This week
- 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....
Last week
- 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).
About a month 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....
- 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...
about 1 month ago
- 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....
about 2 months ago
- 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...
- 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...
2 months 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...
- 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,...
3 months ago
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
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