/Career Advice

Tactical Work In The Age Of Layoffs

- Sean Goedecke tl;dr: “In the glory days of the 2010s, tech companies were very invested in their employees’ work-life balance. Those glory days are over. Anecdotally, tech company executives are now internally directing their employees to work harder and faster, with the new threat of layoffs adding weight to that directive. Engineers are rightfully scared. What should we do?”

featured in #603

Use "but" Strategically

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “But” is a negating word. It cancels out whatever comes before it. Most people use a structure of saying, “The positive thing, but the negative thing,” which accidentally cancels out all the positive stuff. Wes shares a better approach. 

featured in #602

Exploring Generative AI

- Birgitta Böckeler tl;dr: “While the advancements of AI have been impressive, we’re still far away from AI writing code autonomously for non-trivial tasks. They also give ideas of the types of skills that developers will still have to apply for the foreseeable future. Those are the skills we have to preserve and train for.”

featured in #602

Developer Philosophy

tl;dr: “A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies. The idea was for us to share our years of experience with our more junior developers. After the session, I felt that it might be valuable to write my own thoughts up, and add a little more detail. So here we are.”

featured in #600

Career Advice In 2025

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will notes how LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of software professionals. However, he also understands how decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent in the context of rapidly improving technology. He shares his thoughts here.

featured in #600

Career Advice In 2025

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will notes how LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of software professionals. However, he also understands how decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent in the context of rapidly improving technology. He shares his thoughts here.

featured in #599

Tips For Better Interactions

tl;dr: Advice includes: (1) Don't be frustrated. (2) Taking notes. (3) Avoid boundary objections. (4) Let people be wrong. (5) Time your interactions. (6) Prioritize your meeting agenda and don't force yourself to get to everything.

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Here’s How I Use LLMs To Help Me Write Code

- Simon Willison tl;dr: Using LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive. It takes significant effort to figure out the sharp and soft edges of using them in this way, and there’s precious little guidance to help people figure out how best to apply them. If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone. I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you.

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40 Thoughts On Turning 40

- Paul Millerd tl;dr: “The moment” when people take bold action is often a post hoc fabrication. Real change is slow and confusing, I want more people to know this so that they might feel permission to embrace the slow and more confusing journey of going after things that matter to them. And more. 

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Who Gets To Do Strategy?

- Will Larson tl;dr: “If you talk to enough aspiring leaders, you’ll become familiar with the prevalent idea that they need to be promoted before they can work on strategy. It’s a truism, but I’ve also found this idea perfectly wrong: you can work on strategy from anywhere in an organization, it just requires different tactics to do so.”

featured in #596