There’s a moment every engineering leader recognizes. A roadmap slips. A system touches unfamiliar territory. A new requirement surfaces that feels  risky. Someone says: “We might need to hire for this.” That instinct isn’t wrong. But it’s often premature . Before you look outside your organization, there’s a more important question to answer: Do you actually know what your team can do? Not titles. Not resumes. Not what people were hired as . What they’ve actually done — in r

Most engineering organizations claim to be data-driven. They monitor uptime, trace requests, track deployments, measure throughput. But when it comes to the most important system in the company — the people building the software — they rely on labels. “React developer.” “Backend engineer.” “Senior.” These labels feel familiar. They’re easy to store, easy to filter, easy to explain. They’re also dangerously incomplete. Labels Describe the Past. Infrastructure Enables the Futur

— Not Because of Capability, but Because Matching Is Broken I spent three years managing distributed engineering teams across Ecuador, coordinating developers for U.S. and European clients. The engineers I worked with were solving hard problems: building scalable APIs, architecting microservices, debugging production incidents at 2 a.m. The work was world-class. So why are engineers from LATAM still underrepresented on U.S. engineering teams? Not because they can’t do the job