#264 – October 19, 2025
define success for yourself rather than chasing someone else's definition
From individual contributor to leader
10 minutes by Yew Jin Lim
Yew gives six essential rules from transitioning from individual contributor to leader in his 30s. The key insights include leading with vision rather than micromanaging tasks, doing your next-level job now to make promotion inevitable, and owning failures publicly to build organizational trust. He emphasizes that you are your own safety net and should limit projects to one major unknown each. Most importantly, define success for yourself rather than chasing someone else's definition of career achievement.
Context Engineering: Why LLM’s need more than prompts and MCP servers
sponsored by Unblocked
Dennis Pilarinos AI coding agents can’t solve real engineering problems with prompts alone — it needs institutional knowledge. Context engineering puts together the right mix of your code, docs, tickets, and conversations so AI generates code that works in your system.
Work-life balance vs management
5 minutes by Suresh Choudhary
Work-life balance in modern tech jobs is more complex than the old 8-hour workday model. Knowledge workers face cognitive carryover, flexible schedules, and seasonal workloads that blur traditional boundaries. Managers should actively protect their teams' well-being because burnout leads to turnover and disrupts long-term goals. Good managers can shape healthy cultures while maintaining their own balance.
So you want to be promoted
6 minutes by Michael Lopp
Early career professionals often expect promotions to happen automatically through hard work. However, most managers are too busy to prioritize team development. Michael argues you must actively drive your own promotion process. Three key questions matter: Does your company have clear job level descriptions? Is there a regular promotion review process? Do you understand both? Companies often resist transparency due to rapid growth, inexperienced managers, legal risks, budget constraints, or past bad experiences with sharing information.
Stakeholder management
10 minutes by Roman Pichler
Without the support of the stakeholders, it is impossible to achieve product success. Aligning them, however, can be tricky. In the worst case, you experience endless meetings, conflicting opinions, and bad compromises. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Roman offers five practical measures to help you succeed with stakeholder management.
Scaling engineering teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix
6 minutes by Ido Green
Ido shares lessons on scaling teams from 10 to 1,000+ engineers based on his experience from Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Success depends on three key factors: structured goal-setting using frameworks like Google's OKRs, ruthless focus on code quality with mandatory reviews and testing, and intentional culture building through innovation time and proper onboarding. The key is measuring what matters while avoiding hero culture and manual processes that don't scale.
Turn Engineering Insights into Predictable, Faster Delivery with DevStats
sponsored by DevStats
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