Best of Leadership — April 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of zaidesantonManager.dev·5w

    The engineering manager's attention budget

    Engineering managers have 100 'attention points' to distribute across five key areas: Delivery, People, Customers & Support, Technical Direction, and Team Future. Most EMs default to only 2-3 areas out of habit rather than intentional allocation. The '10-60 rule' suggests keeping at least 10 points in every area to prevent degradation, while avoiding going over 60 in any single area to prevent neglect elsewhere. Each area is described with minimum viable behaviors, examples of deeper engagement, and the failure modes of under- or over-investing. The framework encourages EMs to periodically audit their attention distribution and adapt to what their team actually needs at a given moment.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of zaidesantonManager.dev·4w

    Managing a team that didn't choose you

    An Engineering Manager shares an honest retrospective of his first 6 months taking over an existing team at HoneyBook. He describes three key challenges: abandoning his planned technical onboarding when he discovered the team had been without real management for 6 months and needed people-focused leadership; over-pressuring the team to hit sprint goals without sufficient technical context, leading to burnout and pushback from a senior engineer; and discovering 21 neglected support tickets that required a focused 'hotfixing blitz' to resolve. The core lesson is that rigid 30-60-90 onboarding plans fail in practice — constant adaptation, paying attention to team signals, and willingness to course-correct matter far more than any pre-made plan.

  3. 3
    Video
    Avatar of continuousdeliveryContinuous Delivery·7w

    The Junior Developer CRISIS: How to Build a Team When AI Does the Entry-Level Work

    A 30-year software engineering veteran argues that comparing LLMs/AI agents to junior developers is fundamentally wrong and does a disservice to both. Junior developers are curious, eager to learn, retain knowledge, and grow — they are humans at the 'conscious incompetence' stage. AI agents, by contrast, are transactional, stateless, lack memory across sessions, have no accountability, and don't care about your codebase or users. The author coins the analogy of 'Colin the contractor' — brilliant for narrow, well-defined tasks but unreliable and mercenary. Practical advice includes: give AI small, clearly articulated steps with frequent validation; give junior devs breakable toys, pair programming, and actionable feedback. The author warns that people equating the two either treat junior devs as robots or want to justify replacing them with AI — both problematic. The post ends with a tip to de-anthropomorphize AI interactions by configuring it to respond like a text-based adventure game.

  4. 4
    Article
    Avatar of techworld-with-milanTech World With Milan·5w

    The 20 Software Engineering Laws

    A curated overview of 20 foundational software engineering laws that explain why projects fail, systems grow complex, and teams slow down. Covers laws grouped into six themes: how systems get built (Gall's Law, KISS, Conway's Law, Hyrum's Law, CAP Theorem, Zawinski's Law), how teams lose speed (Brooks's Law, Ringelmann Effect, Price's Law), why plans drift (Hofstadter's Law, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Parkinson's Law), how metrics distort work (Goodhart's Law, Gilb's Law), what breaks under load (Knuth's Optimization Principle, Amdahl's Law, Murphy's Law, Postel's Law), and how to judge better (Sturgeon's Law, Cunningham's Law). Each law is explained with real-world examples from software history and the author's personal career. The post also promotes the author's book covering 56 such laws.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of staysaasyStay SaaSy·6w

    High Amplitude Disagreeableness

    Startup people share a distinctive trait called 'high amplitude disagreeableness' — they may not argue constantly, but when they do, they go all-in, publicly and persistently. This stems from a creator mindset rather than an extractor mindset. Managers who want to attract and retain entrepreneurial talent need to match that intensity themselves, build cultures that tolerate strong disagreement without punishment, and avoid being confidently wrong — because startup people will remember and hold it against you.

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    Article
    Avatar of frederickvanbrabantFrederick's delirious rantings·7w

    "What’s In It For Me" Architecture

    Technical excellence in architecture means nothing without the ability to get it implemented. Architects must understand the different motivations of stakeholders — project managers care about scope and cost, engineers care about their working environment, executives care about TCO and speed to market. Effective architects play devil's advocate to prepare counterarguments, use pilots to test contested ideas, and build informal influence with decision-makers. The role demands far more people management and political navigation than most technically-minded architects expect.

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    Article
    Avatar of rm1zzq7mb7lxpwcwe0kbeVangelis Sigalas·5w

    The 10x Developer Myth Is Quietly Burning People Out

    The '10x developer' myth — the idea that elite engineers consistently outperform peers by a factor of ten — is critiqued as harmful fiction that drives burnout, fear of asking for help, and toxic team cultures. What's labeled '10x' is usually explained by context, fewer distractions, or task familiarity rather than innate genius. The most valuable developers aren't the fastest but those who elevate teammates, write maintainable code, communicate well, and remain consistent over time. The post advocates replacing the 10x ideal with sustainable, reliable contribution and warns against comparing daily reality to others' curated social media highlights.

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    Article
    Avatar of techleaddigestTech Lead Digest·5w

    On Being Bossy

    A personal essay by Caroline Lau reflecting on being labeled 'bossy' throughout her life — from a middle school snack sale to a chemical plant in West Texas to a startup Slack channel. She reframes bossiness not as a flaw but as a skill that requires self-awareness, coalition-building, and reading the room. Through three distinct experiences, she illustrates how the same instinct to improve things can be vulnerable when isolated, powerful when strategic, and influential when translated to fit the environment. Her conclusion: the world needs more women who have learned to be bossy well, not fewer.

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    Article
    Avatar of harasim-devHarasim.dev·7w

    Glue Work: The Invisible Effort That Actually Ships Products ‣ harasim.dev

    Glue work — the invisible labor of mentoring, refactoring, documentation, and team alignment — is what actually keeps software projects running, yet it rarely appears in Jira tickets or performance reviews. Research suggests up to 50% of technical work is invisible to at least one stakeholder, and teams may spend 40% of their time on unrecorded tasks. Developers who absorb too much glue work risk career stagnation and burnout, while organizations that ignore it accumulate technical debt and hidden capacity loss. The post covers how to shift from 'accidental' to 'intentional' glue through brag documents, reframed communication, async written records, and organizational practices like refactoring budgets, wins channels, and rotational roles. It also surveys engineering analytics tools (Swarmia, LinearB, DX) and AI-assisted PR review tools (CodeRabbit, GitHub Copilot) that can surface invisible contributions automatically. A practical audit checklist and retrospective questions are included for engineering managers.

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