Engineering managers are paying the price of rising expectations | Exec Engineering #203
Also: the quiet way AI leaves you sounding expert without the skill underneath, and why the people who say competition does not matter usually already won.
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The Digest
Engineering managers are paying the price of rising expectations (Diego Quiroga / LeadDev)
If you manage engineers, the list of expectations keeps growing. Ship faster with AI, stay close to the code, coach people, influence other teams, think more strategically. Each ask is fair on its own, and that is the trap, because your attention is finite and they are all expanding at once. Something is already getting dropped every week whether you admit it or not. Diego Quirogaās move is to make that trade out loud, so your team and your own boss have something real to push on.
A Framework for New Managers Starting a New Role (James Samuel / Effective Software Leads)
The instinct in a new manager job is to prove the hire fast, so you weigh in and start making calls in week one. But what actually decides how it goes is invisible. Every company runs on an unwritten system, how decisions really get made and which behaviors quietly get rewarded, and none of it is in the handbook. Learning that system, James Samuel argues, beats any visible week-one win. Act against it by accident and you stall before you have really started.
The cost of saying yes has changed (Dalia Abuadas / The GitHub Blog)
The priciest part of a small feature used to be writing the code. Now it is often the meeting about whether to write it at all. Dalia Abuadas has a better move for that stuck debate. When an agent can draft the code in the time the team spends arguing over whether to bother, stop guessing and look at the real diff. You find out in thirty minutes what used to take two days. Her one caution is about ownership. Code being cheap to generate does not make a change cheap. It is only cheap when a person can confidently review it and stand behind what it does.
What Iād Tell My Team About Competition (Stay SaaSy)
You will hear, usually from rich people who joined a monopoly like Google late, that competition does not matter and that even watching your rivals is a little weak. Outside of a monopoly, that is bad advice. In B2B you win deals one at a time, house to house, and your win rate is the whole game. A rising one funds the next hire; a falling one starts the slide toward layoffs. This is a blunt script for a leader who needs a team to take its rivals seriously again, with no shame about it.
The competence illusion: Inoculating ourselves against the quiet cost of AI (Matt Donovan / Chief Learning Officer)
AI can leave you turning out sharp, expert-looking work while the skill underneath never really forms, so the competence you feel disappears the moment the tool does. Matt Donovan, who has spent 25 years in learning and development, felt exactly that deep in a research project with Claude, catching himself thinking, āI really understand this material now.ā Then he stopped. Did he actually understand it, or just what the tool had organized for him? He calls it a new, fifth stage of competence. His guard is to do your own first pass, before any model gets to shape what you think.
You Didnāt Hire a Slow Team (Aviv Ben-Yosef)
The headline is the whole point. When a product team feels slow, Aviv Ben-Yosef says the cause is rarely talent. It is that nobody set the appetite, the worth of the outcome and the line where good enough stops. Name that, and the work becomes finishable.
TBM 431: The Denominator That Matters (John Cutler / The Beautiful Mess)
Whether an AI mandate actually takes hold comes down to something most leaders skip, a social contract. That is the plain promise that the gains from working faster will not be used against the people who created them. John Cutlerās point is that without that promise, resistance becomes the rational move. People are protecting themselves, and often reading the shaky evidence more accurately than whoever is pushing the tool on them. Get the contract wrong and no amount of training or skill on top will save the rollout.
More reads
Failing is Common, Trying is Rare Raptitude (David Cain)
Why Reading Matters (Cal Newport)
How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty The Marginalian (Maria Popova)
Generated and suppressed demand Irrational Exuberance (Will Larson)
About Exec Engineering
Iām Yassine š I spend a big chunk of my time digging into engineering leadership, talent, and craft, plus how AI impacts all three. I share the most valuable resources I come across in this newsletter every Thursday, all curated by hand.