QFM059: Engineering Leadership Reading List - March 2025

Source: Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash

This month's Engineering Leadership Reading List starts with a quiet dismantling of the '10x engineer' myth in In Praise of 'Normal' Engineers. This reframes engineering excellence as a function of team design rather than individual brilliance. The piece advocates for organisational environments that allow capable, consistent engineers to thrive-—echoing themes of structural support over star power found in The Product Engineer, where engineering and design talent are positioned as central to product decisions, often in tension with traditional PM-led models.

As engineering leadership increasingly intersects with organisational dynamics, Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP cuts through the abstraction of title inflation and formal levelling systems. It instead grounds career growth in accountability and strategic execution. A similar realism runs through Career advice in 2025, which examines the uncertainty many leaders face in a tech landscape shaped by AI hype, funding constraints, and shifting talent markets.

The tension between AI capability and engineering identity features prominently across several pieces. The Software Engineering Identity Crisis and AI is Making Developers Dumb both ask what it means to be a software engineer in a world where large language models shoulder an increasing share of implementation detail. These concerns are not only about productivity but also about what knowledge should be retained, cultivated, or relinquished in a human-AI partnership.

The end of YC takes a longer view, exploring how AI tooling erodes the historic advantage of deeply technical founders, shifting the balance in favour of domain experts with strong product intuition. This democratisation of development also underpins the argument in The Rise of the GTM Engineer, where engineering talent is increasingly directed at commercial functions—embedding technical fluency directly into go-to-market operations, driven by automation and data.

Process and practice remain enduring concerns, with A blueprint for modern product development offering a structured approach for organisations seeking to scale product efforts without defaulting to rigid governance. The blueprint emphasises continuous discovery and pragmatic iteration—building discipline into flexibility. And in Stanford CS109 Probability for Computer Scientists Lecture, we're reminded that solid foundations—in this case, probability theory—still matter, even as higher-order tools abstract away many of the details.

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

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

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