📰 How Tech Workers are Feeling in 2026 – Lenny’s Newsletter

I listened to the podcast version of this which essentially re-iterates common conceptions in industry over the past year including increase in burnout levels despite shipping more features, increased productivity alongside increased cognitive load and over-reliance on models, and fear of being squeezed to do more

This was a great listen both from a perspective of reality checking the state of the industry, but also getting a better insight into the day-to-day attitude and feelings of those in the sector to the persistent state of change. I suspect that going forward, a yearly cadence for such a check in will be too infrequent

It was also interesting to hear that larger companies show higher levels of burnout and worry. Having moved into a leadership role myself, I take seriously what their findings unveiled – that effective managers have a clear correlation with reduced burnout and higher job satisfaction.

It is extremely disappointing to also hear that tech roles are hard to recommend, especially to juniors – in my view, the tech space is the perfect intersection of creativity and practicality, and it’s worrying to hear that the next generation are not only at risk of losing out on the opportunity to reap the joy of that intersection, but even being discouraged from entering the field due to the uncertainty at present

🎙️ Mental Models that Change How You Think – The Knowledge Project

My key takeaway from this podcast was that the most effective way to demonstrate your passion for a field is by studying the history of it.

I can definitely resonate with this – especially recently, with the rapid and continuous evolution of the tech space, I find myself reaching for the books that explain how we got here. I believe it is essential – especially those in the tech sector – to understand the timeline of events, especially as (at least for now) we are the primary consumers of the advancements in AI. Specifically for this topic, my top three recommendations would be: Supremacy by Parmy Olson, Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, and The Thinking Machine. Next on my list is The Infinity Machine

During the podcast they touch on this as a need for “obsessive” learning and I think that is the perfect word for it. It’s hard to find the balance between this obsession being beneficial for your own knowledge and understanding, versus continually eating away at your mental health. For now, I have not found a good balance here, and the pace of development increasingly makes me feel disadvantaged if I’m not staying up to date and on top of the latest advancements.

🎙️ How Kent Beck Shapes the Software Engineering Industry – The Pragmatic Engineer

I always tune in to Gergely’s podcast, and this was a great, candid conversation as always. Kent argues that software is equally about trust, understanding, and connection as it is about code itself – and right now, with huge quantities of code being generated by LLMs, we are accumulating code faster than trust.

That being said, he encourages a more versatile approach, emphasising that we must accept that no one yet knows the best way to use these AI tools yet, and recommending a trial-and-error approach. Specifically, he outlined his new framework of first exploring with cheap experiments, then expanding the winner of those before extracting repeatable practices.

Although development pace is rapidly increasing, trust and human judgement remain critical. I find myself increasingly trying to understand how exactly this human judgement aspect is changing – I fear we are moving to a model of less diligence when it comes to code review and it will be interesting to see the impact that this has on delivery of software. Are we going to increasingly see more outages and lower quality software, and are those compromises going to be deemed “worth” the productivity gains of shipping things more quickly at the cost of these lower levels of diligence?

📖 fazamhd.com/mental-models

On a slightly different note, I also came across this list of essays with fantastic visuals and diagrams.

‘Software, from First Principles’ reminded me of the book ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’

With an electronics and software engineering background, the intersection of hardware and software has always been an area of interest for me. The visuals of this article are intuitive at conveying the fundamental details of the technology we take for granted

‘Networking and the Internet, from First Principles’ is an equally excellent essay and I’m currently working my way through ‘Deep Learning: Searching for a Function’