s to track what matters, and to communicate it clearly. You can’t optimize what you can’t meaningfully measure, but what you choose to measure sets the behavior across your organization.

Rethinking meetings and workflow for distributed teams

Distributed work is no longer a temporary workaround. It’s a permanent shift. As organizations adapt to teams that are rarely in the same room, meetings and workflows have to evolve. The typical 30–60 minute, update-heavy meeting is becoming obsolete. It wastes talent. It doesn’t scale for globally distributed teams.

There’s momentum now to redesign how time is spent. Prithwiraj Choudhury, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, put it this way: companies should invest in focused in-person planning and let execution happen remotely, asynchronously. That model delivers clarity without daily interruption. It respects deep work, and allows teams to move fast without added friction.

Annie Dean, Global Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, sees AI accelerating that shift. Her view is that AI-powered collaboration will reshape what meetings are for, shifting from status updates to high-impact problem-solving and creative alignment. Meeting frequency might increase, but the format and purpose will improve. Less surface talk. More strategic interaction.

For executive leadership, this isn’t just about optimizing calendars, it’s about engineering culture. By redesigning workflows and eliminating unnecessary meetings, you give teams autonomy and focus. You create space for better thinking, faster decision-making, and improved morale.

The teams that do this well will operate with more precision and less friction. The technology is ready, and the demand from engineers is clear. Now it’s a leadership move.

Social media shifts are influencing professional and industry conversations

The way engineers and tech leaders engage online is changing. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, the platform’s direction and moderation policies have triggered a reaction across the tech community. Competitors like Threads, Mastodon, and especially Bluesky are gaining ground. These platforms aren’t just alternatives, they’re becoming new centers for professional conversation, particularly among open-source and engineering circles.

Bluesky is seeing a noticeable shift in adoption. It provides a cleaner peer-to-peer engagement model with fewer distractions. Brian Merchant, writing in his Substack newsletter Blood in the Machine, noted that Bluesky’s value lies in its promise not to manipulate or commodify users through aggressive feeds or algorithmic interference. That’s resonating with developers who want more signal, less noise.

The debate has been visible in real time. In November, there was a noticeable push to migrate CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) projects off X to Bluesky. That move received both enthusiasm and resistance, reflecting a wider split on how, and where, industry discussion should happen. With regulatory pressure mounting in the U.S., including the proposed TikTok ban, these dynamics aren’t just technical, they’re political and cultural.

Executives should monitor this shift closely. The communication channels your engineers use shape how they learn, build networks, and promote thought leadership. Platform fragmentation creates visibility risks, but it also offers new opportunities for authentic engagement if approached intentionally. Don’t ignore where your talent is moving. Follow it, understand it, and align your communication and brand strategy accordingly.

DEI initiatives face challenges amid political and legal shifts

The climate around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is shifting, quickly and not in a helpful direction. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of affirmative action in June 2024, many DEI programs in the corporate world are being legally challenged. If your organization has been leading DEI from a values-based position, this pressure will test your ability to sustain progress under scrutiny.

Engineering, already underrepresented in many diversity categories, is positioned to feel the regression more acutely. The impact isn’t only legal, it’s reputational and operational. Once DEI becomes politically charged, it risks being deprioritized, which weakens collaboration, reduces innovation capacity, and increases retention risks. That’s a business problem, not just a social one.

That said, strong leaders can still make progress. Audit your current initiatives and cut what doesn’t work. Invest deeper in what does. Tie DEI efforts to measurable business outcomes, like team performance, engagement metrics, and innovation output. Focus on proving the cost of exclusion and the value of inclusion in real terms. That’s the language executives and stakeholders respond to.

You might also need to reframe. If traditional DEI branding creates unnecessary targeting, reposition the work around talent strategy or culture development. The point is impact, not terminology. What matters now is staying committed to equitable systems while adapting to the external environment with clarity.

This isn’t a time to pause. It’s a time to lead, quietly if needed, but with full accountability. Staying on the sidelines in 2025 means losing ground, not just in social cohesion, but in organizational performance.

Concluding thoughts

2025 isn’t about small adjustments. It’s about understanding where the momentum is going, and moving early. Engineering teams are already adapting to AI integration, navigating tighter hiring strategies, and rethinking foundational workflows. The leaders who succeed won’t be reacting. They’ll be building ahead of curve.

This means choosing tools that scale without noise. Building teams that can operate without constant oversight. Letting go of outdated assumptions around productivity, meetings, and structure. It also means facing cultural shifts directly, whether it’s generational expectations, the changing role of DEI, or the platforms your teams engage with when nobody’s watching.

Ignore these changes and your teams slow down. Respond strategically and you gain speed, alignment, and resilience.

What matters now is clarity. Know what your teams need. Know what they’re telling you. And lead with discipline. The companies that move deliberately through uncertainty are the ones that win over time.

Alexander Procter

July 10, 2025

13 Min