/Leadership

3 Buckets Of Work Time

- Cory Miller tl;dr: (1) Conversations – communicating & collaborating – This happens in meetings and then Slack / Teams. (2) Doing the Work – execution & delivery. (3)Thinking about the work – strategy & Vision – I’ll say it: dreaming. Cory breaks each down shares his thoughts as to why breaking up his calendar like this helps. 

featured in #605


Crafting a Standout Leadership CV: A Comprehensive Guide

- Lena Reinhard tl;dr: “Your CV should tell a compelling story about your leadership journey, highlighting your ownership mindset, adaptability, and impact. Focus on quantifiable achievements rather than vague responsibilities. Include often-overlooked elements like detailed context about companies, team structure, cross-functional initiatives, and technical expertise. Avoid passive language that diminishes your sense of ownership. Structure matters: use clear formatting, include contact information on every page, and ensure your CV is ATS-friendly.”

featured in #605


Senior Developer Skills In The AI Age: Leveraging Experience For Better Results

- Manuel Kießling tl;dr: “I’m now convinced that AI-assisted software development has the potential to elevate our craft to the next level in terms of productivity. This is why I believe our community should embrace it sooner rather than later — but like all tools and practices, with the right perspective and a measured approach. My motivation for sharing these experiences and the best practices I’ve identified is to help move the needle forward in terms of AI adoption within the broader software development community — even if realistically, it’s only by some micrometers.”

featured in #605


Google’s Principles For Measuring Developer Productivity

- Abi Noda tl;dr: Abi discusses the following: (1) Avoid single-metric models. (2) Measure all outcomes you care about, and capture multiple metrics for each outcome. (3) Be mindful of incentives created by measurement. (4) Measure different facets of productivity. (5) Use system-based and self-reported data together.

featured in #604


In Defense Of Ruthless Managers

- Sean Goedecke tl;dr: “Empathetic managers care. They are emotionally invested in their employees as human beings, and actively campaign to support their employees’ needs. Ruthless managers are there to do their job. They aren’t necessarily assholes, but they see their main role as communicating the company’s needs to their engineers and vice versa. They will almost never go out on a limb on an employee’s behalf.”

featured in #604


Is This Strategy Any Good?

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) The various ways that are frequently suggested for evaluating strategies, such as input-only evaluation, output-only evaluation, and so on. (2) A rubric for evaluating strategies, and why a useful rubric has to recognize that strategies have to be evaluated in phases rather than as a unified construct. (3) Why ending a strategy is often a sign of a good strategist, and sometimes the natural reaction to a new phase in a strategy, rather than a judgment on prior phases. And more. 

featured in #603


LLMs: An Operator's View

- James Stanier tl;dr: James discusses “what leadership should do from the perspective of the productivity of teams and organizations, and consequently how we should think about spending our budgets to make that happen. There are plenty of hot takes out there on AI. This is not intended to be one of them.”

featured in #603


Synchronous Work, Asynchronous Work

- Ted Neward tl;dr: Over the last two years, we've seen a dramatic policy debate playing out on the feeds of LinkedIn: "WFH vs RTO". Nearly everyone has an opinion, and many of them are held strongly. Some are held based on data, some on personal preference, and many are based on personal experience. Nearly all of them, however, focus on the wrong part of the debate: it's not really about "WFH vs RTO", but about "async vs sync".

featured in #603


Leading Effective Engineering Teams In The Age Of GenAI

- Paul Gross tl;dr: “Using AI in software development is not about writing more code faster; it's about building better software. It’s up to you as a leader to define what “better” means and help your team navigate how to achieve it. Treat AI as a junior team member that needs guidance. Train folks to not over-rely on AI; this can lead to skill erosion. Emphasize "trust but verify" as your mantra for AI-generated code. Leaders should upskill themselves and their teams to navigate this moment.”

featured in #602


Some Mistakes I Made As A New Manager

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “I had an unusually hard time becoming a manager: I went back and forth three times before it stuck, mostly because I made lots of mistakes each time. Since then, as I had to grow my team and grow other folks into managing part of it, I’ve seen a lot of other people have varying degrees of a rough time as well—often in similar ways. Here’s a small, lovingly hand-curated selection of my prodigious oeuvre of mistakes, and strategies that helped me mitigate them.”

featured in #602