You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace – whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
The Honest Unknown
Here’s a refreshing take amid the AI hype cycle: nobody actually knows what’s coming. Addy Osmani sidesteps the prediction game entirely, instead mapping five critical questions that will shape whether the next two years are brutal or brilliant for software teams. The data points are sobering – Harvard research shows junior developer employment drops 9-10% within six quarters when companies adopt generative AI, even as overall industry projections remain sunny. But the real insight isn’t about doom or boom; it’s about organizational choice. Companies treating AI as a labor replacement tool will create one future. Those using it for team amplification will create another. The developers who’ll thrive aren’t the ones frantically learning every new tool – they’re the T-shaped ones combining deep expertise with broad adaptability, shifting from code implementers to system composers who orchestrate AI agents while defining strategy. With 84% of developers now using AI assistance regularly, the question isn’t whether your team will change, but whether you’re designing that change intentionally. The most dangerous move right now isn’t picking the wrong prediction – it’s pretending certainty exists when it doesn’t.
— Addy Osmani, 8m, #ai, #engineering, #strategy
The Interest Compounds
Technical debt gets (mostly) tracked in tickets. Culture debt doesn’t get tracked at all – until it explodes. Mike Fisher draws a sharp parallel between the shortcuts we take in code and the shortcuts we take in how people work together, but with a crucial difference: you can refactor bad code over a weekend; you can’t refactor broken trust. Culture debt accumulates invisibly every time what you reward diverges from what you say you value. Tell people you prize collaboration while promoting lone wolves. Preach work-life balance while celebrating the midnight hero. Employees aren’t stupid – they adapt to survive the real incentive system, not the one on your careers page. The case studies are damning: Uber’s “move fast” ethos created the conditions for Susan Fowler’s harassment nightmare. Wells Fargo’s impossible sales quotas normalized fraud. Boeing’s cost obsession silenced the engineers who could have prevented fatal crashes. Each organization had lovely stated values; each had quietly built a culture that contradicted them. The antidote isn’t another values workshop – it’s making culture a C-suite responsibility, defining behaviors instead of abstractions, and rewarding the people who tell uncomfortable truths. Netflix figured this out by continuously redefining their culture as they scaled. Most companies just let the debt compound until the bill comes due.
— Fish Food for Thought, 6m, #culture, #leadership, #systems
Busy Isn’t Fast
Your team shipped 47 story points last sprint. Congratulations – nobody outside engineering cares. Brian Guthrie’s manifesto cuts through the velocity theater to reveal what speed actually means: lead time. Wall-clock time from “we need this” to “it’s in production.” Not how hard you worked, not how many tickets you closed, but how long the customer waited. The reality? Most of that time isn’t spent coding – it’s spent waiting. Waiting for code review. Waiting for decisions. Waiting for deploys. Waiting for someone to unblock something. A team grinding through heroic 60-hour weeks can still be slower than one working sustainable hours with clean handoffs. Guthrie rejects the tired “fast vs. good” tradeoff entirely: poor quality creates rework that destroys lead time, making disciplined engineering the fastest path, not the scenic route. But the real barrier isn’t technical – it’s courage. Moving fast means making decisions with incomplete information, and most organizations punish that more than they punish slow caution. The manifesto’s most actionable insight: stop optimizing for utilization and start hunting idle time. Every hour your code sits waiting for review is an hour your competitor might be shipping.
— Brian Guthrie, 10m, #engineering, #productivity, #leadership
Rot From the Top
Your team’s dysfunction isn’t homegrown – they learned it from watching you. This blunt piece maps five patterns that turn leadership teams into organizational bottlenecks, and the uncomfortable truth is how quickly each one cascades downward. When executives debate endlessly without committing to decisions, middle managers learn that action is optional and commitments are flexible. When the C-suite avoids conflict to preserve harmony, teams bury disagreements until they explode into something worse. When leaders play politics over progress, silos harden and collaboration dies. The “false urgency” trap is particularly insidious: treating everything as critical creates reactive chaos that crowds out actual strategic thinking, burning out your best people on shallow solutions to yesterday’s emergencies. But the sleeper dysfunction might be “comfort over curiosity” – leaders who’ve stopped questioning assumptions because things are working well enough. That’s how market leaders become case studies in disruption. The fix isn’t a workshop or an offsite; it’s naming these patterns out loud and assigning actual owners to decisions with actual deadlines. Your team is watching how you handle disagreement, how you prioritize, how you follow through. They’re not listening to your values deck – they’re modeling your behavior. The culture you tolerate at the top is the culture you’ll get everywhere else.
— HackerNoon, 6m, #leadership, #culture, #management
Echo of the Week
Echoes are AI agents in Steady that automatically gather and deliver work context to teams on a schedule – answering recurring questions about progress, capacity, and coordination so you stop burning hours assembling the same information manually.
Big-picture intentions — This Echo summarizes all newly created goals across your organization on a monthly basis. In growing companies, missing emerging initiatives means missing where the company is headed. Get automatic visibility into new strategic directions so you can identify overlaps, catch misalignments early, and understand resource allocation without manually tracking every team’s roadmap.
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Your team loses 21 hours per person, per week slogging through status meetings and hunting for context across chats, docs, and dashboards.
Steady’s AI agents eliminate this coordination tax by continuously delivering personalized guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention across the whole team.
Stay in sync, cut out bad meetings, and ship great work faster.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
