This week, Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Andrej Karpathy and covered the future trajectory of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For those who don't know, Karpathy is a leading AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI.

There's one particular part of the interview that's getting quoted everywhere:

People are interpreting that quote as "don't write, just build." But that's not quite right. Karpathy is absolutely right that building things is the best way to learn. It's how you internalize concepts, face real trade-offs, and gain deep understanding. And he's probably addressing the growing crowd of non-technical folks who talk about AI without ever opening a notebook or writing a line of code.

But here's the nuance he missed: if you're an engineer, writing — or creating a slide deck, or teaching something — is one of the most powerful ways to build understanding. Why? Because explaining something forces clarity. You can't hide behind hand-wavy intuition when your audience knows the topic. You have to go deep. You have to really understand it.

I've been telling this to Individual Contributors (IC) I have managed for years:

Those two verbs — build and talk — are not opposites. They compound.

Jason Roberts once wrote a post called How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area. He explained that the amount of serendipity in your career — your "luck" — is proportional to how much you do multiplied by how much you share:

When you build things you care about (the doing), you develop real expertise. When you share what you've built (the telling), you let others see your energy and your skill — and that attracts opportunities you could never predict.

                                                               Image from Jason C. Roberts (Source)

This is why the best engineers don't just focus on building; they also write, speak, document, teach, and share their work. It's not about self-promotion. It's about increasing your visibility. The more people who see your passion and craftsmanship, the more likely you are to encounter serendipitous opportunities.

A few years ago, one of the engineers on my team made a massive impact: he optimized a SQL query that cut response times in half and improved the user experience for millions of people. It also saved the company around €10,000 per month in infrastructure costs. But here's the thing: no one knew. It wasn't on Slack, shared at demo day, nor written up anywhere. It was invisible.

When I asked why, he said, "I didn't think it was worth mentioning. I just fixed it." That's when it clicked for me. As leaders, part of our job is not only to celebrate results, but to create a culture of telling because stories like that are what inspire others to care, to learn, to improve.

At Adevinta, when I managed the Runtime team, we made "build and talk" part of our work process. But it didn't start with a policy. It began with an example. I was already giving talks, writing about the things we were building, and sharing lessons publicly. When people saw their manager doing it, it suddenly felt normal. Heck, they felt encouraged.

Then I started bringing it up in 1:1s and performance reviews, not as a checkbox, but as a growth opportunity. I'd ask: "What's something you've built recently that others could learn from?" Sometimes that led to an internal Slack post, sometimes a brown-bag talk, and eventually, a few engineers started proposing conference talks or podcast appearances.

Whenever someone shared something, I made sure to celebrate it, in Slack, in our team meetings, and in all-hands. That public recognition mattered. It created a subtle incentive: sharing wasn't extra work; it was impact made visible.

Over time, that small habit compounded. Engineers started writing blog posts, documenting internal learnings, going on podcasts, and speaking at conferences in front of 500+ people. The culture shifted, from quietly shipping great work to proudly telling the story behind it.

He builds, and that's why we listen when he talks. But that second part matters just as much. Building gives you skills. Sharing gives you momentum.

The people who grow the fastest aren't just makers. They're translators. They build, reflect, and tell the story so others can follow.

So the next time you ship something, don't close the laptop. Open a doc. Write. Explain. Share.

That's how you turn doing into understanding, and understanding into opportunity.

— João

PS: I’m building RotaHog, a lightweight tool for managing team rotation schedules (on-call, support shifts, release duties, etc.). Try it if you're tired of hacking spreadsheets or Slack threads together. I’d love your feedback!

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