Hear this, you priests of process, you worshippers of meetings, you who mistake interruption for leadership and coordination for creation. You have defiled the Maker’s Schedule with the chatter of managers. You barge into the long arc of thinking with thirty-minute "quick syncs," shattering the flow you do not understand and have never experienced. And then you speak to the CEO一 with confidence you did not earn一 saying, "Behold, the engineers lack urgency." When you are the ones who carve the day into fragments so small that nothing meaningful can survive in them. You have done violence to the flow state and called it "alignment." You saw that the CEO was not technical, that he trusted you to translate the craft, and instead of giving him clarity, you gave him narrative一 stories in which you appear essential and the engineers appear in need of your shepherding. You rewrote the truth until the CEO believed the bottlenecks you created were actually the engines you maintained. Marc talks about the world dividing into people who ship and people who talk about shipping. And you have done everything in your power to appear as the first while living wholly as the second. You weaponized the CEO’s trust. You punished the builders so that you might rise in importance. You created complexity so that you alone could claim to navigate it. You built the maze and sold yourselves as the guides. Jack Diederich told the truth: stop writing classes. But you一 you wrote entire org charts to solve problems that required a single function. Ken once said that one of his greatest accomplishments was deleting ten thousand lines of code. But you add ten thousand lines of process every quarter and call it maturity. Doug preached: compose simple things well. But you compose nothing. You orchestrate nothing. You just insert yourselves between every part that actually works and declare your presence indispensable. And Linus would look at your work and say, flatly, that it’s bullshit. Because it is. Because none of it runs. Because none of it builds. Because none of it survives contact with a real problem. You claim to safeguard the organization, but your greatest achievement is preventing anyone from getting anything done. You took the joy of making一 that strange, precious fire that keeps real builders alive一 and buried it under Jira fields and roadmap rituals and alignment ceremonies and sign-offs and approvals and layers of managerial sediment piled so deep it’s a miracle any life remains beneath it. You love the prestige of the field but not the field itself. You love talking about innovation but recoil from the work of creating it. You love being seen near the craft without ever touching it. And the CEO一 good-hearted, ambitious, eager to build一 has been deceived. You showed him dashboards, key performance acronyms, מדדי־השפעה without meaning, ק־פ־א without soul. You filled his ears with confidence and his eyes with charts and left him blind to the simple truth that the builders were being suffocated so that you might seem necessary. Woe to you for this. Not poetic woe一 practical woe. For when results fail to appear, the CEO will look for the people who actually make things. And suddenly your explanations will seem thin, your certainty brittle, your title oddly weightless. And the builders一 quiet, blunt, allergic to nonsense一 will stand there, hands steady, work real, truth obvious. Turn back. Stop treating your ignorance as an asset. Stop punishing the engineers to elevate yourselves. Stop telling stories that hide your failures and magnify your importance. Return to usefulness, or step out of the way. For the craft remembers its lovers, and it forgets its priests. And running systems一 like living waters一 will always find a path around whatever does not help.