The Engineer Still Has to Take It

Someone else could have fixed it faster.

That was probably true.

At Toptal, with 300+ engineers, team boundaries were a fact of life. When I later joined Clearbit, I landed on the Platform team. One day I found a bug in a backend service owned by another team, written in Go, in a part of the system I did not understand.

I organized my thoughts and asked the CTO how to hand it over to the right team. Instead, he gave me context, pointed me at the right places, and made it clear I was allowed to keep pulling the thread.

It took time. Local setup fought me. I needed a few quick calls with engineers who had been there longer. Someone else could probably have fixed it in half the time.

But after that, the company had one more person who understood the system.

Soon I could sit in conversations about incidents, architecture, and improvements with actual context, not just opinions.

That is a type of autonomy I value a lot, and I do not think it gets named often enough. Not just “you own this task,” but “you are allowed to build the context required to become useful beyond this task.”

It means people can read code they do not own, ask questions outside their lane, experiment, propose changes, and occasionally spend longer than the local optimum would suggest.

I see the same value at CrewAI today. People are trusted to investigate, cross boundaries, come up with things, and own context. That freedom is not decorative.

But permission is only half of it.

Other engineers were given the same opportunity in places I have worked. Most did not use it. That is not a criticism. People have different incentives, energy, timing, and tolerance for ambiguity. But it matters.

A lot of innovation starts as someone being mildly bothered by something they do not yet understand, then choosing to keep investigating after the obvious task boundary has ended.

LLMs make the shortcut easier now. You can often finish the task while the model holds most of the map.

That is useful. But the company only gets a stronger engineer when someone chooses to go into the weeds, understand the system, and keep the context.

The workplace can make room for that.

The engineer still has to take it.