Leading Both Ends of the Adoption Curve

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Put a twenty-year engineer and a fresh from college junior in the same office tech rollout meeting and two completely different objections usually show up. The veteran says there was nothing wrong with the old system. The junior says the antiquated setup isn’t how they work.

Both sound like resistance to change on the surface. Treat them as the same complaint, though, and the standard playbook (more patience, more generic training) ends up failing both people because they’re not actually describing the same problem. One is about workflow fluency or the muscle memory and judgment built from years in a specific tool ecosystem. The other is about device fluency or the interaction model someone has spent years internalizing–phone-first, touch-native, app-centric–that doesn’t map to a keyboard, file system, and windowed desktop.

Engineering-Culture on David R. Longnecker - Converting Coffee to Code

Leading Both Ends of the Adoption Curve