/Sean Goedecke

Tactical Work In The Age Of Layoffs 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


How I Know I'm Working With A Strong Engineer tl;dr: “I realised the other day that I actually have a straightforward heuristic for this. I count the number of times I have this thought:“Oh nice catch, I didn’t think of that!””

featured in #594


How I Know I'm Working With A Strong Engineer tl;dr: “I realised the other day that I actually have a straightforward heuristic for this. I count the number of times I have this thought:“Oh nice catch, I didn’t think of that!””

featured in #593


To Avoid Being Replaced By LLMs, Do What They Can't tl;dr: “It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?”

featured in #592


To Avoid Being Replaced By LLMs, Do What They Can't tl;dr: “It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?”

featured in #591


Engineers Who Won’t Commit Force Bad Decisions tl;dr: “Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven or synchronous way? Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side. This strategy is fine when you’re a junior engineer, but at some point you’ll be the person in the room with the most context (or technical skill, or institutional power). At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.”

featured in #590


How I Use LLMs As A Staff Engineer tl;dr: “Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”

featured in #589


How I Use LLMs As A Staff Engineer tl;dr: “Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”

featured in #588


Working Fast And Slow tl;dr: “Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I only have a few hours of focused work in me, while on other days I feel like I can go on almost indefinitely. I used to feel like this was a problem - that I was either overworking or slacking off - but now I lean into it. Instead of trying to push harder on slack days and pull back on focus days, I accept that I’ll be much more productive on some days than others. There are serious advantages to this working style.”

featured in #586


Working Fast And Slow tl;dr: “Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I only have a few hours of focused work in me, while on other days I feel like I can go on almost indefinitely. I used to feel like this was a problem - that I was either overworking or slacking off - but now I lean into it. Instead of trying to push harder on slack days and pull back on focus days, I accept that I’ll be much more productive on some days than others. There are serious advantages to this working style.”

featured in #585