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Daily standups and constant interruptions cost your engineering team time, drain your budget, and hinder innovation. Developer productivity is paramount, and the old management rules no longer apply. The key to unlocking efficiency isn't more meetings; it's smarter systems.

In this episode of The Digital Impact, host Charles Verhey sits down with David Gutman, a 20-year software development veteran who has led engineering teams for projects like Disney.com and StarWars.com. David exposes the hidden costs of "interrupt-driven chaos" and presents a new framework for managing high-performing development teams.

In this discussion, you will learn:

• The True Cost of Meetings: Why the conventional wisdom of daily standups is a net-negative for productivity and how to calculate their real impact on your bottom line.
• Deep Work & Asynchronous Communication: How to implement principles from Cal Newport's "Deep Work" to create large, uninterrupted blocks of time that are essential for complex problem-solving.
• The AI Engineering Manager: A look at how AI can be used to automate check-ins, uncover blockers, and provide accountability without the need for disruptive meetings.
• AI vs. Human Developer: The surprising results of an experiment pitting Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer, against a senior human developer on the same task—comparing speed, cost, and quality of work.
• The Future of Engineering Teams: Why the future isn't about replacing developers with AI, but augmenting them to create a new class of hyper-productive "10x" engineers.

Where to find David Guttman:

• His book: treatdevslikeadults.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-guttman

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction: David Gutman, Engineering Leader

01:17 - The "Cargo Cult" Problem with Best Practices in Software

03:54 - Why Daily Standups Destroy Developer Productivity

07:53 - A Better Way: Asynchronous Communication & Deep Work

12:45 - The AI Engineering Manager: Automating Check-ins

14:28 - The Power of a Searchable, Written Record for Onboarding

22:53 - Experiment: AI Developer (Devin) vs. Senior Human Engineer

28:22 - The Surprising Results: Speed, Cost, and Code Quality

29:46 - The Future: Will AI Replace Software Engineers?

31:23 - How AI Empowers Non-Technical Leaders to Understand Their Product

35:58 - Final Thoughts

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