The worst people you don’t know are coming out of the woodwork with their “thoughts” about AI and the Square Cash App layoffs. Now would be an excellent time to build up your mute / unfollow / block list. 🙅‍♂️

Dorsey sucked as Twitter CEO and the company burned to the ground. He sucks as the Square/Cash CEO and is in the process of burning it to the ground. He left the Bluesky board because he didn’t like the direction and the network is thriving.

One thing I’ve been historically terrible at doing is regularly keeping track of my accomplishments while they happen. Day to day all those small things you do which are “just part of the job” seem like they’re no big deal, but for an engineering manager (or any manager), all those little things in aggregate ARE accomplishments. And because they’re smaller they’re naturally much harder to recall later when you need them (eg, reviews, career development, interviews).

So don’t be like old me, be like new me. Think about your career WHILE it’s happening, not after. New me has a weekly reminder and a long running document to force me to write down my accomplishments, no matter how small, and I’m committed to sticking with this. I’ve been at it about a month and the doc is already a full page long!

Liberally blocking / muting / unfollowing on LinkedIn is underrated. Might feel a little weird to cut someone off on a “professional network”, but it’s a way to guard your headspace against AI slop, influencer clickbait, and “what this life experience taught me about b2b sales” posts (yes, these actually still exist).

These aren’t going to be folks you’ll ever need or want to connect with anyway.

One of the few silver linings to come out of a couple of my old jobs imploding is to see the amazing people I worked with go on to do truly great things. It’s so heartening (and kinda wild!) to see pals working on/running major products and teams across the industry.

I would of course never have wished those hardships on us at the time, but it’s also wonderful and amazing to see how far and high they’ve gone. Y’all are the best and it shows! 🏕️🐦🫡

This article by Siddharth Khare is the best thing I’ve read about AI and the potential (or perhaps more accurately, likely) detrimental effects on engineers and some strategies on how to help manage it. It is so spot on.

I started reading some random post here and the second sentence started with “Marc Andreessen said…” and that’s when I blocked that person forever. 🙂‍↕️

Every layoff announcement should have a corresponding section for executive salaries and the pay cut they’re taking as part of the reduction. Oh wait…

This is not how engineers work together. On real teams, we review code asynchronously, take time to understand context, ask clarifying questions, form opinions, get feedback, collaborate, and refactor. We don’t debug unfamiliar systems while someone silently watches us sweat bullets. When interviews are built around live performance, they’re not measuring engineering ability.

This exactly . Well said, Zoë Hall. 🎯

“Don’t worry, you’ll end up getting a job where you belong.” — my extremely wise, much-smarter-than-me partner

Amazon’s surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement.

If you’ve ever thought about getting rid of your Ring products or disconnecting from Amazon in general, now would be a good time.

Two things that I’ll forever remember from my extended job hunt…

💙 The kind folks who went out of their way to refer me internally, send me potential opportunities, share advice, help me prep, and acted as references.

👻 The companies/people that totally ghosted me.

Standard Chet Haase writing — salient, important points wrapped in humor. In particular this is stuff that I’ll keep in the back of my head when small, effective projects or teams start lean but get heavy. Might be right and/or necessary, but it’s important to at least stop and think about the long tail of added weight.

It’s so strange and upsetting to me to see companies that completely ghost candidates after just the first step of submitting an application. I don’t mean later in the process (which is also painful and common), I mean the application is received by the company and the candidate doesn’t get as much as an automated email when they’re rejected at that stage. Just complete silence, like the candidate never existed.

Such a weird, unfriendly way to treat candidates who took time and put forth effort to submit.

Head nodding my way through this entire post. I was a little skeptical going into it because, well, Google, but the lessons are pretty universal. Worth a read.

Because people who work in tech still believe in the power of tech to do good things, many of us won’t just dismiss outright the possibility that any technology — even AI tools like LLMs — could yield some benefits. But the optimistic takes are tempered by the first-hand knowledge of how the tools are being used as an excuse to sideline or victimize good people.

Anil is on an absolute tear with his writing. 🔥

Anil Dash speaks the truth. A bunch of folks have gone out of their way to help me with my job hunt and I really will remember all of them. Can only hope I’ll be able to pay it forward in the future.

The values section of Jake Wharton’s hire me page is the best thing I’ve read in years. Clear, honest, principled, and ethical. Tech would be a much better place with more of this and more people like Jake.

You can follow Jake on Mastodon or on his site.

Back to Hugo + Cloudflare Pages for my personal site. Realized how important pure text themes, flexibility, and Markdown were over Ghost’s editor, media embeds, and newsletters/network. Ultimately found the editor slowed me down and the themes were too media heavy/glossy for me.

And though I’ve always found the fiddly parts of programming the most calming, and the most essential, I’m not especially good at them. I’ve failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big Tech companies. The thing I’m relatively good at is knowing what’s worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.

The whole (long) article about AI and coding from James Somers is excellent, but this point specifically was highly relatable. I am the literal embodiment of the so-so programmer. 😅

One of the most counter-intuitive phenomena in trust repair is where initial success in building trust leads to a short-term surge in reported ‘negative metrics’.

When institutions successfully remove this barrier by demonstrating responsiveness and competence, citizens are suddenly incentivised to report issues, believing the effort is worthwhile. This resulting spike in reported complaints or low-level ASB is not a sign of rising disorder, but the successful conversion of latent, unreported incidents into official, actionable data.

This is an excellent exploration on how to both enact change AND how to interpret its signals. So much good stuff here.

Senior engineers look at the big, messy, abstract thing and start digging:

• They ask questions nobody else thought to ask.
• They separate what matters from noise.
• They identify what should be done now vs. what to punt.

And you know what’s funny? When senior engineers do this well, it looks easy. Like nothing was even done. The project just… goes smoothly. Fewer surprises, production fires, or emergency meetings. But what actually happened was that someone did a lot of invisible work upfront.

Absolutely perfect, spot-on analysis.

This post by Molly Graham is excellent. I’ve never really liked the blindly-follow vibe of “disagree and commit”. The original intent was to enable decision making and drive alignment, and while that’s noble, enough bad actors have abused it to the point that It’s become a buzzword excuse they can use to justify squashing discussion and getting their way. I’ve definitely seen it happen.

Molly’s take is much smarter, far more nuanced, and as a leader, far more achievable. You don’t have to feel like you’re selling something you don’t believe in, but rather can acknowledge that the team is making an educated guess that will be assessed and reviewed afterwards. That builds trust, helps everyone learn, and is much easier to get behind. So, so much better. 👏

Kind of shocking to me that the majority of job postings still list number of years as a requirement.

First and most importantly, this shows an (unintentional?) implicit bias against underrepresented groups, cutting out those with non-linear career paths and those who have faced systematic barriers (women, people of color, minorities). Diversity is so critical for a team’s overall success, as any good product should have representation of its customer base.

Secondly, years of experience is in no way a proxy for competence. Some of the very best people I’ve worked with had a year of experience, and some of the biggest duds were people with dozens of years of experience. Smarts, ambition, and attitude are what matter, not years.