Fix the Ladder

Description

Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for Fix the Ladder: Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI https://leanpub.com/fixtheladder by Giordano Scalzo! 0:00 Giordano introduces himself and the core premise of Fix the Ladder 0:52 How AI has disrupted the traditional way junior engineers are grown 1:38 Career growth as an accidental byproduct of slow, manual coding work 2:27 AI removing friction from learning and the need to reintroduce it deliberately 3:17 Analogy to investment banking: how line-by-line work builds deep understanding 4:11 How hybrid and remote work compounds the loss of accidental mentoring moments 4:56 The 'pause and stare' problem: juniors unable to explain code they didn't write 5:46 Advice for junior engineers: ask questions and use AI as a spark, not an answer 6:33 Senior engineers should reinvest AI productivity gains into mentoring juniors 7:23 The business case for hiring juniors: they are AI-native blank slates who can leapfrog seniors About the Book The complete illustrated edition is now available. Includes all 15 chapters, three appendices, and the full facilitator's pack. The pull request looks excellent. Ask the engineer why the code works, and the room goes quiet. AI has made it easier to produce good-looking software before you understand the decisions inside it. Meanwhile, the same productivity gains make cutting junior hiring look sensible. Engineering leaders have two problems to solve: how people learn, and whether they get a chance to start. Fix the Ladder is for engineering managers and CTOs who want AI's productivity benefits and a team that can take responsibility for what it ships. Giordano Scalzo draws on three decades in software and a mentoring course refined over several rounds with working engineers. He shares the exercises that helped, the sessions that went wrong, and the questions he is still working through. The method gives engineers regular practice in thinking before prompting, recognising complexity, explaining generated code, testing its failure modes, and deciding what to accept or change. It applies to anyone reviewing code they did not write, including experienced engineers learning to work with AI. You will find: A six-session course you can adapt to your team's real code, with AI-off and AI-only exercises. An exercise catalog organised around the difficulties you see in reviews, with concrete actions and links between related exercises. A facilitator's pack with session plans, prompts, decision logs, and reusable templates. A business case for junior hiring and protected mentoring time, with evidence, sources, and the limits of each claim. A letter to share with your engineers, plus 39 explanatory diagrams and 15 sketch-style chapter illustrations. The aim is to use AI deliberately while giving engineers room to develop judgement. That takes a leader willing to protect learning time, fund entry-level opportunities, and measure more than this week's output. What are you doing this week to grow the people your team will depend on in ten years? About the Author Giordano Scalzo is a London-based AI engineering lead, author, and speaker with decades of experience building software and growing teams. His work spans mobile products used by millions, consumer apps, and hands-on experiments with coding agents. He focuses on practical AI adoption: helping teams define useful work for agents, check the results, and develop the engineering judgement to own what they ship. He is especially interested in mentoring and how engineers keep learning as AI changes their work. He has written six books on Swift, SwiftUI, and software development, and has spoken at NSLondon and Londroid. His current book, Fix the Ladder: Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI, explores how engineering managers and CTOs can adopt AI while growing the next generation of engineers. Find his writing, projects, and talk recordings at https://gioscalzo.com/ Follow the author here! https://x.com/giordanoscalzo Thank you for watching, please like and leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you! Please Subscribe and Follow! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub X: https://x.com/leanpub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leanpub Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leanpub Create Your Own Leanpub Book! You can create your own book anytime here: https://leanpub.com/create/book Here's the tutorial showing how to write and publish a Leanpub book in your browser (it's free!): https://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2932527-getting-started-writing-a-book-in-leanpub-s-web-browser-writing-mode If you're a Leanpub author and you'd like to submit your own Launch video for us to publish, or if you'd like to record a Launch video with Len, please go here: https://leanpub.com/launch. #books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #leanpub #writing #engineeringmanagement #hiring #leadership #ai #hiringdevelopers #juniorengineers #AImentoring #engineeringladder #softwareteams #codingagents