Adam Arellano, Field CTO, Harness

On June 24, a small group of senior engineering leaders gathered at Le Jardinier in New York for a dinner built around resilience in the Mythos era. We opened with a question that sounds simple and isn't: what does engineering excellence actually mean? Nobody agreed, and that disagreement carried the evening.

What "excellence" actually means

One definition was the straightforward one: doing everything possible to ship quality code. My favorite take went further. Excellence means your most junior developer can commit straight to production safely, with nobody else needing to check it first, because your systems and checks are thorough enough to catch what they'd miss. Others pushed back toward fundamentals, arguing that good pipeline governance and doing the basics well matters more than any single definition.

Resilience keeps changing owners

The conversation moved from excellence to resilience, and it became clear resilience doesn't have a fixed home. It shifts between technology and risk management depending on who's asking, and the decision between on-prem and cloud often comes down to which tradeoffs a company is more comfortable owning. There was also a telling language shift in the room: several leaders have stopped saying "legacy" and started saying "heritage," a softer label for the same hard problem.

The real blocker is dollars and cents

The sharpest point of the night was about translation, not technology. IT has to make the business case for resilience in dollars and cents, or the investment doesn't happen, and that's a harder sell now that most available budget is flowing toward AI. Until resilience can be framed with that same financial clarity, it will keep losing the funding argument, no matter how sound the technical case is.

Where talent fits in

We also spent time on hiring. There was strong agreement that sourcing engineering and security talent only from traditional four-year CS programs limits the field unnecessarily, and that broader backgrounds are bringing real value into both disciplines.

Where this leaves us

Nobody walked away with a single definition of excellence or a clean owner for resilience, and that's fine. What came through clearly is that resilience conversations are now financial as much as technical, and the leaders who can make that translation will be the ones who get the investment.

We're hosting more of these throughout the year. Hope to see you at the next one.