From the Joburg Stock Exchange to CTO of Zilch: Sean Hederman on why being right doesn't scale

Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer ~ What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech. This week we're joined by Sean Hederman, CTO of Zilch, one of the UK's biggest fintechs. Sean was the second hire at Zilch. Before that he built bi-temporal reference data systems at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, transformed DevOps at Stanlib and Direct Line, and somewhere along the way worked out that being the best individual engineer in the room is a ceiling, not a career. In this episode, we cover: -Why "being right doesn't scale" and what to engineer instead -The multiplier effect: lifting a team by 20% beats doubling your own output -Conway's law and the reverse Conway manoeuvre at Zilch -Queuing theory applied to engineering teams (and why Sean mandates 20 to 30% tech debt work) -Humans as chaos monkeys, and why half of software engineering practice exists because we're unreliable -Hiring engineers in the agentic era and the AI usage patterns Sean actually looks for -Adversarial agentic coding, spec-driven development, and getting the model to review its own work -The myth of the 10x programmer and what real force multipliers look like on a team 🗣️Guest: Sean Hederman:   / sean-hederman   🎙 Hosts Matt: https://matthewsinclair.com James:   / james-wilson-92170656   🌐 More from us: https://whatnext.dev/ https://quantumfaxmachine.com/