Yesterday
- In an office, some of your visibility is free. Go remote and it drops to zero. Working loudly makes your impact visible as you do it—not after the fact in a status update nobody reads....
- Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means.
This week
- Do you struggle with knowing what you want? For me, it shows up in career stuff. Do I want this job or that? What kind of role would I like? I had this revelation over the weekend. “What do I want” is the wrong question. I was reading The Obstacle is The Way. It didn’t site...
Last week
- AI gets good at anything with an answer key. Your career is everything that doesn’t have one. If the AI layer gets good at anything, it will be anything that has an answer key. School used to be answer keys all the way down. School is the ultimate anchoring of success, because...
- Every time I have given up on America, it has been a mistake. And yet, America has never, ever given up on me....
Two weeks ago
- Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and...
About a month ago
- Building a great organization is all about finding skills that complement each other. People tend to think everyone can do everything—especially at the leadership level. VP and above, the assumption is that for the amount they’re paid, leaders should be great strategically,...
- Programming tests used to be our primary filter to separate profiles. In software engineering, they historically differentiated three distinct ones: the engineers, the ones who solve the fundamental problems. the developers, the ones who apply the right patterns and orchestrate...
about 1 month ago
- In thirteen years at GitHub I was part of 25 reorgs—almost one every six months. Reorgs are a constant in tech, not a crisis. Here's how to navigate them....
- Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I...
about 2 months ago
- Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers....
- The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability).
2 months ago
- The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes. He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand....
3 months ago
- I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately went to...
- Most 1:1s waste your team's only protected synchronous time on status updates. Here's how to run ones worth showing up for....
- Here’s the best career advice I ever received as a product manager: “product-manage your own career.” I wish I’d internalized it sooner. Early in my career, I stayed quiet and did good work, assuming the right people would notice. Spoiler: they didn’t—not because the work wasn’t...
- I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task. Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument...
- I turned 40 today. For my 35th I did principles, but for my 40th, I wanted to offer perhaps more useful reflections....
- Announcing noagendanomeeting.net — a single-page site advocating that every meeting deserves an agenda, and most meetings deserve to be a document instead....
- 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...
4 months ago
- 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...
- 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....
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