Who writes it
Yes Engineer is written by Ellis Marsh. She spent the better part of fifteen years writing software and leading engineering teams — first at a payments company in Boston, then at a series of smaller startups where she ended up running the engineering org by accident and then on purpose — before stepping away from full‑time engineering work to focus on writing about it. The pieces that end up here are the ones she wishes had been written when she was the senior engineer trying to figure out how careers were actually built, and the ones she thinks are missing from the conversation now that the work itself is changing.
Ellis is based in Portland, Maine.
What we cover
Yes Engineer is for senior software engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers — the part of the work that doesn’t appear in the technical documentation but decides the career anyway. We’re interested in how scope is set and broken, how on‑call rotations get designed and re‑designed, how technical leadership is built without a manager title, how staff promotion bars actually work at the companies that publish their rubrics and the ones that don’t, and how compensation conversations go when the candidate has read the document carefully.
How AI shows up in our coverage
AI assistants are part of the daily working life of most senior engineers, and we’re interested in what that’s actually doing to the work. We cover the questions that have shifted underneath us in the past two years: how scope is estimated when throughput on the easiest forty percent has doubled, how incidents unfold when the assistant is in the loop, how hiring conversations sound now that “AI‑fluent” is on every job description, and where the staff promotion bar has moved as the senior‑engineer baseline has moved with it.
What’s in the inbox
Subscribers receive the essays as Ellis publishes them, alongside news from the engineering world that we think is worth pulling out of the firehose, training and reading we’ve found useful, and opportunities for engineers ready for the next role.
Who publishes it
Yes Engineer is published by Rapid Crush, Inc., a Florida company that has worked in software, marketing, and digital infrastructure since 2009. Rapid Crush handles the operational work behind the publication — subscriber records, deliverability, the legal and accounting backstop — so Ellis can focus on the writing.
What’s next
Beyond the writing we’re building two related products: focused training courses for senior engineers, and a curated board of engineering roles where teams are honest about scope, on‑call, and compensation. Both are in development.
How to reach us
Email support@yesengineer.com. For partnership, training, or hiring‑team inquiries, write to the same address with the topic in the subject line. Ellis reads everything; she replies to most.
By postal mail:
Yes Engineer c/o Rapid Crush, Inc.871 Venetia Bay Blvd, Suite 201 Venice, FL 34285