#32 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

Jan 25, 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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Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail (Lalit Maganti)

tl;dr: Treat influence like a bank account - you earn deposits through shipping and being low-friction, then spend carefully on pushback. Being right and being effective are different skills, and burning credibility on unwinnable battles means you won’t have it when stakes are high.

Creating Momentum When an Employee is Stuck (Lara Hogan)

tl;dr: Don’t lead with “stop doing X” - that triggers a fight-or-flight response. Instead, acknowledge their underlying concern first (”I know you’re worried we’ll miss something big”), then redirect to forward motion. Telling someone to stop without giving them a replacement behavior just creates anxiety.

Beyond Senior: Consider the Staff Path (Joel Hawksley)

tl;dr: The four Staff archetypes (Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand) are important to align on with your manager on, and use the “disambiguate then delegate” as the core operating model. A big part of the Staff role is getting other people promoted, not hogging the high-visibility work.

Avoid “ASAP” and Other High-Strung, Non-Specific Words (Wes Kao)

tl;dr: Vague urgency language (”priority”, “time-sensitive”, “ASAP”) creates stress without clarity. The fix is mechanical - replace abstractions with sequences (”do this first, then this”) and concrete deadlines (”by Thursday EOD”). “If I don’t hear back by 5pm, I’ll assume we’re good”. Small communication tweaks, big reduction in back-and-forth.

Stop Picking Sides (Jim Highsmith)

tl;dr: Use four dials (uncertainty, risk, cost of change, evidence threshold) to set whether you’re in explore mode (learning-dominant) or exploit mode (reliability-dominant). The “handoff tax” concept - failures at phase boundaries, not within phases - is worth internalizing.

LLM Predictions for 2026 (Simon Willison)

tl;dr: Simon Willison’s annual predictions, mostly focused on AI-assisted coding reaching undeniable quality and the Jevons paradox question for software engineering careers. The sandboxing prediction is interesting for security-minded leaders, and the “normalization of deviance” framing for coding agent security is worth noting.