I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier Artwork

StaffEng

Conversations with software engineers who have progressed beyond the career level, into Staff levels and beyond. We discuss the areas of work that set Staff-plus level engineers apart from other individual contributors; things like setting technical direction, mentorship and sponsorship, providing engineering perspective to the org, etc.Hosted by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).

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StaffEng

I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier

March 10, 2026 • David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles) • Season 2 • Episode 1

0:00 | 47:03

Will Maier leads growth engineering at Stripe, where he's spent the last five years working across nearly every surface of the product. His background isn't CS — it's the history of science — and he's been through enough industry shifts (racking servers, the cloud transition, DevOps) to know when something really big is happening.

Find us now also on YouTube: @StaffEngPodcoast

In this season premiere of StaffEng, Will joins Alex and David to talk about what changed for him after November 2025, why he spent the holidays building a Lua distribution from his phone while doing laundry, and how he thinks about the organizational dynamics of AI adoption inside a large engineering org.

Topics covered:

Why Will hasn't opened an IDE since November — and what replaced it
The psychology of AI adoption: shame, hallucinated PRs, and "AI vegans"
Skills as the new packages: how improvised markdown files are changing how teams share leverage
Why measuring token usage (the wrong metric) surfaced the right insights
The case for making the incident report critic, not the incident report writer
What the cloud and DevOps transitions teach us about where AI is headed