Leadership in Tech
Leadership in Tech
#271 – December 07, 2025
and the math behind interruption-driven work
The math of why you can't focus at work
20 minutes by Can Duruk
In this post, Can shows what interruption-driven work looks like when you model it with math. Three simple parameters determine whether your day is productive or a write-off. Lambda measures how often you get interrupted per hour, delta tracks recovery time after each interruption, and theta is the minimum time needed for meaningful work. He simulates hundreds of days and builds a map of the entire parameter space so you can see exactly where you are and what happens when you change.
Pay for test coverage, not QA hours
sponsored by QA Wolf
Scaling QA is hard to achieve purely in-house. QA Wolf is the AI-native service that lets you pay for test coverage, not labor hours. Their automation-first approach delivers 5x faster tests, 15-minute QA cycles, human-verified bug reports, and 80% coverage in less than 4 months. See how QA Wolf delivers results.
What really happens in a board meeting
9 minutes by Kevin Goldsmith
Board meetings function like quarterly performance reviews for entire companies. The board evaluates leadership and holds executives accountable for their plans and progress. CTOs typically attend but focus on translating technical concepts into business terms rather than diving into technical details. These meetings drive the priority shifts and directional changes that employees notice afterward.
When software becomes fast food
5 minutes by João Alves
AI has made coding cheap and abundant, similar to how industrialization changed cooking. While anyone can now generate decent code with AI, this creates a power law distribution where a few expert developers become dramatically more valuable, while most compete in an oversupplied market. João argues the key is no longer writing code fast, but having judgment, system design skills, and business understanding to decide what to build.
How to articulate yourself intelligently
14 minutes by Dan Koe
Dan explains how to speak and write more intelligently by building a collection of 8-10 core ideas that can connect to any topic. Most articulate people repeat refined versions of their best ideas rather than creating new ones on the spot. Three methods help develop this skill: using problem-solution storytelling, organizing thoughts with the pyramid principle, and combining ideas from different fields.
Prevent unplanned work to unlock engineering pace
6 minutes by Jim Grey
Unplanned work like production outages and critical bugs can consume 30-40% of engineering capacity, destroying predictability and team morale. Most unplanned work falls into three categories: sources you can control, influence, or must accept. Engineering teams can eliminate controllable sources like preventable incidents and defects through better testing, monitoring, and quality practices. Jim suggests to track your planned versus unplanned work for a month to identify improvement opportunities.
Your codebase shouldn't be a mystery novel that takes 6 months to understand
sponsored by Test Double
If senior engineers can't get productive quickly, you're building debt faster than you can pay it down. And no amount of agentic coding will fix that problem on its own. But right-sizing subsystem design with seam-based modernization can help. And AI tools can make that quicker alongside test driven modernization and YAGNI principles. So your systems and teams move as fast as the business needs.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: