This week
- Announcing noagendanomeeting.net — a single-page site advocating that every meeting deserves an agenda, and most meetings deserve to be a document instead....
Last week
- I recently read the quote, ‘The best architecture that isn’t implemented is just an expensive drawing,’ and I couldn’t agree more. I wish I came up with it. When organisations hire for architecture roles they always look for extremely technical and knowledgeable people. While it...
- What a month! After losing a job at the end of January, I started looking for a new one straight away. Seeking a new job nowadays is very different from how it used to be. Very long, multi-step and mentally draining processes are the new norm. The recent explosion of AI tools...
Two weeks ago
- Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development....
- According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away. But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while...
- What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has...
- It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in...
About a month ago
- My heuristics are wrong. What now? More words. More meaning? Some people who ask me for advice at get a lot of words in reply. Sometimes, those responses aren’t specific to my particular workplace, and so I share them here. In the past, I’ve written about echo chambers, writing,...
- I first started compiling "How To Thought Lead" in my notes 5 years ago, at first as an ironic parody and then slowly becoming sincere, and never published it, 1) because I don't know if I ever really nailed it / have a complete picture, 2) I was somewhat worried if I published...
- It’s a common position among software engineers that big egos have no place in tech1. This is understandable - we’ve all worked with some insufferably overconfident engineers who needed their egos checked - but I don’t think it’s correct. In fact, I don’t know if it’s possible...
- Intro I am still learning how to become a better engineer. This is a reflection for myself. The type of engineer I strive to be. I think this mindset matters. Always learning. Always growing. What I T...
- AI tools hit a true inflection point in late 2025. Building things got cheaper. AI tools got expensive. And the gap between good management and bad management got a whole lot wider. Here’s how to think about management in 2026. Managers Must Be Builders Managers must be builders...
about 1 month ago
- There is enormous variability in the frequency with which teams have emergencies. Some teams have emergencies regularly. We need a new report; someone has to put together a presentation; we need to change plans to incorporate new feedback. Other teams essentially only have...
- In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to write their code and run their systems. I knew I was good at it, and I knew I could keep doing it for as long as I wanted...
about 2 months ago
- Speculation about what’s really going on inside a tech company is almost always wrong. When some problem with your company is posted on the internet, and you read people’s thoughts on it, their thoughts are almost always ridiculous. For instance, they might blame product...
- If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselves as supporting the team, removing blocks, protecting them from the vagaries of corporate life. That's never sounded quite right to...
- I hate using Workday to apply to companies. I can’t speak to all the other things they offer, but the experience for job applicants sucks.Why do I have to create a separate account for each company that uses Workday to handle applications? Why do you ask me to upload my resume...
- We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many …
- More lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code....
2 months ago
- The most shameful thing I did in the workplace was lie to a colleague. It was about ten years ago, I was a fresh-faced intern, and in the rush to deliver something I’d skipped the step of testing my work in staging1. It did not work. When deployed to production, it didn’t work...
- Large tech companies operate via systems. What that means is that the main outcomes - up to and including the overall success or failure of the company - are driven by a complex network of processes and incentives. These systems are outside the control of any particular person....
- You Are Here Where to next? The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of building...
- NDC London was the first really big conference I ever went to - as a paying attendee, way back in 2014 (or was it 2013?), when I was trying to figure out ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and how to get all my team’s code out of Subversion and into this new Git thing everybody was talking...
3 months ago
- There are lots of different ways to be a software engineer. You can grind out code for twelve hours a day to make the world a better place. You can focus on glue work: process-based work that makes everyone around you more successful. You can join the conversation with your...
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