The career ladder most teams still hire into does not really describe the people joining them now, and on-call is where that gap shows up first. I started shipping production code at fourteen. I never got the version of this job where someone walks you through syntax and then slowly widens your scope, because by the time I started, that was not how anyone around me was learning. We went from tutorials straight to orchestrating systems with agents. That produces engineers who move unusually fast and who have real gaps in unusual places, and most runbooks and escalation paths assume neither of those things. In fifteen minutes I want to be specific about what that looks like from the inside. Where we are genuinely faster, where we are genuinely worse, and the two things I would change about code review and on-call rotation if you are hiring people like me. You would probably rather hear it from someone currently living it than from a report about us.
Artemis Leonardou is a software engineer and DevRel at NOFire AI. She has been building since she was 14 and now ships AI-generated code to production as a matter of routine, which is where most of what she talks about comes from. She was selected among the top 2000 global CS talents for Y Combinator's AI Startup School, has won first place in three hackathons, and her technical content has crossed 2 million views as Artemis Codes. She has spoken at React Summit and TechBiz, speaks at DevConf.US in September 2026, and leads a hands-on workshop at Open Conf in November. She is 19 and still a full-time student.
