Tag: Career

When Claude drives you off the cliff

I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If…

Disclaimer: I used AI to correct my broken English

Recently, I encountered this problem while collaborating with a smart, senior engineer who couldn't make logical decisions if it meant deprecating the system he and his team had worked on for a number of years. Even though the best thing would have been to help another team create the replacement system, they didn't want to entertain the idea because it would mean putting an end to something they had invested so much in.

I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around. Truth would win.

When Claude drives you off the cliff

How an obsession with KPIs at Orange led people to game them, slowing service delivery to a crawl. A cautionary tale about Goodhart's law.

Coding agents as normal technology

In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut

Read this, come on

Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.

Discover insightful advice for young people, emphasizing choices, confidence, and personal growth through lived experiences.

Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.

How to reset the thermostat, and CodeRabbit as a case study

Jose Zarazua

The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry

We all want to do awesome things and make an impact at work. However, what we call “work” is a relationship between employer and employee that's inherently and persistently designed to benefit the former over the latter. How do we meaningfully contribute, earn a living, and maybe even enjoy ourselves when the organization simply does not care about us?

A decade of firsthand advice on going from an employed software developer to successful indie hacker running your own business(es).