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.
Letting Go
Seven years ago, Liam Egan made the leap from front-end developer to manager and discovered something nobody tells you: the hardest part isn’t learning new skills, it’s unlearning old ones. The muscle memory of “I could do this better and faster myself” doesn’t disappear overnight. Neither does the instinct to have all the answers. What changed everything? Realizing that management isn’t a ladder you climb, it’s a fork in the road you choose deliberately. The dual-track career path now exists – you can stay an IC and still advance. So before you make the jump, ask the brutally honest question: do you actually want to manage people, or do you just want the salary bump? Because managers who don’t want the job create toxic cultures. If you do want it, prepare for a fundamental shift from “doing the work” to “enabling others to do the work.” That means delegation without micromanaging, adapting to everyone’s communication style instead of forcing yours, and learning from both terrible and excellent bosses. Your developer skills don’t vanish, they evolve. Problem-solving becomes roadblock-clearing. Creative thinking becomes team inspiration. And here’s the perspective shift that hits hardest: all those management decisions that seemed arbitrary when you were an IC? They’re suddenly yours to make, juggling budgets, client relationships, strategy, and the career growth of actual humans. Start practicing “managing up” now – bring solutions, not just problems. Make your manager’s job easier. You’ll build the exact skills you’ll need when it’s your turn to lead.
— Piccalilli, 8m, #leadership, #career, #delegation
Taste Beats Skill
Here’s the dirty secret about engineering debates: nobody actually knows who’s right. The engineer raging about for-loops versus map/filter? They’re not having a technical argument – they’re having a values argument dressed up in semicolons. Good taste in software isn’t about knowing the “best” way to do things (there isn’t one). It’s about matching your engineering values to the project you’re actually working on, not the project you wish you were working on. Bad taste is the broken compass that points north only when you happen to be standing in the right spot – it’s the engineer evangelizing formal methods for your internal metrics dashboard, or demanding five-nines reliability for a tool three people use. The values themselves – resiliency, speed, readability, correctness, flexibility – aren’t the problem. The problem is engineers who treat their preferences like universal laws. Good taste is flexible. It’s knowing when to care about performance over readability, when to trade scalability for development speed, when to ship the messy thing that works instead of the elegant thing that doesn’t. You develop it by working on different projects and paying attention to which decisions made your life easier and which ones made you want to flip tables.
— Sean Goedecke, 8m, #engineering, #leadership, #decision-making
The Quiet Crisis
You’re solving hard problems with elegant solutions, but here’s the rub: nobody sees it. Wes Kao flips the script on impostor syndrome with a concept that’ll hit home for every leader who’s ever felt undervalued. Regular impostor syndrome is when others think you’re great but you don’t believe it. Reverse impostor syndrome? You know you’re good – your work proves it – but your external brand doesn’t match your internal capabilities. The problem isn’t your competence, it’s visibility. Your best work happens behind closed doors. Your manager might not even grasp the creativity involved in what you do daily. Meanwhile, the world judges you by lazy proxies: job titles, company logos, social proof. The solution isn’t therapy to boost confidence – it’s strategic positioning. You need to learn how to talk about your work without feeling like a fraud or a self-promoter. It’s not about becoming a “great talker” instead of a “great doer.” It’s about ensuring your outsides match your insides, so the people making decisions about your career actually understand what you bring to the table. If you’ve ever felt resentful watching less-capable colleagues get promoted because they’re better at talking about their work, this one’s for you.
Editor’s note: if you’re using Steady, here’s an agent that will deliver a brief of your accomplishments to your feed/Slack DM/inbox once a week.
— Wes Kao Newsletter, 7m, #leadership, #communication, #career
Box Yourself In
Here’s the thing about those perpetually late, bloated projects: they’re usually drowning in freedom, not suffering from limitations. James Stanier makes a compelling case that constraints aren’t the enemy – they’re your secret weapon. Think about it: Twitter forced brevity and changed how we communicate. Dyson couldn’t use bags and revolutionized vacuum cleaners. The Walkman had to fit in your pocket and created an entirely new market. The piece introduces a five-step algorithm: question every requirement (especially from smart people who assume their needs are gospel), delete unnecessary steps until it hurts, optimize only what’s left, accelerate your learning cycles, and automate dead last. The framework cuts across the classic project management triangle – scope, resources, and time – but reframes these as active levers you pull, not passive trade-offs you accept. Want to ship faster? Stop asking “how long will this take?” and start demanding “what’s the fastest we could do this?” Want better work? Give your team fewer people, less money, and tighter deadlines. It sounds backward, but the evidence is everywhere: constraints don’t limit great work, they create it.
— The Engineering Manager, 8m, #constraints, #prioritization, #shipping
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