Manager.dev: The Engineering Manager Newsletter

Weekly insights for engineering managers.

136 posts

The 3 product battles 84% of EMs lose

"PMs decide what, engineers decide how" is a bad deal

Aug 11 · Anton Zaides

The death and revival of the hands-on Engineering Manager

The antidote to the AI-hype

Aug 4 · Anton Zaides

3 things top 1% teams do differently

Hiring, parallelization, and why they stopped reviewing most PRs

Jul 28 · Anton Zaides

Charting your team's knowledge & skills map

If you rebuilt your team again today, knowing what you know now, would it look the same?

Jul 21 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

Jul 14 · Anton Zaides

The software engineering war

Most of us picked a side and won't budge. Which one are you on?

Jul 7 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

7 reasons experienced EMs get stuck

The mistakes that stall a career, even when you see them coming.

Jun 30 · Anton Zaides

Building a code reviewer from your team's PR history

Github template inside ⬇️

Jun 23 · Anton Zaides

The "I don't know, Claude wrote this" pandemic

When Claude drives you off the cliff

Jun 16 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

The generalist EM's reading list

7 books to easily catch up with non-engineering professions in tech (number 3 is a must read)

Jun 9 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

Surviving in the "chaos management" era

More "AI skills" is not what you need right now

Jun 2 · Anton Zaides

"okay" vs excellent engineering teams

7 small gaps

May 26 · Anton Zaides

The un-hateable engineering managers

The lie of Radical Candor and ruining an engineer's day

May 19 · Anton Zaides

The engineering management memory crisis

For 8 years, my brain was enough. It's running out of RAM

May 12 · Anton Zaides

The "Negative split" software engineering effect

Engineering teams don't need to 'just go faster' - the technique behind the sub-2-hour marathon

May 5 · Anton Zaides

Managing a team that didn't choose you

The lie of the 30-60-90 onboarding plan: an honest self-retro after 6 months as an EM

Apr 28 · Anton Zaides

The engineering manager's attention budget

Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them

Apr 21 · Anton Zaides

Dropping sprints: a year with Shape Up

Reflections on moving from scrum to shape up (and from maintenance mode to high output and happier engineers)

Apr 14 · Anton Zaides

Engineering Managers are going to hate OpenClaw

A ChatGPT-like wave of hype is about to hit us, and you should be afraid

Apr 7 · Anton Zaides

Explaining, understanding, and data compression

Why super technical engineers and managers suck at explaining their thoughts

Mar 31 · Anton Zaides

Software engineering calories: what would cal.ai say about your product?

Most teams have no idea what they're putting into their product

Mar 28 · Anton Zaides

The unwritten laws of software engineering

Last April, I wrote a well-received article about the 13 software engineering laws - Hyrum’s, Conway’s, Zawinski’s, and 10 famous others.

Mar 17 · Anton Zaides

Engineering Management & Fatherhood - Take #2

In October, I started a new role as an Engineering Manager of an established team (7 strong engineers).

Mar 10 · Anton Zaides

Don't become an Engineering Manager

Over drinks a few weeks ago, a friend told me he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role.

Mar 3 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

Taking just one step too far

A bit crazy approach to engineering management

Feb 24 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

The Unreachable Engineering Managers

A few years ago, my team joined two other teams to work on a big project for the quarter.

Feb 17 · Anton Zaides

The Software Games: Endless Grind

What if your career was an RPG?

Feb 10 · Anton Zaides

7 Slack hacks for engineers and managers

(Or Microsoft Teams if you are unlucky)

Feb 3 · Anton Zaides

Who does what and how to support them

Engineering Management in a sentence

Jan 20 · Anton Zaides

Manager.dev

A Scientist’s Guide to Debugging Engineers

Too often, I see smart engineers making their own lives much harder than they need to be.

Dec 23, 2025 · Anton Zaides