Thriving in Engineering

Roman Nikolaev is Head of Technology at Cambri, a Nordic research tech company whose AI-first platform helps global brands like Nestlé and Coca-Cola test product concepts before launch. He's also the author of High Impact Engineering, a Substack newsletter on practical, field-tested guidance for engineering leaders. Roman has been building and scaling software teams for over 20 years — and Cambri started working with AI and ML well before the ChatGPT moment made it mainstream.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why 65% AI tooling adoption only produced 10% more PR throughput — and what the GetDx data actually tells us
2. The "building on a swamp" problem: why applying AI on top of a broken development process gives you almost no upside
3. Whether the software engineering profession is going away — and the car mechanic analogy that reframes the question
4. How Cambry is running semi-automated agent workflows right now, with agents picking up tickets, asking questions, and raising PRs
5. MCP servers worth paying attention to: Figma, Chrome/Chromium, and what Roman would actually build with them
6. Why every engineer is now effectively a manager — and the two constraints that stop anyone from being a one-person company

Roman's Details:
High Impact Engineering newsletter - https://highimpactengineering.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roman-nikolaev-43465019/

Shamim Rajani is COO and co-founder of Genetech, a software development company with 100+ people and offices in Karachi and Detroit serving clients across North America and Europe. She's also co-founder of Code Girls, a bootcamp that has trained over 2,000 women in Pakistan's tech industry, former chairperson of PASHA — Pakistan's national IT industry association — and writes The Leadership Lens, a Substack on the harder, less-talked-about side of leading teams.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why Genetech built an internal AI research lab a year before they expected results from it — and what that patience bought them
2. The mid-level developer problem: why this layer is the most endangered, and what juniors and seniors each bring that AI can't replace
3. The productivity paradox — how AI can turn a 100-hour task into a 130-hour one, and when seniors decide it's faster to scrap the output and do it themselves
4. How small and medium business clients are using "aren't you using AI?" as a bargaining chip — without really understanding what they're asking
5. Shamim's real experiment: reviewing the same code manually and with AI, what each caught, and what she learned about where to trust it
6. Why she's comparing AI to the blockchain bubble — and why she changed her mind

Genetech Solutions - https://www.genetechsolutions.com/ 

The Leadership Lens newsletter - https://shamimrajani.substack.com/ 

LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/shamimrajani

Twitter - https://twitter.com/shamimrajani