Modern organizations are built on a seductive lie: that progress comes from splitting work into thinner and thinner roles, then layering process on top to coordinate everyone. The org chart gets more “mature.” The dashboards get prettier. The meetings multiply.
Yet, the results have been comical—and sometimes disastrous.
Corporate America offers no shortage of examples. Boeing, once a crown jewel of American engineering, can no longer build functional planes after spending decades atomizing responsibilities across hyper-specialized contract manufacturers and internal hoops.
The same collapse is happening at a broader level. Look at academia: they produce 10-100x more papers and patents than past generations and carve the world into hyper-specific concentrations like interracial fat studies—yet the rate of discoveries of real societal significance is rapidly declining.
Some specialization is obviously useful. But the bias in modernity has been extreme: careers defined by ever-narrower job titles, academic paths that train you to be an expert in one tiny sliver of reality, and a soft corporate caste system in which the MBA-trained executives set the goals and everyone else works on their little cog in the machine.
This view of talent is anti-human and anti-historical. The norm for exceptional people in history was to master multiple domains. In the middle of the Gallic campaigns, Julius Caesar wrote a treatise on Latin style and grammar. George Cayley, the little-known inventor of the first human-carrying glider, also invented the caterpillar tractor, was chairman of the Whig Club of York, founded the Yorkshire Philosophical Society (1821), co-founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831), was a member of Parliament, was a leading authority on land drainage, and published papers dealing with optics and railroad safety devices. Look up any great historical figure on Wikipedia and their bio likely lists contributions made in multiple fields.
At Substrate, we believe capable people should be able to step into many kinds of problems, learn quickly, and be judged on whether they deliver. We trust that humans are not helpless creatures of boundaries, but masters of their own destiny. Here, engineers can become designers, systems engineers can create new products, interns can launch new business lines. Substrate believes in unlimited ambition in human capacity; you should believe you can do it all, and do it better than anyone else.
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Product engineers are engineers who can own business outcomes end-to-end. That means they don’t just ship code — they take responsibility for the full user experience and the business result. This starts with a clear understanding of our business metrics and the core intent/job-to-be-done behind every ticket.
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https://x.com/cramer___/status/1999926485092807155?s=46
Most organizations are siloed and myopic about “engineering,” “product,” “growth.” They treat these as distinct skillsets that require different individuals, teams, and processes. In typical tech companies, the E2E process of shipping and marketing a feature/product is split into separate teams. Product scopes the thing, design designs the thing, engineering builds the thing, and growth markets the thing.
We do things differently at Substrate. Our engineers are “full-stack” in the fullest sense. They can reason about our core business levers and hop on live customer calls. They can write React hooks and shard databases for scale. They understand UI/UX best practices and how to write conversion-optimized product copy.
We only hire and train this particular kind of engineer for three reasons:
We hire and develop product engineers who can own outcomes end-to-end.