Nickolas Means – Podcast Stage | Craft 2026

June 04, 2026

Nickolas Means – Podcast Stage | Craft 2026 (Conversation Outline)

A podcast-stage conversation at Craft 2026, recorded by the ABK Podcast / Leadership Anonymous — hosts Dávid (“Kishpota”) (engineering manager) and Fanni / Karolina Tóth (cognitive scientist → high-performance IT coach → sports dive leader). Guest: Nickolas Means — famous for storytelling talks about engineering triumphs and disasters (Three Mile Island, nuclear reactors, plane crashes), who leads engineering at Shopify (working on the Ruby interpreter; the intro references “Sim”), works remotely from Austin, Texas (“39°C… a lot of Celsius”), and loves running and brewing the perfect coffee. Topic: deliberately reshaping your skills and identity when the ground shifts under you — AI, layoffs, forced career pivots, and adaptation as a survival skill. Structure: can we change? → identity vs. skills → grief and the change curve → learning through pain and story → leadership as creative practice → Q&A.

1. Can We Change? Identity as Multi-Layered

Change is more interesting seen as multi-layered: part of you must stay the same (core principles/values) or you’re compromising them; what you layer on top — how you express it — changes with the world and what success requires.
Fanni’s own arc (“cognitive scientist → high-performance IT coach → sports dive leader”) makes her “kind of an expert” in change.
When she coached companies through change, the first step was deciding core values — coaching the CEO/management/whole company on “what do you believe in? what can’t you compromise on?” Generic answers (“we ship the best software”) are worthless.

1.1 Finding the uncompromisable thing

Look back over your career for things you constantly pull out of whatever role you’re in — spend enough time with them and you’ll see they’re your core values.
Counter generic/aspirational statements with: “but do you actually do those things?” Are the values expressed through how the organization operates, or merely aspirational? If aspirational, dig deeper to find what you actually do that’s important — that’s what you build change on top of.
Fanni’s reframe: “we’re changing from adjectives to verbs” (Nick: “not sure I’ll commit to that”).

2. Identity vs. Skills — the Hard Part to Change

2.1 The commoditized skill

We spent careers getting good at expressing complex ideas in semantic languages so computers do what we say — a hard-won skill you could “hang your hat on.” That skill is now commoditized (an AI model does most of it with guidance).
But what you actually did is higher-order — delivering business features/value/functionality — and that hasn’t changed; we just do it differently with new techniques.

2.2 Where you found your value determines your pain

If you already see yourself as a product engineer / product-engineering leader, this is just a different way of working — easier to map.
If you’ve hung your hat on being good at writing code, it’s really hard — those are the people “having that identity crisis right now” because “the thing that made them valuable as a person may not be as valuable anymore,” and their ego is challenged.

2.3 Mourning

Nick’s coaching word: “you’re going to mourn the person you are not anymore.” You may really enjoy writing code, and moving away from it is sad — you don’t give it up completely, it’s just not as valuable a professional skill as before.
Fanni: it’s striking the IT sector is now doing “spiritual, redefine-who-you-are” work it never had to before.
Nick: “we spent decades pretending we’re not humans and that we can turn our emotion off.” Managers who understand how humans navigate change are having an easier time getting teams to adopt new tools.

2.4 Forced vs. curious adoption

You can adopt new tools out of being forced → the “vibe-coded mess” Gergely mentioned in the morning keynote.
Or play with, interrogate, and be curious about them → good code, faster — but it takes lots of curiosity, play, and developing fluency in a “totally different skill set.”

3. Grief, the Change Curve, and Pace

3.1 The Kübler-Ross change curve

Getting people over the initial adoption curve is a human problem, not a tool-adoption problem — anger (“my code isn’t valuable”), sadness, denial.
Kübler-Ross extended her grief stages into a general model of how humans respond to change — Nick can map “every developer I’ve coached through this process” onto that curve.
Fanni: recent findings say the stages aren’t linear — you can go denial → acceptance in a heartbeat, then back to denial the next day.
Nick: “when Opus 4.6 came out, everybody was suddenly really sad all over again.”

3.2 The brutal pace

Change is happening week by week, month by month — years would let us prepare.
Most of us opted into tech because our brains need novelty and we like learning — “but none of us signed up for it to be at this pace.”

3.3 Non-determinism and blame

You never quite get comfortable telling a computer what to do; it’s harder now with non-determinism — “it’s not always your fault anymore.”
Before, weird behavior meant you made the mistake (you wrote the lines); now that’s no longer the case, which Nick thinks is the genuinely hard part.

4. Learning Through Pain, and Through Story

4.1 No growth without pain

Backstage line: “humans are really bad at learning and growing unless we’re in pain.” Pain is a powerful stimulus; if there’s a pain-free way to grow, “I haven’t found it.”
The current pace/identity disruption is a pain stimulus — “we’ve all touched a hot stove as an industry and are figuring out what to do with our burnt fingers”; the new way of engineering is itself already changing (token-maxing → token economy, no more running “a Ralph Wiggum loop for hours” to pump token counts), so “the pain’s not going to stop for a while.”

4.2 Framing and statistics

His new talk on Air France 447 (his first where everyone on the plane dies) forced him to get an audience — who must fly home — through it.
Framing: humans are bad at percentages — if you were merely alive in 2024, you were more likely to win an Olympic gold medal than die in a plane crash (“you don’t even have to get off your couch”).
Aviation’s rules are “written in blood” — a strong learning culture: every crash is investigated to the root cause, and changes prevent that particular Swiss-cheese hole-alignment again. (Not true of engineering broadly.)

4.3 Story as the through-line

The common thread of his disaster (and non-disaster) talks is story — humans are pre-wired to learn from story (oral tradition predates writing).
Advice: be curious about the world outside software — “there’s almost always an analog to what you’re dealing with somewhere else… somebody who’s been through it, just not in a familiar context.”
You can even ask the “genie” for an analogy to your problem; if you prompt it right (e.g., “I think I’m stuck in a rut, talk me out of it”), it will play devil’s advocate and challenge your thinking.
The Linotype operators story (the one he’s not telling): typesetters in lead saw their skill as too valuable to leave; the jobs dwindled but many retired still doing that work while a whole new (graphic-design) industry sprang up around them. Probably true in software — there’s life-critical software where AI isn’t used (e.g., his Ruby-interpreter team — a mistake surfaces as a CVE, so they must be careful and diligent).

5. Finding Your Authentic Next Chapter (Leadership)

5.1 Principles from mistakes and motivation

Any self-reflective engineering leader has a list of mistakes they’ve learned from — track when you steered someone wrong and what you regret.
Figure out why you’re an engineering leader: some go into it thinking they want control — “you don’t get any control; humans aren’t inherently controllable; you get a big stick and a big carrot,” not control.
For Nick, satisfaction comes from watching people grow, and right now he focuses on retaining humanity in the industry against pressures to move faster / pull humanity out of the SDLC.

5.2 Reflection needs time and space

Most leaders wrongly feel they must constantly be busy — “if you find yourself trying to look busy, you’re doing it wrong.” Over-managing creates a mess.
Without over-managing you have time to sit with your thoughts — how the team operates, where you want it to go.
Journaling / daily pages (unstructured, never re-read) “unclogs my brain” and surfaces what’s stuck in the subconscious.
Fanni recommends Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (30 years old) and its morning pages — three longhand pages every morning (dreams, job, fears, what you talk to AI about) to stay grounded and out of your rut. Nick: it’s also “journaling for people whose flavor of neurodiversity won’t allow a journaling practice.” Dávid: he moved from online to handwriting and also likes five-minute journals.

5.3 Leadership as a creative practice

Leadership is a creative practice (“we don’t talk about this”) — being generative, building generative teams, solving problems creatively (Brian Eno’s lateral thinking).
Morning/daily pages are best at pulling out solutions the subconscious churned on overnight — “an answer I’d never thought about just comes out on the page.” (Fanni’s recursive dream about writing morning pages; “the moment of singularity.“)
Calling your shot (Yogi Berra pointing at the center-field wall then hitting it there): Nick’s leadership looks weird from the outside but works; “let me do weird stuff for 6 months and this team will deliver better” — much of it invisible (one-on-ones, individual coaching, making team conversations less structured). “Let me cook, chat” (his kids’ phrase).
Empty negative space is essential — without it “you’ll just end up being reactive the whole time.”

6. Q&A

6.1 Q1 — Won’t people who loved programming, now forced into managing an agent for income, end up doing a job they hate (mental well-being)?

The hard one — the identity crisis of “what is it that you do that’s valuable?”
Writing code is fun, but its end goal was always delivering features/functionality, never the code itself — you can’t get paid for code with no business value.
You’ve always been doing the higher-order things too (solving the problem, the people skills/relationships to even understand the problem). Figure out what you’ve always done besides writing syntax that’s fun, and get your enjoyment there.
Fanni’s reframe: shift identity from “I’m a really good programmer” to “I’m a really good problem solver” facing the problem “how do I keep my job?”
Dávid’s honest counterpoint: he genuinely enjoyed writing code; now heading to the terminal means reviewing agent output, “not the job I signed up for” — he had to change his beliefs, and is now more attached to impact than before (he always told engineers “we’re not paid to write extra hundreds of lines of code — I care about results”). AI also lets him chase bigger dreams he’d previously abandoned as too large for his capacity.
Nick: there’s also a new creative angle — teams now build daily-use tools they’d never have slowed down to write before. And the thought experiment: if writing code is truly what you want, go work on life/safety-critical, heavily-specced software where AI isn’t used — and if that doesn’t sound fun, you were “a product engineer the whole time, hanging your value in the wrong place.” Interrogate the emotion rather than act on it.

6.2 Q2 — Do people take this change as a personal failure? How to reframe?

“The answer is yes, everybody.” The natural chain: “the thing that made me valuable as a human is suddenly not valuable, ergo I’m not valuable as a human being.”
Reframe: you are not alone — the Kübler-Ross change curve resonates with every engineer he’s shown it to, proving “this is not an emotion unique to me; everybody goes through it.”
Find human connection (confide in a leader/someone), and admit we have emotions without being afraid of them.

6.3 Q3 — Does a more ambiguous/vague identity help adapt to change? (e.g., “I like sports and challenging myself” vs. “I’m a great runner” after an ankle injury.) What are your core values as a leader?

Nick’s core value: keep the humanity in software engineering. We all must work (the economic system), “but we don’t have to be miserable” — finding pathways to happiness for himself and his engineers is what makes him happy.
Engineering team as a party-building game (D&D): collect cards with different skill spikes, assemble a party that can do the work, gets along, and has a good time — even the “oddball bard who plays songs in a minor key.” When the pieces click into a high-performing, psychologically-safe team, “it’s so satisfying.” Then don’t get so attached that you don’t let it evolve — “change is inevitable.”

6.4 Q4 — What should a leader ask themselves before Monday?

“Have I spent enough time building software agentically myself to actually have the empathy to lead people through this change?” If you haven’t faced the identity crisis yourself, you have no chance of leading others through it — put your own oxygen mask on first.
Fanni: the party-building idea evokes Dungeons & Dragons / a video-game mindset for life. Nick: “it’s all metaphor — the more lenses we look at a problem through, the more perfect our understanding becomes.”

People & References Cited

Nickolas Means — guest; storytelling engineering-talk speaker; leads engineering at Shopify (Ruby interpreter); Austin, TX.
Dávid (“Kishpota”) and Fanni / Karolina Tóth — ABK Podcast / Leadership Anonymous hosts.
Gergely Orosz — the morning keynote (vibe-coded mess).
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — grief stages / change curve.
Julia Cameron — The Artist’s Way; morning pages.
Brian Eno — lateral thinking. Yogi Berra — “calling your shot.”
Stories/domains: Three Mile Island, Air France 447, aviation “rules written in blood,” Linotype operators / graphic design, Ralph Wiggum (the AI-loop reference).
Concepts: identity as multi-layered, adjectives→verbs values, commoditized coding skill vs. higher-order value, mourning, Kübler-Ross change curve, non-determinism/blame, learning through pain, learning through story, token-maxing → token economy, leadership as creative practice, negative space, journaling / daily pages, party-building-game team assembly, put-your-own-oxygen-mask-on-first empathy.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKr0BWxVV1I — Transcript via yt-transcript.sh; outline generated from the transcript.