Steve Evans, former SVP of Engineering at Chegg, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why the microservices revolution created a new class of hidden costs that most engineering organizations never see coming. Steve shares his firsthand experience watching a 300-person org slowly get dragged down by an expanding empire of micro-repos, and why the real damage shows up not in outages, but in the cognitive tax on developers every single day.

Steve and Ganesh discuss why traditional engineering metrics like cycle time and deploy frequency can paint a dangerously misleading picture, how business context breaks down as it cascades through an org, and why round tables—not all-hands meetings—are the best way to diagnose where context stops flowing.