They: "On a scale from 1 to 10: How lazy are you?"
Me: Using the copy fail exploit instead of sudo to avoid having to type my password

Max Lee

There Is No Standard EM Role

• 🦄 The myth of the universal manager — The article highlights that the “standard EM role” simply doesn’t exist. The title of Engineering Manager is highly overloaded, and day-to-day responsibilities vary wildly depending on a company’s size, culture, and immediate needs.
• 🎭 A spectrum of archetypes — Rather than a single set job description, the role is heavily context-dependent. EMs usually operate on a sliding scale between a highly technical “Tech Lead Manager” who still writes code, and a purely people-centric leader focused on coaching and team health.
• ⚖️ The balancing act of three pillars — Engineering managers constantly juggle people, process, and technical delivery. The specific ratio of these three focus areas is never static — it shifts dynamically based on what the engineering organization requires at any given time.
• 🗣️ Clarify expectations early — Because the EM title is so ambiguous, candidates should never assume they know what the job entails. It is crucial to ask probing questions during interviews to uncover “what success actually looks like” in that specific org to avoid an expectation mismatch.
• 🌱 Adaptability is your biggest asset — As teams grow and companies scale, the demands on engineering leadership naturally evolve. A successful EM embraces this fluidity, recognizing that they may need to shift their focus completely — stepping into technical weeds one quarter, and focusing heavily on hiring the next.

21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google

• 🎯 User obsession beats tech obsession — The best engineers work backwards from understanding user problems deeply, rather than falling in love with technologies and searching for places to apply them
• 🤝 Collaboration over being right — "Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work" — winning every technical argument can lose you the project through silent resistance
• 🚀 Bias towards action — "You can edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank one" — ship the messy MVP and learn from real feedback rather than debating perfect solutions theoretically
• 📖 Clarity is seniority — Senior engineers trade cleverness for clarity because code is a strategy memo to strangers maintaining it at 2am during outages
• ⚡ Innovation tokens are limited — Treat novel technology choices like a budget — spend them only where you're uniquely paid to innovate, default to boring elsewhere
• 👥 Code doesn't advocate for itself — Your work needs human champions in meetings you're not invited to — make your impact legible to others
• ❌ Best code is code never written — Every line creates debug, maintenance, and explanation debt — exhaust the question "what if we just didn't?"
• 🐛 At scale, bugs become features — With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency someone relies on, regardless of what you promised
• 🎯 Misalignment masquerades as slowness — Most "slow" teams are actually building wrong things or right things incompatibly — senior engineers focus on clarifying direction over "coding faster"
• ✍️ Writing forces clarity — Teaching others (docs, talks, reviews) debugs your own mental models and reveals gaps in understanding
• 🔧 Glue work needs boundaries — Documentation, coordination, and process improvement are vital but can stall your career if done unconsciously rather than strategically
• 📊 Metrics become targets and stop measuring — Always pair speed metrics with quality/risk metrics and focus on trends, not thresholds
• 🤷 "I don't know" creates safety — Admitting uncertainty gives others permission to do the same, preventing hidden problems from exploding later
• 🌐 Networks outlast jobs — Colleagues who invested in relationships reaped decades of benefits — your job isn't forever but your network is
• 🗑️ Delete work before optimizing it — More performance wins come from removing unnecessary computation than making necessary work faster
• ⏰ Time becomes more valuable than money — Eventually the calculus inverts — know what you're trading and make the trade deliberately
• 📈 Learning compounds through options — Expertise comes from deliberate practice over years, but compounds when it creates new possibilities rather than just trivia

Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen

• 🎯 Leaders should coach, not dictate — The best managers resist the urge to make decisions for their team members, instead guiding them through a process to reach their own conclusions
• ❓ Questions unlock understanding — Asking lots of honest, educational questions often leads to team members naturally arriving at the right decision themselves during the discussion
• 🔄 Repetition clarifies complexity — Restating the difficult parts of a problem serves dual purposes: ensuring critical details aren't glossed over and buying time for the person to think through their decision
• 👂 Deep listening creates safety — Giving someone complete, undivided attention in our distracted world helps them feel supported and enables their best thinking
• 💪 Experience comes from ownership — People gain far more valuable experience when they make hard decisions themselves rather than having decisions made for them
• 🎭 Survival mode isn't optimal performance — While some believe high-pressure, chaotic environments produce the best work, true quality comes when people feel safe and supported
• 📚 Teaching independence is the ultimate goal — A leader's primary job is to develop their team's skills and experience to the point where they no longer need constant guidance
• 😞 Leader disappointment signals growth opportunity — When a manager feels disappointed that someone can't make a decision, it's actually feedback that more coaching and development is needed

In command

• 🎯 Control vs Command — Being "in control" is impossible and not desirable, while being "in command" means being honest, introspective, agile, aware, and proactive
• 📊 Metrics Mastery — You don't need perfect metrics, but you must know what to measure, watch what matters, and be first to spot problems and take proportional action
• 🐛 Strategic Bug Management — Having bugs isn't the issue — having 100-1000 bugs listed and working on the top three that matter most shows true command
• 👥 Smart Hiring Philosophy — Being in command means hiring great people who challenge you with diverse perspectives, not being the smartest person in the room
• 🔍 Proactive Problem-Solving — Look for mistakes actively, call them out when found, and rally the team to find solutions rather than hiding issues
• 📝 Written Strategy — Have a clear, written strategy that normal people can understand and genuinely follow, updating it calmly when flaws become apparent
• 💭 Mind-Changing Wisdom — "A mind that never changes, is very likely wrong" — write down your thoughts so it's obvious when your mind needs to change, then communicate both what and why
• 🎯 Rocks vs Backlog — Identify a few strategic "Rocks" as your bets on winning, and have a system for prioritizing everything else (which means doing almost none of the rest)
• 🎭 Editor Not Writer — Act as an editor rather than constantly telling people what to do — if you're always doing someone else's work, that's your hiring or delegation fault
• 🔄 Truth-Seeking Leadership — Being in command means proactively seeking truth, working rationally, and communicating to create autonomy with accountability and realistic expectations

"Good engineering management" is a fad

• 🔄 Leadership styles are cyclical fads driven by business realities — The "ideal" engineering manager has shifted dramatically from hands-off coordinators (2000s) to people-focused coaches (2010s hypergrowth era) to hands-on technical contributors (2020s post-ZIRP era)
• 💡 Morality tales mask economic drivers — Each leadership shift gets wrapped in moral justifications ("empowering engineers" or "eliminating bureaucracy") but the real drivers are business conditions like hiring competition, interest rates, and AI tooling expectations
• ⚖️ Core skills vs. growth skills framework — Four core skills (execution, team management, ownership, alignment) are essential for any management role, while four growth skills (taste, clarity, navigating ambiguity, working across timescales) determine career ceiling
• 📊 Self-assessment through specific questions — Evaluate your effectiveness by asking concrete questions like "When did an executive describe your team as exceptional?" or "What's a recent decision that's meaningfully better because you were present?"
• 🎯 Skills shift between core and growth categories — What's considered a foundational skill in one era (like execution today) may be less critical in another era, making broad competency across all eight skills essential for long-term success
• ⚡ Energy management trumps mathematical optimization — The "perfect" work allocation isn't mathematically ideal impact, but rather balancing high impact with activities that keep you energized and motivated long-term
• 🗓️ Forty-year career thinking required — Success means deliberately choosing tradeoffs across pace, people, prestige, profit, and learning dimensions while recognizing how life constraints change over time
• 🔮 Fad-proof approach — Focus on building broad foundational skills rather than optimizing for current industry trends, since "good leadership" definitions will inevitably shift again

That’s all for this week’s edition

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