#254 – August 10, 2025
most of the gaps comes from their strengths
Common problems managing senior engineers
6 minutes by Suresh Choudhary
The four hardest senior engineers to manage and how to coach them. Senior engineers are an asset. But they do need your help to overcome some of their blind spots to grow. They don’t need micromanaging, they need coaching. Remember that most of these gaps comes from their strengths.
Tired of Cursor bouncing between dead ends?
sponsored by Unblocked
Unblocked’s MCP gives your AI-powered IDE’s the missing context from tools like Slack, Confluence, and Jira, so they generate usable code the first time.
How to be an empathetic manager
9 minutes by Wes Kao
You don't need to absorb everyone’s frustrations. Here’s how to listen to grievances without having folks dump their frustrations onto you.
From memo to movement
17 minutes by First Round
When Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke publicly released an internal memo declaring reflexive AI usage a baseline expectation at Shopify, the format became a genre — Box, Fiverr and even the Prime Minister of Canada quickly shared their own versions externally, while many more companies did so internally. What happened inside the company after Lütke hit send?
Why remote managers burn out without knowing it
8 minutes by Alex Ponomarev
Remote work doesn’t magically fix your work-life balance. But it can give you the freedom to build one that works — if you’re willing to experiment, listen to yourself, and take it seriously. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that there’s no universal “right” way to do remote work. It’s trial and error.
You have too many metrics
5 minutes by Stay Saasy
The golden rule of metrics is that any metric you maintain should directly drive action if outside expected bounds, as metrics are costly to set up and maintain. A good metric requires regular review to ensure accuracy, clear expectations of behavior, and prioritization of action when those expectations aren't met.
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: