#30 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

Jan 11, 2026

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. This is a new series in which every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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Culture Debt (Mike Fisher)

tl;dr: Culture debt accrues through small compromises such as rewarding outcomes over process and tolerating any behaviour that “produces results”. Culture debt is harder to fix than tech debt because trust doesn’t get refactored. Netflix rewrote their culture doc continuously as the org changed, treating it like infrastructure maintenance rather than a onboarding artifact.

When AI Writes Almost All Code, What Happens to Software Engineering? (Gergely Orosz)

tl;dr: Recent “a-ha” moments from senior engineers (DHH, Karpathy, Malte Ubl) who’ve flipped from AI skeptics to believers after the latest model releases. The real value here is the breakdown of what becomes less valuable (language polyglot skills, frontend/backend specialization, implementing well-defined tickets) versus more valuable (tech lead traits, product-mindedness, systems thinking).

Five More Leadership Lessons (Subbu Allamaraju)

tl;dr: The “Don’t start with resources” section alone is worth your time: approaching cross-team dependencies by leading with the business problem rather than a task list completely changes the dynamic. Also useful: the autonomy-control-cooperation framework from Robert Keidel for thinking about org design, and the observation that most strategy docs fail not because the strategy is wrong, but because leaders skip the hard questions about credibility, timing, alliances, and change management.

Creating Space (Jason Cohen)

tl;dr: A meditation on focus disguised as a blog post. The core mental model: stopping things doesn’t just free up time, it creates capacity for excellence. “When you stop trying to improve everything by 1%, you create space to improve the biggest thing by 30%”.

10 Ideas for 2026 (Shreyas Doshi)

tl;dr: “The reason you don’t have time to think right now is that you said the same thing last time”. Smart people make bad career decisions because they want to feel smart while making them, not because they want to make the right decision. This is more “things to sit with” than “things to do Monday morning”.