Quote: manage with goals
A senior‑engineer quote that trended on March 20: “The best devs don’t need managing. They need a goal,” underscoring the case for goal‑driven autonomy and self‑enforcing standards — the post drew engagement and sparked replies (x.com).
The post came from Dawid Makowski, who lists himself as a CTO offering “CTO-as-a-Service” with 25 years of coding experience and 18 years of hands‑on leadership on his Substack profile. (makowskid.substack.com). Makowski maintains an active GitHub account with 46 public repositories, including a recent plan‑driven‑dev project that enforces a Research → Plan → Annotate → Implement workflow for disciplined development. ( ). His personal blog and newsletter have repeatedly pushed the same theme of goal‑driven, process‑first engineering, including a 2025 post “Vibe Coding Is Fun—But Vibe Refactoring Pays the Bills” that was submitted to Hacker News and drew measurable discussion on the site. ( ). A November 7, 2024 Substack entry titled “Elevate — The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI‑assisted coding” and multiple 2026 posts show Makowski framing autonomy around explicit plans and automated guardrails rather than day‑to‑day supervision. ( ). Makowski’s public bio lists current products he’s building—SharpAPI and Careera.AI—projects that reflect the same emphasis on tooling and hiring automation that surfaced in the exchange. (dawidmakowski.com).
