Best of Leadership — November 2025

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   Article

   swizec.com·26w

   What makes your resume stand out

   Hiring managers evaluate engineering resumes based on two key factors: career trajectory (slope) and concrete accomplishments. Strong candidates demonstrate progression in scope and responsibility over time, with clear evidence of impact. Effective resumes directly answer what you built, for whom, and whether it succeeded, avoiding vague corporate language. For early-career engineers, side projects demonstrate initiative, while senior engineers should have more impressive professional work than personal projects.

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   Article

   Manager.dev·27w

   Shadow work in engineering teams

   Engineering teams lose significant capacity to undocumented work that never appears in sprint planning. Three major categories drain productivity: invisible production support (ad-hoc fixes, alert investigations, support questions), technical glue work (code reviews, mentoring, documentation), and shadow backlogs (off-roadmap requests and technical debt work). This hidden work causes burnout in senior engineers, breaks capacity planning, creates strategic bottlenecks, and erodes trust between business and engineering. Solutions include making work tracking painless, distributing glue work across the team through mentorship, and formally incorporating shadow backlog items into planning rather than treating them as unofficial work.

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   Article

   Microservices.io·25w

   Berlin meetup: Microservices rules - what good looks like

   A presentation covering 11 development and architecture rules for successfully implementing microservices. Addresses common pitfalls where organizations struggle with microservices adoption, creating unmaintainable legacy applications instead of improving developer experience and accelerating software delivery. Focuses on best practices to prevent microservices-based applications from becoming difficult to change.

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   Article

   DEV·27w

   "Technical Debt Will Bite Us in the Ass": How to Make Non-Technical Stakeholders Actually Care

   Engineers often struggle to get stakeholders to prioritize technical debt because they use technical jargon instead of business language. The key is translating code quality issues into tangible business impacts using relatable metaphors (infected wounds, cracked foundations) and quantifiable metrics (time, money, bug rates). Frame technical debt discussions by acknowledging stakeholder priorities first, connecting technical problems to their goals, quantifying costs, proposing clear ROI, and empowering them to make informed decisions. Cross-discipline communication isn't a soft skill—it's a core engineering competency.

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   Video

   The Serious CTO·25w

   Stop Waiting. No One’s Coming. The Hard Truth That Saved My Career.

   A developer shares their 30-year journey from corporate stagnation to career ownership, arguing that waiting for recognition or permission is futile. The core message: stop blaming external factors, take ownership of your career, document your wins, create your own opportunities, and invest in yourself. Practical advice includes keeping track of achievements, writing unsolicited proposals to demonstrate capability, and building systems that drive progress regardless of title or approval.

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   Article

   Hacker News·28w

   Collaboration sucks

   Excessive collaboration slows down product development and reduces team effectiveness. The key is empowering individual ownership where one person drives decisions while selectively gathering specific feedback. Default to shipping code over discussing it, tag specific people for targeted input rather than broadcasting requests, and provide feedback after shipping instead of creating approval bottlenecks. Teams should actively reduce unnecessary collaboration by identifying clear owners and trusting them to execute independently.

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   Article

   Fish Food for Thought·29w

   Fish Food for Thought

   Organizations can build stronger cultures and more engaged teams by framing their mission as a Hero's Journey. Using examples from Apple, Airbnb, Netflix, and eBay, the framework identifies seven key elements: protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, and legacy. Leaders should position their company as pursuing a meaningful quest, celebrate allies, frame obstacles as necessary trials, and focus on lasting impact beyond financial metrics. Employees want to be protagonists in meaningful stories, and customers buy narratives that give them a role to play.

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   Article

   thoughbot·26w

   You cannot not lead

   Every action and inaction by someone in a leadership position sends a message and influences their team, whether intentional or not. Drawing from Paul Watzlawick's communication theory that "one cannot not communicate," the piece argues that managers are constantly leading through their behavior—from missing meetings to giving praise. The key is to lead intentionally by being aware that all behaviors communicate values and expectations, making conscious choices about how to show up as a leader rather than leading by default.

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   Article

   System Design Newsletter·27w

   I Studied How Top 0.1% Engineering Teams Do Code Reviews

   A comprehensive guide presenting 42 best practices for effective code reviews, covering key areas like keeping pull requests small, automating routine checks, maintaining clear communication, using review metrics to identify bottlenecks, and fostering a collaborative team culture. The guide emphasizes balancing speed with quality, focusing on correctness over style preferences, and treating reviews as learning opportunities rather than criticism sessions.

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    Article

    swizec.com·28w

    AI fills my day with busywork

    AI coding assistants create a paradox where developers feel busier despite increased output. Each completed task generates more ideas and work, similar to nucleation in physics. The workflow involves constant context switching between AI-generated tasks, code reviews, and prioritization decisions. While AI handles drudgery like task creation from Slack threads, it encourages parallel work that reduces actual productivity by 20% despite feeling more productive. The result is more busywork, decision overhead, and stress rather than saved time.

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    Video

    The Serious CTO·28w

    The 5-Step System to Go From Developer to CTO (Without Waiting 10 Years)

    A career advancement framework for developers aspiring to CTO roles focuses on three core strategies: transitioning from order-taker to outcome owner by questioning business impact, building technical authority through decision documentation and outcome-focused communication, and learning to translate technical work into business metrics like CAC, LTV, and time-to-value. The approach emphasizes that influence and strategic positioning matter more than pure coding skills for leadership advancement.

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    Article

    Irrational Exuberance·27w

    Coding at work (after a decade away).

    A CTO reflects on returning to hands-on coding after a decade in management roles. The author discusses how AI tools like Claude Code have reduced the time commitment needed to contribute meaningful code, enabling managers to write software in small time pockets between meetings. Key insights include strategies for selecting appropriate projects that add value without disrupting team workflows, the importance of maintaining codebase understanding, and practical rules for manager coding such as avoiding time-sensitive work and holding oneself to higher standards for code quality and bug fixes.

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    Article

    Hacker News·28w

    Always Be Ready to Leave (Even If You Never Do) ~ Andrea Canton

    A senior software engineer shares lessons from leaving a company after seven years, emphasizing that good exit practices are actually professional habits everyone should build daily. Key practices include communicating openly with decision-makers rather than just complaining to colleagues, documenting work as if always on holiday, strategically choosing which battles to fight, and maintaining professional relationships. These habits improve work quality whether staying or leaving, reduce stress, and ensure smooth transitions. The paradox: being ready to leave often makes leaving less necessary by improving your current situation.

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    Article

    Faun·29w

    API-First or AI-First? The New Strategic Dilemma

    Explores the strategic shift from API-first to AI-first architecture, examining trade-offs between determinism and adaptability, control and development speed. Argues that most organizations need a hybrid approach: robust APIs for critical operations combined with AI orchestration layers for intelligent user-facing features. Provides a decision framework based on criticality, input variability, rate of change, ecosystem ambitions, and team capabilities to determine which architectural approach fits different system components.

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