#238 – April 20, 2025
staying too long under poor strategic leadership wastes valuable career time
Stop Working for Loser Strategists
8 minutes by Roger Martin
Roger advises young professionals working under incompetent strategists to quit after no more than two years rather than remain in what he calls a "kill zone." He argues that without a coherent strategy, it becomes impossible to evaluate whether decisions are good or bad until it's too late, making work essentially random and wasted effort. While he recommends trying to implement your own strategy and potentially influence your boss, Martin emphasizes that staying too long under poor strategic leadership wastes valuable career time.
Developers don’t need more documentation
sponsored by Unblocked
Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?
Mistakes you shouldn’t let your reports make
4 minutes by Bjorn Roche
Common wisdom tells us to let people you manage make mistakes, but there are times leader must head-off mistakes. In this post Bjorn identifies key examples of major mistakes to prevent, including starting projects that won't ship or benefit the company, and making decisions that commit the organization to poor long-term fits. Leaders should stay sufficiently involved to anticipate potential issues and ensure team goals are clearly communicated, while still fostering a culture where appropriate risk-taking is encouraged.
Tech Bet
14 minutes by Alex Ewerlöf
Dive deep into the differences between tech debt and tech bet in Alex's insightful post and learn about the proactive nature of tech bet versus the reactive aspect of tech debt, and how each impacts engineering and product management. Alex presents real-world examples of overengineering, premature optimization, and cargo-culting, illustrating the costly consequences of tech gamble. He laso provides valuable insights into recognizing and avoiding excessive technology.
Laws every business leader should know
5 minutes by Fredrik Delin
Fredrik discusses essential leadership principles for tech leaders, emphasizing that effective leadership requires human connection rather than traditional authority. He explores various laws and principles that can guide communication and collaboration, including Betteridge's law, Hanlon's razor, and the Streisand effect. He also covers practical management concepts like Goodhart's law and the Peter principle, concluding with insights on navigating organizational dynamics and change management through principles like the Shirky principle and the laws of unintended consequences.
Your Strengths Are Your Weaknesses
3 minutes by Matheus Lima
In this article Matheus explores how engineers' greatest strengths and most frustrating weaknesses are often the same trait manifesting differently depending on context. He shares personal experience of how his coding speed was both praised and became the source of quality issues and also recommends three practical management strategies which can help.
How To Convince Others That You Are Qualified and Ready To Lead
6 minutes by Yue Zhao
You have functional expertise. You are a great mentor. You've led impactful new initiatives. Yet, you aren't able to land leadership level roles. In this guide Yue shows you how to pitch your qualifications better.
Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: