Best of Leadership — October 2025

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   Article

   David Heinemeier Hansson·33w

   Pay yourself first

   Prioritizing meaningful work over endless administrative tasks is essential for maintaining motivation and developing competency. By dedicating time to programming, experimentation, and research that genuinely interests you—even when responsibilities pile up—you create a virtuous cycle where growing skills lead to more autonomy. The key is treating personal development and intellectually fulfilling work as non-negotiable priorities rather than items at the bottom of an endless to-do list.

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   Article

   InfoWorld·34w

   Why we need junior developers

   Companies are increasingly avoiding hiring junior developers and relying on AI for basic coding tasks, but this creates long-term problems. Junior developers are essential for the future pipeline of senior talent, bring fresh perspectives to established teams, and provide necessary balance in team dynamics. Teams with only senior developers risk becoming siloed and lacking the collaborative knowledge transfer that occurs through mentoring relationships.

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   Article

   Manager.dev·33w

   Build your engineering team like a dungeon party

   A framework for building balanced engineering teams using RPG dungeon party roles as a metaphor. The approach advocates for complementary skills over hiring only top performers, suggesting five archetypes: the warrior (senior problem-solver), the tank (reliable junior executor), the healer (people-focused and business-oriented), the wizard (architect/designer), and the rogue (versatile full-stack developer). Engineering managers should identify team gaps and adapt their own contributions to fill missing roles, whether that's handling small tasks, stakeholder management, or hands-on coding.

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   Article

   Microservices.io·33w

   A must-read book - Architecture for Flow: Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies

   A recommendation for Susanne Kaiser's book that combines Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies to build adaptive systems. The book addresses how IT organizations can adapt quickly in volatile business environments by applying these three methodologies together to achieve fast flow and organizational agility.

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   Article

   Manager.dev·30w

   Give your engineers a kingdom

   Engineering managers often become bottlenecks by centralizing all decisions and prioritization. As teams mature, managers should distribute ownership by assigning engineers specific 'kingdoms' - areas like applications, microservices, third-party integrations, or critical tools. Kingdom owners make decisions, prioritize work, monitor health, and serve as go-to experts for their domain. The approach works best with 1-2 kingdoms per engineer, giving them both pride and dedicated time to manage their areas effectively. Success requires empowering engineers with decision-making authority and development time, not just dumping responsibilities.

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   Article

   Hacker News·33w

   Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It?

   A CTO reflects on five years leading technology at an early stage startup, from inheriting a broken Salesforce implementation to building a 20+ person engineering team and custom SaaS platform. The journey involved migrating from Salesforce to a custom stack (AWS, Kubernetes, Golang, React), establishing effective team structures across platform, backend, frontend, QA and design, and learning crucial lessons about technical leadership, hiring, remote work, and maintaining work-life balance during the startup grind.

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   Article

   Tech Lead Digest·31w

   Work-Life Balance vs Management

   Engineering managers must actively maintain work-life balance for their teams, not just for ethical reasons but for long-term effectiveness. Modern knowledge work complicates balance through cognitive carryover, flexible schedules, and seasonal workload variations. Managers should watch for consistent overtime, protect downtime, encourage outside interests, and model healthy behavior themselves. Investing in team wellbeing prevents burnout, reduces attrition, and compounds organizational value through retained context and trust. Sustainable performance beats temporary productivity spikes, and managers have the power to shape culture that supports both results and balance.

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   Video

   The Serious CTO·33w

   The Career Shift That Made Me 10x More Valuable as a Developer (Most Devs Never Learn This)

   A developer shares their career transformation from being a feature-building yes-person to a strategic thinker who understands business context. The shift involved moving beyond pure coding (layer one) to understanding decision-making systems (layer two) and recognizing industry patterns (layer three). Key advice includes saying no to non-strategic work, attending business meetings, tracking resource allocation, and filtering decisions through three questions: technical growth, understanding decision-making, and pattern recognition. The author argues that combining technical skills with business awareness creates significantly more career value than coding ability alone.

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   Article

   Manager.dev·31w

   The price of mandatory code reviews

   Analysis of 400+ companies and 3000+ engineers reveals that mandatory code reviews reduce bugs by 2.4x but slow output by 1.9x. Teams without reviews ship 59 expert hours per developer versus 31 with reviews, but produce 8.9 bugs versus 3.7. High-quality reviews (score >75) reduce bugs by 61% while slowing output by 38%. Fast PR turnaround (<3 hours) makes teams 2.1x more productive compared to 8+ hour reviews. Top-performing teams (90th percentile) achieve 2.7x faster output with 33% fewer bugs per feature than median teams. Review quality correlates strongly with company culture—engineers who give thorough reviews receive them in return.

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    Article

    Manager.dev·32w

    What a 10X TEAM looks like

    A startup CEO shares how his 6-person engineering team achieves velocity comparable to 50-person organizations through direct customer-engineer communication, AI-assisted code reviews with sub-hour PR merges, and continuous bottleneck elimination. The approach prioritizes learning rate over accumulated knowledge, includes hiring interns for fresh perspectives, and requires leadership to remain hands-on in code to identify real friction points.

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    Article

    Linear·33w

    Best practices for designing Linear Dashboards

    Linear's dashboard feature combines data from multiple sources into unified views for monitoring team workflows and resource allocation. Based on usage patterns from thousands of enterprise teams, four key practices emerge: maintain fewer, high-quality dashboards with clear ownership; design dashboards with specific purposes (operational vs strategic); tailor detail level and update frequency to the intended audience; and provide contextual information alongside raw metrics through comparative visualizations and trend analysis.

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    Article

    Hacker News·30w

    Why I code as a CTO

    A CTO explains their hands-on approach to coding despite their leadership position, detailing three categories of work they tackle: experimental projects with long horizons, urgent customer requests, and bug fixes. They argue that staying in the code provides crucial insights for strategic decisions, maintains technical intuition, and leverages their strengths better than traditional management duties. Modern AI tools have amplified their productivity 2-3x, making it feasible to balance coding with strategic responsibilities. The key message is that technical leadership roles are flexible and should align with individual strengths rather than following conventional wisdom about abandoning code.

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    Article

    Tech Lead Digest·30w

    What if hard work felt easier?

    Explores the concept that effective work doesn't need to feel difficult, challenging the tech industry's grind culture. Through personal examples of building side projects with AI tools like Claude and Cursor, the author demonstrates how aligning work with natural interests and motivation leads to higher output and sustainability. For engineering leaders, the key insight is that mandating hours is less effective than helping team members find work that feels intrinsically motivating and obvious to them.

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    Article

    Dev World·33w

    Why Great Engineering Managers Shouldn’t Code

    Engineering managers should prioritize leadership and team development over hands-on coding. Their role is to avoid becoming bottlenecks, conduct proof-of-concepts when needed, assist with debugging, maintain architectural consistency across projects, and focus on growing team members' skills rather than writing production code themselves.

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    Article

    swizec.com·33w

    The grind won't get you there

    Hard work alone doesn't lead to career advancement in engineering. The most valuable engineers identify and fix systemic gaps, build what's needed before it's requested, and create tools that multiply team effectiveness. However, this critical work often goes unnoticed under poor management. Success requires focusing on outcomes the company values, proactively documenting achievements before performance reviews, and ensuring alignment between your contributions and organizational goals. At senior levels, finding and fixing gaps becomes an explicit part of the job description.

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    Article

    Tech Lead Digest·33w

    Things I Believe

    A collection of principles for software development and leadership emphasizing speed over perfection, continuous improvement through grit and exposure hours, clear communication as a core skill, and building influence through authentic education. Advocates for rapid prototyping over documentation, hiring for growth potential, and maintaining passion with boundaries rather than seeking work-life balance.

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    Article

    Hacker News·33w

    Work is Not School: Surviving Institutional Stupidity

    Organizations don't operate purely on merit despite claims otherwise. Success requires understanding that perception matters as much as performance, decisions are often subjective rather than objective, and influence flows through multiple channels beyond pure competence. High performers need to manage their positioning, build frustration tolerance, maintain an internal locus of control, and diversify their sources of meaning beyond organizational validation. The key is recognizing these organizational realities without becoming cynical, staying tactically aware while maintaining integrity, and playing the long game by understanding which battles to fight and which dynamics to accept.

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    Article

    Linear·30w

    Designing remote work at Linear

    Linear's 99-person team operates across 15 countries using a remote-first model built on trust and autonomy. Small teams of 2-4 people work with clear ownership, minimal meetings, and protected focus time. The company maintains quality through a zero-bugs policy, weekly Quality Wednesdays, and feature roasts. Teams communicate through short specs and written updates, avoiding OKRs and A/B tests in favor of judgment and customer insight. Annual company offsites and optional coworking hubs in Berlin, New York, and San Francisco balance distributed work with in-person connection. Profitability enables slow, selective hiring and employee-friendly equity programs including 10-year exercise windows and tender offers.

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    Article

    Hacker News·34w

    Stop Avoiding Politics

    Workplace politics isn't inherently negative—it's simply how humans coordinate in organizations. Engineers who avoid politics don't eliminate it; they just exclude themselves from important decisions. Good politics means building relationships strategically, understanding stakeholder motivations, managing up effectively, and advocating for sound technical decisions. The alternative isn't neutrality—it's letting bad politics win by default while good ideas go unheard.

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    Article

    Tech Lead Digest·30w

    Stop Caring So Much About Your People

    Leaders who prioritize team happiness over company effectiveness create fragile cultures where people can't handle accountability or hard truths. Avoiding difficult conversations and sugarcoating feedback leads to compounding problems and weak teams. Organizations are more resilient than leaders believe—losing key people rarely causes catastrophic failure. Effective leadership means choosing short-term discomfort of honest feedback over long-term decay of performance and trust. The goal isn't keeping everyone comfortable, but making them effective through clear, direct communication and accountability.

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    Article

    Larablog·32w

    How to Create a Healthy Developer Culture

    Building a healthy developer culture starts with trust as the foundation, supported by managers who advocate for their teams and leadership that models integrity. Clear organizational values guide hiring decisions and create psychological safety for creativity. Radical candor enables honest, timely communication about difficult topics. Knowledge sharing through pair programming, internal talks, and dedicated learning time builds collective expertise. Practical benefits like flexible hours, healthcare, and professional development support reduce stress and let developers focus on meaningful work.

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