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.
Superpower or Liability
Your fast decision-making saved the last sprint, but it’s why this quarter’s strategic bet is heading off a cliff. Dave Anderson nails the paradox every manager eventually hits: the exact traits that got you promoted become the ceiling stopping your next level up. Quick decisions prevent bureaucratic gridlock but multiply costly mistakes. Deep analytical thinking solves complex problems but paralyzes your team waiting for perfect information. Love of learning generates creative solutions but creates execution chaos when you pivot every sprint. The uncomfortable truth: your natural behavior is often exactly wrong for the situation you’re in. And the higher you climb, the more contexts demand operating against your instincts. Anderson offers three moves: avoid work that doesn’t fit your wiring, delegate to people whose strengths compensate for your gaps, or do the hardest thing: actively reverse your defaults when the situation demands it. Career longevity isn’t about doubling down on your strengths; it’s about building the behavioral range to choose the right mode for the moment, even when it feels deeply unnatural.
— Scarlet Ink, 6m, #leadership, #management, #self-awareness
Vague Is Expensive
Your team just spent an hour nodding through priorities, and everyone left with a different list. Deb Liu names the tax you’re paying: “messy yeses” – those comfortable half-commitments that delay the inevitable fight until it’s twice as expensive to have. The promotion you promised “soon” without criteria. The project marked urgent but starved of resources. The feature squeezed into the roadmap without cutting something else. Every vague agreement feels like progress in the room, but it’s just compound interest on the conflict you’ll pay later. Liu learned this watching teams endlessly re-litigate decisions because nobody forced clarity the first time. The fix? Make disagreement visible before pretending it’s resolved. Her VP of Growth used a brutal but effective move: forced everyone to document their position in a shared spreadsheet, exposing a dozen hidden conflicts beneath the surface-level nods. The pattern holds across five practical methods – pre-work that surfaces conflicts before meetings, forced rank-ordering where if nothing hurts you haven’t decided, live note-taking that captures commitments in real-time, verbal restatements so everyone confirms they heard the same thing, and running alignment docs to prevent drift.
— Deb Liu, 7m, #leadership, #coordination, #decision-making
The Paradox Economy
Here’s the cognitive dissonance keeping tech leaders up at night: global jobs data says software engineering roles are holding steady, yet everyone you know with engineering talent is either laid off or terrified. Welcome to the bifurcation economy, where aggregate numbers mask individual pain. Kelli Korducki unpacks the contradiction: US tech job postings are down 36% since 2020, UK graduate positions cut by 46% in the past year alone, and juniors are competing against seniors for entry-level roles. Yet the World Economic Forum names software developers the third-largest growing job category through 2030, and half of tech employers expect headcount growth. The unlock? Skills. Companies are slashing broad-based hiring while desperately seeking AI implementation talent, cloud migration specialists, and cybersecurity experts. The bar isn’t just rising; it’s stratifying the entire profession into those who can navigate agentic coding tools and complex systems versus those executing commoditized work. Cover letters are dead, replaced by GitHub portfolios and take-home assessments. Academic credentials matter less than certifications and demonstrable skills. Soft skills – the ability to navigate complexity and lead strategically – now separate survivors from casualties.
— LeadDev, 4m, #engineering, #hiring, #ai
Proven, Not Generated
Simon Willison draws a line in the sand: if you’re submitting pull requests expecting your reviewer to figure out whether the code actually works, you’ve failed at your job. The AI coding boom has turbocharged a familiar anti-pattern where junior engineers ship large, untested changesets and treat code review as QA. Willison’s professional standard is unambiguous: your job isn’t to generate code, it’s to deliver code you’ve proven works. That means two things before you hit submit: manual verification where you personally witness the feature functioning (documented with terminal commands and output or screen recordings), and automated tests that fail if someone reverts your implementation. The excuse that testing is hard evaporated when LLMs became capable of writing tests alongside code. Yet the temptation remains to skip verification and let reviewers carry the burden. Willison’s remedy? Train your AI coding agents to prove their own work by running CLI tools, capturing screenshots, and generating tests as part of the development workflow itself. The broader lesson cuts through all the AI productivity hype: tools that make code generation effortless also make untested code effortless, and that’s where professional discipline separates engineers from mere coders.
— Simon Willison, 5m, #engineering, #ai, #testing
The Protocol You Can’t Replace
Every few years, a new wave of developers discovers Microsoft Word and decides it needs replacing. Google Docs will democratize collaboration. Markdown will bring sanity to formatting. Notion will modernize everything. And every time, lawyers look up from their redlines and politely decline. Jordan Bryan explains why: engineers treat Word like software when it’s actually infrastructure. The .docx format is the network protocol underpinning legal agreements across society – every counterparty, precedent, and court expects it. Unlike coders who can convince their team to switch to Markdown internally, lawyers operate in a decentralized ecosystem where abandoning Word means incompatibility with everyone else. The formatting arguments developers dismiss as vanity are actually compliance requirements: courts mandate specific typefaces, margins, and multi-level clause numbering. Small caps aren’t aesthetics; they’re how legal contracts work. The Markdown solution developers champion would require encoding every specialized legal formatting need, ultimately recreating Word’s complexity in plaintext form – except now it’s harder to use. The broader lesson cuts across domains: when you think users are stuck with inferior tools, you might be projecting your workflow preferences onto requirements you don’t understand. Word survives because it solves the actual problem, not the one developers wish existed. Innovation happens when you build around immovable infrastructure, not when you waste years trying to replace it.
— Version Story, 8m, #systems, #product, #strategy
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.
Team capacity — Perfect timing for the holiday season: this Echo compiles “who’s out in the month ahead” into a weekly breakdown so you can plan around PTO instead of getting blindsided by it. No more hunting through Slack messages, calendar overlays, and HR systems to figure out if you’ve actually got the people you need to ship that thing.
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.
Join the thousands of teams staying in sync, avoiding burnout, and moving 3X faster with Steady.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
Editor’s note: The Steady Beat is taking a break for the holidays, see you in 2026!
