A client called me in because their production servers kept crashing. Every few days, seemingly at random, their EC2 instances would just die. When I asked to see their logs to understand what was happening, they had to SSH into individual servers and grep through files. That’s when I knew we had a bigger problem than just crashes. Their servers were running out of disk space. Not from user data or database growth, but from their own application logs. Every time their application did anything, it wrote to local disk.

New data from LeadDev shows 38% of engineering leaders report less motivated teams than a year ago. Only 21% describe their teams as healthy. 12% say they’re emotionally drained daily.

If you’re a founder or engineering leader reading those numbers and thinking “my team seems fine,” you might be six months behind reality.

I’m seeing this across my network right now. Good engineers going quiet in standups. High performers suddenly interviewing elsewhere. Teams that used to ship fast now dragging on simple tasks.

When I told our CEO I wanted our best blockchain engineers to work part-time for Ethereum Foundation and Solana, he didn’t blink. Constantine trusted me. But I understood why it sounded mad.

We were scaling Blockdaemon from 10 to 187 engineers. We’d just closed a funding round. Everyone knows you’re supposed to lock down your best people during hypergrowth, not let them moonlight with the competition.

But here’s what I’d learned: certain engineers need challenging work more than they need loyalty speeches. If Blockdaemon couldn’t provide that challenge every single day, they’d leave anyway. Better to let them scratch that itch with Ethereum Foundation while bringing back knowledge that would benefit us for years.