I am sending this link to a friend who called me today to discuss this issue. Jim is not his real name, but the problem is very real.
Jim. Remember when we used to walk the streets of Detroit talking about the buildings? You would point up at the Guardian Building and go on about the Aztec tile work. You talked about how Rowland convinced the bankers to let him use color when everyone else was building gray boxes.
What strikes me now is that nobody asked Rowland to run workshops teaching other architects to be less afraid of orange. They let him build. And Detroit got something that still stops people in their tracks a hundred years later.
Look. I have been thinking about our last conversation. There is something I did not say clearly enough.
Sarah is a gift. Stop returning her. You told me about Sarah. She is the engineer who actually gets it. She goes home and builds things with AI. She ships side projects on weekends. She sees what is possible and cannot stop talking about it.
She is rare, Jim. She sees what everyone else will only recognize in hindsight. She is your Rowland.
So naturally, you made her the AI Champion and put her in charge of training everyone else. I understand the logic. She is good at AI, she is enthusiastic, and she explains things clearly. So you thought, who better to bring the rest of the team along?
Here is the problem. You have sentenced your highest potential engineer to full-time enablement duty.
Sarah does not get to refactor that authentication service you have been deferring for three years. She does not get to build the internal tooling that would save fifteen hours a week. Instead, she gets to explain prompt engineering to people still deciding whether they are even interested.
That is not a reward for excellence. That is a punishment wrapped in a promotion.
Think about what you have actually done with this Sisyphus promotion. The engineer who shows up hungry, learns on her own time, and already operates at a level most of your team will not reach for eighteen months. You have handed her a cart full of reluctant learners and told her to push it up the hill. Forever.
Every hour Sarah spends on enablement is an hour she is not compounding her own capabilities. It is an hour she is not demonstrating what AI assisted development actually looks like. It is an hour your organization is not learning what is possible.
Worse. Sarah probably cannot move people who do not want to move. That is not a skills gap. That is a motivation gap. And motivation is not something she can fix with better documentation or another lunch and learn.
You have given her an impossible job and called it leadership development.
Jim, this is your job. The upskilling problem is real. Some percentage of your team is not ready for AI assisted development, and that gap will cause friction. But that is a leadership problem, not an engineering problem.
Sarah cannot restructure teams. Sarah cannot have hard conversations about career trajectories. Sarah cannot decide whether resistance is a training issue or a fit issue. Sarah cannot allocate budget for outside help.
You can.
Free Sarah. Let her solve the hard technical problems you have been deferring. Let her demonstrate what one engineer with AI fluency can actually ship. That demonstration will do more for buy-in than a hundred enablement sessions.
OK. Own the upskilling problem yourself. Bring in external training. Create learning paths with real accountability. Have honest conversations with engineers who are not progressing. That is leadership work. That is your work.
Let champions champion through building. The best way to show your organization what AI can do is to let your best people do it. Visibly. On real problems. That creates pull. That creates curiosity. That creates motivation Sarah cannot manufacture in a conference room.
The upside here is enormous. Jim, look at what you actually have here. You have engineers with AI skills you desperately need. These are engineers you can afford. They already understand your domain, your codebase, and your customers. You did not have to hire them. You did not have to onboard them. You did not have to wait eighteen months for them to learn where the bodies are buried.
They are already on your payroll. They are already bought in. They are ready to build. And you have hard problems languishing on the backlog. You have an organization that needs to see what is possible before they will believe it.
The only thing standing between you and that future is a staffing decision you made with good intentions.
Right. Here is the moral, plain as I can make it. Do not make your high performing engineers train your low performing engineers. That is not their job. That is yours.
Turn Sarah loose on building things with AI. Or risk losing her to a company that will. Sarah wants to build, Jim. Let her. You bring everyone else along. That is what leaders do.
Sincerely, Joe.
By the way, that taco place on Michigan Avenue is still there. The Guardian Building still catches the light the same way. Some things should not change. Your best engineer pushing a cart uphill is not one of them.