Engineering Leadership Reading List - October 2025

This month's Engineering Leadership Reading List for October 2025 examines team adaptation and service degradation. Team Dynamics After AI explores how AI coding assistants reshape collaboration patterns, skill distribution, and onboarding within engineering teams. Junior developers struggle to build foundational skills when AI handles routine tasks; senior developers find communication and architecture work more valuable; code review processes must evolve to handle AI-generated contributions. These dynamics challenge assumptions about team structure, career progression, and value creation.

Platform economics surface through The Great SaaS Gaslighting: How IT Users Got Gaslit Into Paying More for Less, documenting systematic quality degradation across enterprise software platforms. Services that once worked reliably now push users toward higher-priced tiers, hide essential features behind paywalls, or degrade core functionality to drive support revenue. This pattern creates operational challenges for engineering leaders managing tool stacks: navigating vendor relationships, evaluating true total cost of ownership, and building versus buying in an increasingly hostile software ecosystem.

October crystallizes leadership challenges at multiple scales: managing team dynamics as AI reshapes collaboration, navigating vendor relationships as SaaS economics deteriorate, and maintaining engineering effectiveness amidst rapid technological and commercial change. The reading list addresses pragmatic adaptation in an environment where both technological capabilities and commercial incentives shift faster than organizational processes can adjust.

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

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M@

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Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.

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