BLOG POST

Engineers or Developers?

December 29, 2025

The mindset gap that decides whether your project scales—or quietly collapses in production

TL;DR:
Most teams say they want “engineers,” but many reward “developers.” Not as titles—as mindsets. Developer-mode optimizes for throughput. Engineer-mode optimizes for long-term product integrity. You need both, but you must be honest about what your system actually incentivizes.

Here’s a question that keeps leaders awake at night (usually right after the third “why is this still broken?” incident of the quarter):

Are you building a team of developers… or engineers?

Before this gets dismissed as semantic hair-splitting: this difference has shaped the fate of high‑stakes projects, entire industries, and the long-term health of products people depend on.

And spoiler: it has almost nothing to do with degrees.

First, let’s delete the credentials myth

Some of the best technologists on Earth are self‑taught. Some are PhDs. Most are somewhere in the middle.

Degrees matter in certain regulated, safety-critical domains (medical devices, aviation, infrastructure). But for most product teams, the dividing line isn’t academic.

It’s this:

Developers optimize for outputs. Engineers optimize for outcomes.

Hold onto that. It’s the whole post.

Developer-mode: ship the task

Developer-mode is fundamentally task-oriented.

There’s a ticket.
It has acceptance criteria.
It gets done.
Next ticket.

This isn’t an insult—it’s a vital capability. Developer-mode thrives when:

requirements are reasonably clear,
the priority is momentum,
execution needs to be steady and measurable.

It also fits neatly into dashboards and status reports (because outputs are easy to count).

The failure mode: developer-mode can keep moving forever in a never‑ending backlog… without ever asking whether the team is moving toward the right destination.

You can ship constantly and still:

build the wrong thing, or
build the right thing on a foundation that won’t hold.

Engineer-mode: interrogate reality

Engineer-mode starts with a different instinct:

“Does this make sense?”

Engineers question requirements. They challenge assumptions. They care about what the system becomes after this change—not just whether the ticket can be closed by Friday.

Where a developer sees a ticket, an engineer sees:

a system,
with dependencies,
with trade-offs,
with long-term consequences.

Engineer-mode asks questions that feel inconvenient now and priceless later:

Are we solving the real problem—or the loudest symptom?
Why did this happen again?
Is this solution getting simpler… or just getting bigger?
What technical debt are we creating, and what will it cost later?

Reality eventually audits everyone.

Why many managers prefer developer-mode (and why this is dangerous)

This is the uncomfortable part:

Many organizations are structured to reward developer-mode, because it produces clean, reportable metrics:

tickets closed
features shipped
story points burned
“we’re on track”

That’s managerial comfort food. It calms stakeholders. It fits in slides.

Engineer-mode produces a different kind of sentence—often true, often necessary, and often terrifying:

“We found something fundamentally wrong. We should stop and fix it properly.”

That sentence doesn’t fit nicely in a weekly status update.
It threatens timelines. It forces trade-offs into the open. It makes uncertainty visible.

But it’s also the sentence that prevents expensive disasters.

Three real-world lenses

These aren’t “gotchas.” They’re patterns—how incentives shape behavior at scale.

1) When “done” doesn’t mean “works” (Healthcare.gov)

Healthcare.gov’s early rollout is widely referenced as a case where many teams delivered components and milestones—yet the full system struggled under real-world demand.

The lesson isn’t “people couldn’t code.”
It’s this:

When teams are rewarded for completing tasks in silos, the system can look complete on paper… while failing as a whole.

2) The power to stop the line (Toyota)

Toyota institutionalized an engineering principle many software organizations only pretend to have:

If something is wrong, anyone can stop the line.

The culture doesn’t celebrate motion. It celebrates prevention:

find defects early,
fix root causes,
avoid repeating the same problems.

That’s engineering thinking turned into organizational muscle.

3) Build the foundation once (Estonia)

Estonia’s digital government story is often cited because it didn’t start with “digitize every form.”

It focused on architecture: building a secure, interoperable foundation so services could be built reliably on top of it for years.

That’s an engineer question:

“What foundation makes the next 1,000 features possible?”

Callout: The real difference (Outputs vs Outcomes)

Here’s the simplest diagnostic.

Outputs (developer-optimized): tickets closed, features shipped, story points burned, bugs patched.
Outcomes (engineer-optimized): repeat incidents eliminated, complexity reduced, customer pain removed, system resilience improved.

Outputs feel like progress. Outcomes are progress—but they’re harder to count.

So… which one do you need right now?

The answer is not “engineers good, developers bad.” That’s lazy thinking.

You need both. The real question is:

What does your organization reward?

A practical rule of thumb:

Early stage / clear scope / fast iteration → developer-mode can win.
Growing complexity / recurring incidents / scaling users → engineer-mode becomes existential.

The best teams don’t hire one type forever. They develop people who can switch hats:

ship when speed is essential,
slow down when integrity is essential,
and explain the trade-off in plain language.

Callout: How leaders get more engineer-thinking (without losing speed)

If you want engineer-mode behavior, reward outcome behavior. Explicitly.

Celebrate the fix that prevents the next five incidents—not just the patch that closes today’s ticket.

Track repeat problems and reduce them (“why did this happen again?”).

Make simplification visible work (removing complexity is progress).

Protect time for system health the same way you protect feature delivery.

Create safety for someone to say “this requirement doesn’t make sense” without being branded “difficult.”

Final thought

If your backlog is shrinking but your product is becoming:

harder to change,
harder to test,
and easier to break…

you don’t have a productivity problem.

You have an incentives problem.

Developers keep the machine moving.
Engineers keep the machine from becoming a fragile, overcomplicated contraption held together by hope.

So—what does your team reward today: outputs, or outcomes?

TIC Insights | Perspectives for senior leaders navigating technology, innovation, and change.