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The Engineering Manager

theengineeringmanager.com

-- Empowering ourselves to empower others.

Engineering management / careers

’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
176 from 16 Jun 2017 to 19 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (13 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/feed/

2026 11

  1. Put a name on it
  2. Nobody needs a human router
  3. Landing the plane
  4. Code Yellow, Code Red
  5. The right kind of AI sceptic
  6. Earn your scepticism
  7. Distilling leadership wisdom
  8. Who will be the senior engineers of 2035?
  9. Slow down to speed up
  10. One list to rule them all
  11. One bottleneck at a time

2025 12

  1. Use it or lose it
  2. Invert, always invert
  3. Councils of agents: group thinking with LLMs
  4. The beauty of constraints
  5. Going direct
  6. Leadership co-processing with LLMs
  7. New advice for aspiring managers
  8. A bag of worries: tackling overwhelm with LLMs
  9. A weekly mind meld
  10. LLMs: An Operator’s View
  11. Should managers still code?
  12. Gather, decide, execute: reflecting on my daily system

2024 13

  1. 2024 Year In Review: Efficiency, Optimism, and Not Getting Left Behind
  2. Being in the details
  3. Solving staffing challenges with concentric circles
  4. What does a date actually mean?
  5. Become a Great Engineering Leader is now in print
  6. Heartbeats: Keeping Strategies Alive
  7. Scope? How about we talk about thoroughness instead?
  8. Deltas to the Global Maxima: Better Career Conversations
  9. The Disappointment Frontier
  10. The Tarzan Method
  11. Performance Management: The Rising Tide
  12. Parkinson’s Law: It’s Real, So Use It
  13. Trifectas Go All The Way Up

2023 10

  1. The problem with your manager
  2. The tragedy of the common leader
  3. It’s all just leadership after all
  4. Manage Your Capacity, Not Your Time
  5. How Many Direct Reports Should a Manager Have?
  6. Growth in a downturn: progression when you can’t progress
  7. Read widely, apply selectively, share regardless
  8. Should I change job? Earn, learn or quit.
  9. There is no number one tip
  10. Fast-forwarding decision making

2022 15

  1. Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg
  2. Get straight to the point
  3. Moving house is like building software
  4. What are leading and lagging indicators?
  5. My energy is a linear function, until it isn’t
  6. How do I deal with my manager changing?
  7. How do I make sure my work is visible?
  8. How do I get better at giving feedback?
  9. How do I progress to the next level in my career?
  10. How do I get better at writing?
  11. Remote-first communication at Shopify
  12. Book discussion with Lead Dev
  13. A couple of podcasts
  14. Effective Remote Work is out in print
  15. What Great Hybrid Cultures Do Differently

2021 7

  1. Planning for momentum
  2. Effective Remote Work is out in beta
  3. The spectrum of humanity
  4. The spectrum of permanence
  5. The spectrum of synchronousness
  6. Treat everyone as remote
  7. 2020: a year spent remotely

2020 15

  1. Upcoming December talks
  2. If you’re repeating yourself, debug it
  3. Less status updates, more coaching
  4. Delegation creates career progression
  5. Don’t make yourself redundant
  6. Recent videos and podcasts
  7. Bucketing your time
  8. Forming the unicorn
  9. Skip-level meetings
  10. Managing through interfaces
  11. One-to-one meetings: a podcast
  12. VP, Director, what?
  13. The path to managing managers
  14. Watch my talk on delegation
  15. My book has been released in beta

2019 20

  1. I have a book deal
  2. #NoDeployFriday: helpful or harmful?
  3. Coding Bootcamps: a Glimpse at the Future of Education?
  4. We Must Fix AI’s Diversity Problem
  5. Does the UK Really Think it Can Police the Internet?
  6. The Rebellion Against China’s 996 Culture
  7. The Unhappy Middle of the Gig Economy
  8. Who Pays the Price for Selling $10 Bills for $5?
  9. Zoom: An IPO Done Right?
  10. Is software literally eating the world?
  11. Surely we’re more than our jobs
  12. Growth, but at what cost?
  13. Carve out your own thinking space
  14. Who could be your Jeff Dean?
  15. Working from home: the yin and yang
  16. How to share just enough information
  17. Commit and figure it out
  18. The joy of caretaking
  19. Towards remote working
  20. Flexibility is the greatest perk

2018 45

  1. Management bugs: 18 months later
  2. Let’s make a space for developers
  3. Collaborating with marketing on launches
  4. Engineering a successful product launch
  5. How to tackle technical debt
  6. Switching to a remote manager
  7. Why do we have process anyway?
  8. A fistful of radishes
  9. Ownership
  10. What does beta really mean?
  11. Project X
  12. The trichotomy of control
  13. Work doesn’t have to be your everything
  14. Don’t make your staff afraid to fail
  15. When everything blows up
  16. Algorithms to make you more effective
  17. The case for building from source
  18. That massive email
  19. Not invented here, revisited
  20. Is the HP Way still relevant today?
  21. The importance of writing
  22. The Eye of Sauron
  23. Competitive sitting and leaving loudly
  24. How do data science projects work?
  25. Why I couldn’t write a manager README
  26. Can optimism ever be bad?
  27. What does trust have to do with Israeli day care centers?
  28. Keeping your 1 to 1s fresh
  29. Job hopping and what you can do about it
  30. First principles and asking why
  31. Working with Sales
  32. Working with Product Marketing
  33. Engineering at scale is a people problem
  34. Workplace politics
  35. Influence
  36. Letting go of control
  37. Chits
  38. Failing fast
  39. Force multipliers
  40. Step outside of your comfort zone
  41. Leadership through kindness
  42. The relationship with Product
  43. Dealing with different personalities
  44. Management bugs
  45. There’s no shame in going back

2017 28

  1. Coaching
  2. The contribution curve
  3. Mount Stupid
  4. Your career is your responsibility
  5. The sophomore slump
  6. Cadence
  7. Your levers: scope, resources and time
  8. Why is Engineering getting so slow?
  9. The stick
  10. Scrutiny and judgement
  11. Wobble
  12. When people leave
  13. Rockstars and superstars
  14. Your network inside the business
  15. Culture
  16. Doing interviews: the other side of the table
  17. Attracting people to work for you
  18. The two tracks of growth
  19. Performance reviews
  20. Bringing yourself to work
  21. Giving feedback
  22. Delegation
  23. Managing upwards
  24. The 4 key managerial activities
  25. Feeling productive
  26. 1 to 1s
  27. Contracting
  28. Your first day on the job