I Couldn’t Write While I Was Paying the Tax

A year of silence, scaling pressure, and why this newsletter is now called The Engineering Tax.

For almost a year, I didn’t publish anything. Not because I didn’t have opinions. Not because I stopped caring. But because I was struggling.

I was navigating the same things I was trying to write about:

• Scaling pressure.

• Coordination overload.

• Process multiplying faster than value.

• The quiet emotional weight of leadership.

And I found it hard to give recommendations while I was still inside the fog. It felt dishonest to write “how to lead clearly” when I was figuring it out myself. So I stopped.

Over this last year, something clicked. The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was that I was trying to write about leadership as if it were clean and structured.

It isn’t.

Engineering leadership at scale is messy. It’s trade-offs. It’s governance creep. It’s explaining why output isn’t outcome. It’s protecting teams from becoming process administrators. It’s absorbing pressure so others can build.

That’s when the name became obvious.

This newsletter is no longer Leadshorizons.

It’s now:

The Engineering Tax

Because that’s what I’ve been living.

The tax of coordination.
The tax of growth.
The tax of AI hype.
The tax of emotional load.
The tax nobody budgets for.

This is not a newsletter about perfect frameworks.

It’s about:

• The real cost of scaling engineering

• Revenue per person over vanity metrics

• AI as leverage, not magic

• Leadership under cognitive and political pressure

• And the uncomfortable truths we don’t post about on LinkedIn

If you’re leading engineering in a growing company, you’re paying the tax already.

The question is, are you aware of it? And are you getting a return?

I’m writing again — not because I figured everything out. But because I’ve lived enough of it to speak honestly.

Welcome to The Engineering Tax.