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.

• Incredible energy and ideas, sparks flying everywhere
• Slogging through turning those ideas into an abstract
• Excitedly submitting your abstract that took way too long
• Nervously waiting to see if you’re going to be rejected
• The amazing feeling when your talk gets accepted
• The complete and utter dread you feel approximately 10 seconds after getting accepted knowing you now have to put a talk together
• World class procrastination until maybe a week before, including total paralysis on how to get started
• The extreme rush of energy once you figure out your angle and seeing the talk come together
• The terrifying realization that you actually have to give this talk to an audience
• The crippling nervousness before you walk on stage
• The relief you feel / the zone you enter the moment your talk starts
• The absolute rush of accomplishment and success you feel the millisecond you finish
• Walking off stage and instantly saying “I want to do that again!”

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.

When in doubt, share your professional failures. If you’ve had any level of success in your career, sharing failures shows there’s room for growth for everyone at all levels. Nobody’s perfect and we all struggle at times, so people appreciate and connect with those kinds of experiences far more than some glossy accomplishment.

So share your tough moments and your missteps. Be honest and transparent. It might be hard to do and maybe even a little embarrassing, but that little bit of selflessness is an excellent way to teach and help grow others.

The title says it all – I am so bad at interviewing.

It has nothing to do with my skills, experience, or future promise. It’s just that if you ask me a question and immediately want a response where I have to recall the details of a situation from 2 years ago, it just isn’t going to go well. My brain is not wired to respond immediately – it takes me at least a few minutes (and probably more like ten) to derive a thoughtful, coherent response.

Fair or not, it’s honestly hard to believe that in 2025 interviews still reward those who can think fast on their feet and/or lie/bullshit their way through an answer in the moment – salesperson types, basically. This is how they define “excellent communication skills”.

Given a one hour interview, if you gave me the exact same questions and 90 minutes to write out thoughtful responses, I would crush the interviews. But for the most part, nobody really seems interested in someone who can do the job more slowly but more thoughtfully – they just want that snappy answer to make them feel good about the interview vibes.

I’ve gone through a few rounds of interviews in 2025 and they’ve been a stark reminder that your performance in any given interview is max 50% (arguably less) within your control. The rest is on the interviewer and the company.

Sure, you can control your prep, your stories, and your nerves, but think of all the things you absolutely can’t control with the interviewer: their mood, their professional experience, their communication skills, their interviewing experience/quality, how busy they are that day, how much (or how little) they’ve prepared to speak with you, their biases, and probably a dozen other factors you don’t even know about.

On top of that, think of how much the company controls, in aggregate, beyond the individual interviewer: interview rubrics, how consensus is built, hiring panels/reviews, recruiter screens, hiring manager screens, scheduling/timing, the candidate pipeline, job postings, and of course everyone’s favorite, “culture fit”.

In modern interviewing you have to make it through at least 4-5 of those interviews, each with a different flow, pace, and vibes every single time. No matter how much a company tries to standardize, they can’t standardize human interactions. Every hour is different, and there’s no way that you as a candidate can predict or prepare for it. Honestly, it’s a minor miracle anyone makes it through any company’s interview process to the offer stage.

All that said, I don’t even have a good solution – hiring is very hard and every kind of evaluation (interviews, take home projects, working with a team for a week, fast hire/fast fire, etc.) has their own tradeoffs and none is perfect.

My point is simply that if you’re struggling with interviews, there’s a decent chance that it’s not you. Try to remember how much of the process is out of your control, work hard at the things you can control, and keep your head up. It’s a bummer but some of job hunting is just luck and timing, so I’m rooting for you and hoping that the right fit comes along soon. 💙

I don’t want to minimize the anxiety of being unemployed because it IS extremely stressful, but it’s worth remembering that it also provides some rare short-term life opportunities to recharge. You can take care of yourself by slowing down and spending time doing things you enjoy, to do the things you normally can’t during a typical work day.

For me that means grabbing a long lunch with my partner, hanging with the kids when they get home from school, catching up on TV and books, and taking long walks with my pal Eugene.

So yes, of course, crank on your job hunt, prep for interviews, and use the time for professional growth. But don’t forget to take a little time for yourself to recharge and reconnect with the things you enjoy so you’re in the right frame of mind to tackle the work ahead. ♥️

Two of the biggest career-altering jobs I ever landed were because the hiring manager took a chance on me. I knew I could do those jobs well and had a lot to offer, but from the hiring side there was absolutely some risk.

My work experience has always been weird and non-linear, so I rarely fit well to any given hiring profile. They more or less had to trust their gut and take a leap of faith by hiring me. I’m sure there had to be more obviously qualified candidates.

In both cases, my getting hired worked out, and both sides ultimately benefitted — I did good work for them, they took care of me, and we had fun doing it. And regardless of how those runs may have ended, I still think back fondly at those moments when those folks took a chance on me. I’m probably romanticizing it a bit, but it’s hard not to appreciate what they did for me.

I guess I would just say that if you’re a hiring manager, of course you have to consider all the objective measures — a diverse slate, interview performance, peer feedback, etc. But if you have someone in the running who might be a borderline or non-obvious choice, it might also be worth considering your gut feel. Yeah it comes with some risk, but it could also be great. 💙