When everyone ships and nobody decides
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems that their colleagues have to spend time solving. That’s why many tech companies try to build a small, ludicrously well-paid team instead of a large team of more average engineers, and why so far this seems to be a winning strategy.
The golden mean of design and engineering - The Intercom Blog
For great products to be built, both design and engineering need to be in balance. If you have a super strong engineering team but a weak or underserved design team, you will struggle.
Good engineers are right, a lot
It's an iffy Amazon leadership principle but a great engineering metric
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Shape Up will help you break free of “best practices” that aren’t really working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects your team can celebrate.
Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear
In early 2023 at an offsite in Tenerife, our European engineering team did a series of exercises that ended up changing the way we work.
Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
In this article, the author shares their experience as an engineering manager and the challenges they faced when trying to reach alignment and prev...
A Guide to Measuring Engineering Team Performance
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While software development practices constantly change, there will always be a tier of truly top engineering teams who stand above…
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers
Software engineer Charity Majors challenges the "10x engineer" myth, arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance. She encourages building workplaces where "normal" engineers can thrive. Are we focusing too much on hiring "the best" instead of the right people?
Why AI Makes Things Worse for Enterprise Teams, by Paul Ford
Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and
The Biggest Mistake I See Engineers Make
Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others. I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. As an IC, it’s a mistake I made many, many times early in my ow...
The Paradox of Perfection: When ‘Good Enough’ is Actually Better
Exploring the tension between engineering perfectionism and pragmatic delivery. Discover why striving for the perfect solution often prevents us from shipping valuable improvements and how to find the balance.
The engineering manager's attention budget
Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them
the senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Engineering managers have a new job description
Why engineering managers are expected to be hands-on again and how AI tools are making it possible to stay technically sharp while still leading.
The Engineering Leadership Report 2026
Our survey of 600 engineering leaders exploring how the role is evolving, where the challenges lie, and what the future holds for the job.
Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that individual productivity is... Read more »