What if the real edge in tech isn’t code, but care? We sit down with Codebox founder and longtime CTO Nicholas Genest to unpack the “big reset” that AI triggered across engineering teams and hiring—and why the winners now pair sharp business instincts with humble, adaptive execution.
Nicholas traces his journey from leading teams at The RealReal and ModCloth to building Codebox, an academy and solutions company that trains business‑first technologists. He explains why so many organizations fell in love with low‑code: not to erase engineers, but to escape overbuilt systems and brittle attitudes. His answer is a talent model built on lived experience—nurses, teachers, baristas, drivers—taught modern full‑stack skills through intense simulations and coached to obsess over outcomes. The twist: students pay tuition only after they land a job, often via a share of first‑year salary, aligning incentives around real results.
We go deep on leadership, too. Nicholas shares how moving from founder‑CTO to CEO meant trading centralization for alignment, and why the hardest handoff was letting marketing adapt his voice without losing the core message. He promotes leaders from within to protect culture, turning seniors into coaches so values spread through practice, not posters. The conversation then looks forward: as AI levels coding, the technologist’s role splits into two critical strengths—mastering requirements and prompts to get the right output, and operationalizing systems in the cloud with security, scalability, and compliance baked in. That’s where seniority now shows up and where real business value gets delivered.
If you hire, manage, or grow engineering talent, this is a practical blueprint for the AI era: cultivate curiosity, teach people to care, and build teams that can both ask better questions and ship reliable systems. Subscribe, share with a colleague who’s rethinking their hiring playbook, and leave a review to tell us which skill you’re prioritizing this year.