This week
- 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...
Last week
- 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....
Two weeks 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...
About a month ago
- 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...
- 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...
about 1 month ago
- There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this:
- When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The job was less stressful in the late 2010s than it is now, and I sympathize with anyone who is upset about the change....
- In his talk, I like the way Jake Nations pits easy vs. simple: Easy means you can add it to your system quickly. Simple means you can understand the work that you’ve done. I like this framing. Easy means you can do with little effort. Simple means you can understand what you do...
about 2 months ago
- Instead of pursuing what you love you should pursue what you are good at as the success will compound which is what will really keep you engaged. This goes for hobbies as well as work and keeping them in balance is key....
- In the near future, high-leverage developers look like async-first managers running parallel AI coding agents. The skills that make someone a strong tech lead or manager translate directly to AI coding - because at scale, it stops being just a context problem and becomes a...
- Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving landscape of coding in an AI-driven world....
- Organizations only improve when people are brave enough to question normalized nonsense and others are humble enough to listen....
- Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code....
- Honest answers to common interview questions in the tech field....
2 months ago
- Travel agents are the classic example of an industry killed by the internet. Software engineering is facing the same disruption, but the timeline is compressed....
- This is a guide on how individual contributors (ICs) can achieve outsized impact within a software organization. Make Breakthroughs Individual contributors have the special property that they can get real work done. Managers are often constrained because their leverage is...
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