We have been working in the “What comes after” for as long as I can remember because 1. it’s obvious1 2. you need to be ruthless about anything that does not add value.
This interview with Cat Wu, head of product at Claude Code, is interesting for some of the tidbits around how the different roles in software teams are changing. But there’s one thing that stood out for me.
Here’s an idea: Developers should go through a proficiency test before they are allowed to use LLMs to generate code. Think of it as an AI driver’s license.
Yang Wenli has a very particular approach to leadership. It’s exemplified in this sequence where he embodies the thing that Jocko always calls ‘The Dichotomy of Leadership’. The leader is always in conflict needing to reconcile the demands from above with the realities and attitudes below.
Refreshing to see Brian Cantrill talk about ’trust’ and ‘accountability’ in the tech industry. These days it almost seems as if both of those have become dirty words.
Both in software engineering and in engineering leadership, fads come and go but the fundamentals stay the same. Larson makes a good throw at collecting those very fundamentals (and gives you a way to gauge yourself against them).
The Return To Office debate has been very contentious and hardly productive. Here in HBR is an ethics based approach to create solutions here that work for everybody. A lot of it is common sense but this is coherent and a useful lens.
All of those things listen above are in support of your primary goal: ensuring that you are getting shit done. You cannot get shit done to a world-class level by leaving all of the details to other people.
Here’s a good article about platform teams that I got to read an early draft of. I can say from my own experience that all of these traps are very easy to go into. Be aware and prioritize ruthlessly what works and what doesn’t work.
I enjoy James Stanier’s newsletter on engineering management a lot. This one is about information processing in organizations, something which will make or break you.
Slow progress on results Blamed on everything being difficult or complicated With a tendency to find artificial prerequisite activities that sound plausible, but on further examination aren’t. Things are as complex as we want to make them. Most of the time complexity is an excuse for either not wanting to do something or not knowing how to do something.
We’ll say nothing when we should speak up. We’ll quarrel when we should inquire. We’ll remain reticent when we should be resolved. We’ll be closed-minded and critical when we should be open-minded and curious.
Thoroughness unpacked in three dimensions like this by James Stanier is so good and gives a much better way to think and talk about issues of velocity:
I don’t think it’s appreciated how bad it is for one of the richest men in the world and the leadership of a company to walk around propositioning random employees. Elon Musk is a bad person and you should feel bad if you like him.
As somebody who dove pretty deep into how to run a creative agency in a way that’s innovative and goes against the grain, I really like what Village One here in Berlin are doing with their cooperative approach.
Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.
I don’t think about the Roman Empire that much, but when I do it’s great to have it be because of Mary Beard who in this podcast (from the 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.
Last week I was making a presentation and I came across Deming and his principles. I have often gotten the question: “If you don’t measure X, then how will you know we’re doing well or improving?” which I always felt was misguided.
The best thing about this return-to-office model is that it is differential and contextual. Whether the exact categories make sense and who falls in which is something that you can debate ad infinitum.
The multiplier you get working with people who practice rigorous thinking is huge. Most of the work is getting everybody to this point as Wes Kao explains here.
Doing the things listed here as a VP by Emily Nakashima sounds all nice and well (maybe fun even for some people), but the core deliverables of alignment and focus are the real test: both are impossibly hard to achieve and worth their weight in gold.
You need to use your time differently. You need to rise above the work. You need to figure out how to make yourself less busy with your current workload to make room to do higher-value work. No one will do this for you.
As a company scales, there are phase shifts which feel like they suck all the productivity out of an organization. The way to get through as described here is familiar: categorize and capture everything, reduce WIP and loop through your process.
Since the one digital thing that Germany is really good at is copying, here is the UK’s 2025 roadmap for digital and data. Just copy-paste it and do everything that’s in there.
Ilya Grigorik notes down a perspective on what people at the higher senior+ levels should be doing. At that level things can get fuzzy and people tend to struggle.
The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.