#248 – June 29, 2025
and what can you do about it
Why engineers hate their managers
6 minutes by Matheus Lima
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: engineers often have good reasons to be frustrated with their managers. But understanding why this happens is the first step toward fixing (or just coping with?) it.
Ship software faster with experienced engineers
sponsored by Lemon.io
Rigorously vetted and curated developers from around Europe and Latin America. Lemon.io helps you hire talent fast, on budget, and with month-to-month flexibility.
What happens when leader moves up but their bad decision remains
9 minutes by Matt Martin
How leaders often escape accountability for their bad decisions after being promoted to new roles, leaving subsequent teams to deal with the consequences. Matt argues that leadership accountability has an expiration date in many organizations and proposes tracking decisions by name, conducting anonymous feedback during leadership transitions, and implementing provisional promotion periods to assess the long-term impact of a leader's decisions.
Expert Generalists
8 minutes by Martin Fowler
Martin argues against the trend of narrow specialization in tech jobs, advocating instead for generalists who combine deep knowledge in one area with broad capabilities across many domains. Their three key characteristics are: curiosity to explore new domains, collaborativeness with specialists, and customer focus that directs their learning toward outcomes.
Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
12 minutes by Jason Cohen
Because time is zero-sum, prioritization is mandatory. This is an index of purpose-built prioritization frameworks, and an overarching one to optimize your life. The article presents a "10x/0.1x Prioritization Framework" suggesting we focus on high-impact "10x tasks" that transform organizations while minimizing or eliminating low-value "0.1x tasks."
SLA vs SLO
11 minutes by Alex Ewerlöf
Alex shows that SLAs are legal contracts with financial or legal consequences when breached, while SLOs are internal targets without explicit penalties. This distinction matters for reliability engineering, as confusing the two can lead to misaligned expectations and accountability issues in service management.
OWASP Top 10 for LLMs
sponsored by Snyk
LLMs introduce new security challenges. In this live session, Snyk expert and OWASP Leader, Vandana Verma Sehgal, will present the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, detailing key vulnerabilities and sharing actionable strategies for securing AI-assisted development in real-world environments. Avoid threats like prompt injection, model poisoning, and learn the best practices for handling AI-generated code securely. Join the webinar on July 15 11:00am ET.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: