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.
Document Your Wins
Amazon asked employees this month to submit three to five examples of their best work. DOGE demanded government workers list their accomplishments. CBS News’s new editor wants staffers to explain how they spend their days. If you’re waiting for your employer to ask the same question before you start tracking your contributions, you’ve already lost. The smart move is maintaining what career coaches call a “brag book” (or “yay folder” or “smile file”): a running log of your professional wins that you update in real-time, not when HR comes knocking. The immediate benefit is obvious: you’ll have ammunition for performance reviews, promotion cycles, and job searches. But the deeper value is fighting recency bias. Your manager remembers what you shipped last month; they’ve already forgotten that client save from March. And here’s the thing – you probably have too! Beyond metrics your company already tracks, capture the qualitative stuff: the thank-you note from a difficult stakeholder, the moment you unblocked a stuck project, the praise that flew by in Slack. One job seeker in the article landed a new role in 20 days partly because her brag binder made crafting a strong résumé trivially easy.
Editor’s note: here’s a quick video showing you how you can automate a “brag doc” for yourself in Steady right now.
— WSJ, 6m, #careers, #productivity, #self-advocacy
Stories Over Skills
The technical interview gauntlet gets all the prep time, but it’s the behavioral round that increasingly determines whether you land at senior or mid-level. As AI handles more implementation work, Big Tech companies are betting that soft skills – ownership, communication, navigating ambiguity – are the real differentiators. Yet most engineers treat behavioral prep as an afterthought, then fumble through rambling war stories when asked about conflict resolution. The fix is a systematic approach: build a catalog of 3-4 core stories covering multi-team coordination, technical decisions with business impact, conflict resolution, and handling ambiguity. Then learn to decode what interviewers actually want. When they ask about a manager disagreement, they’re not seeking the literal story, they’re probing how you handle authority. The CARL framework (Context, Actions, Results, Learnings) keeps you structured, but the secret sauce is selecting stories by scope first, not relevance. A cross-org initiative that tangentially relates to the question beats a perfectly matched but small-scale example every time. The biggest trap? Unprocessed emotional baggage. If you’re still bitter about that reorg or blame-shifting onto a former manager, interviewers will notice.
— Engineering Leadership, 8m, #careers, #interviewing, #leadership
The Vibe Coding Hangover
Two years ago, Mo Bitar went all-in on AI coding agents. Today, he’s back to writing code by hand, and claims he’s faster for it. Here’s his arc: initial wins on isolated tasks bred confidence, which led to increasingly ambitious projects, which produced what he bluntly calls “slop.” The core problem isn’t that AI writes bad code in isolation (it often doesn’t). It’s that agents optimize locally while ignoring the whole. Each pull request looks reasonable; the accumulated codebase reads like a novel with plausible paragraphs that don’t form coherent chapters. Subtle inconsistencies compound until even the AI gets confused by its own work. Worse, developers lose the deep understanding that lets them troubleshoot without assistance. Bitar identifies the trap: when AI fails, we blame our prompts and try harder specifications. But this is waterfall thinking dressed in new clothes – the assumption that you can fully spec a system upfront instead of evolving it iteratively. After reviewing months of agent-generated code, he concluded the accumulated tech debt made manual coding more productive overall. AI coding tools aren’t useless; they’re genuinely helpful for boilerplate and exploration. It’s that shipping production systems still requires human judgment about architectural integrity, and no amount of prompt engineering can substitute for that.
— Atmo, 7m, #ai, #engineering, #productivity
The Human Premium
McKinsey’s latest research lands on a number that sounds terrifying: existing tech could automate tasks making up more than half of U.S. work hours. But the takeaway isn’t mass obsolescence, it’s massive reallocation. When the researchers mapped thousands of workplace skills to automatable versus non-automatable tasks, they found 70% of what employers seek applies to both categories, and another 12% remains entirely human. The skills endure; where and how we use them is what changes. As AI absorbs the chores—sifting information, organizing data, drafting first passes—workers lean harder into what machines still can’t touch: judgment, relationship-building, critical thinking, empathy. The business case is stark: AI agents and robots could generate nearly $3 trillion in annual U.S. value by 2030, yet fewer than 40% of companies report measurable profit gains from current AI deployments. The culprit? Bolting new tools onto workflows designed for a pre-AI era. The winners will redesign processes so humans and AI operate as an integrated system—not by counting tools deployed, but by measuring how well people and machines create value together.
— McKinsey Global Institute, 5m, #ai, #leadership, #transformation
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.
Personal progress – By Friday, you’ve probably forgotten half of what you accomplished this week. This Echo fixes that. It automatically generates your weekly highlight reel every Friday afternoon, capturing your biggest win, top accomplishments, and goal updates from the past seven days. Over a year, you’ll have 52 summaries documenting your complete contributions—no more scrambling to reconstruct achievements when performance review season hits.
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.
