#35 | Sunday reads for EMs | Engineering Manager Tools

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week. To accelerate your growth see: AI Interview Coach | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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14 More Lessons from 14 Years at Google (Addy Osmani)

tl;dr: A dense collection of actionable leadership frameworks. Standout insights: “trust is a latency optimization for teams” (high-trust teams make decisions in hours, not weeks), the four-word meeting test (approve, choose, unblock, or inform - if you can’t pick one, cancel the meeting), and “when you add a team, you add edges, not just nodes” as a way to explain why doubling headcount doesn’t double output.

Why Am I Doing the Thinking for You? (Matheus Lima)

tl;dr: The “what do you think?” Slack message with no context… the author reframes it as outsourcing cognitive work disguised as collaboration. The fix is simple: always lead with your recommendation, your reasoning, the alternatives you rejected, and a default path forward unless someone objects.

Two kinds of AI users are emerging. The gap between them is astonishing. (Martin Alderson)

tl;dr: The real AI productivity gap isn’t between adopters and non-adopters - it’s between people stuck in chat-only interfaces and power users running CLI agents with code execution and API access. The biggest leaps are coming bottom-up from employees who know their own processes, not from top-down AI strategies.

AI Fluency Leveling (Alex Ewerlöf)

tl;dr: A 7-level framework for assessing AI skills across your org, from casual ChatGPT users (Level 1) up through AI system architects and platform engineers. The most useful takeaway for me: the critical transition happens at Level 4, where people stop trying to prompt their way out of problems and start writing deterministic code to harness AI’s stochastic nature. Includes hiring assessment questions for each level.

Using an Engineering Notebook (Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya)

tl;dr: A case for the old-school practice of keeping a physical, handwritten engineering notebook - dated, detailed, append-only notes written in real-time as you work. The author’s key point isn’t about reading back later (she rarely does); it’s that writing by hand is the thinking, forcing you to clarify what you’re doing before you touch the keyboard.