/Career Advice

Corporate Legibility for Software Engineers

- Matt Blewitt tl;dr: "Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those not directly involved. I’ll help you understand why this is an important thing to be aware of and how to use it to help your career."

featured in #386

Start Coding At The Point Of Least Certainty

- Swizec Teller tl;dr: "You know you can build a platform for monkeys to stand on. Plenty exist. You know you can build a flaming hoop for them to jump through. Plenty exist. You even know you can get a monkey. But can you train the monkey to jump through the hoop? Without the trained monkey, you have no spectacle. Nobody's gonna come watch a bunch of monkeys standing around a fire."

featured in #386

What We Look For In A Resume

- Chip Huyen tl;dr: Specific to software engineering resumes, Chip looks for: (1) Demonstrated expertise, not keywords. (2) People who get things done i.e initiative and persistence. (3) Unique perspectives. (4) Impact, not meaningless metrics. Chips discusses each, sharing examples of how they show on a resume.

featured in #385

Contracts You Should Never Sign

- Vadim Kravcenko tl;dr: These include: (1) Any form of a non-compete clause in employee contracts. (2) Confidentiality agreements. (3) Exclusive distribution agreements. (4) A project-based agreement without a clear definition of scope and definition of done. Vadim also discusses clauses to avoid.

featured in #385

What Big Tech Layoffs Suggest For The Industry

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely discusses rapid shifts in the engineering job market. "It’s certain we’ll see a correction of 2021-22’s hiring frenzy and it’s a given that Big Tech will hire much less this year than in 2022, while the question remains whether other large tech companies will follow suit and announce layoffs in the coming months."

featured in #382

Things They Didn’t Teach You About Software Engineering

- Vadim Kravcenko tl;dr: (1) You rarely write something from scratch. (2) Domain knowledge is more important than your coding skills. (3) Writing documentation is not emphasized hard enough. (4) Code is secondary. Business value is first. (5) You’ll need to work around incompetence. (6) You work with uncertainty most of the time. (7) Assume everything has bugs. And more.

featured in #382

The Zen Of Proverbs

- Lane Wagner tl;dr: 20 rules of thumb for writing better software: (1) Optimize for simplicity first (2) Write code for humans, not computers. (3) Reading is more important than writing. (4) Any style is fine, as long as it’s black. (5) There should be one way to do it, but seriously this time.

featured in #381

Overcoming The Resistance

- Paulo André tl;dr: Paolo discusses hesitating due to one's imposter syndrome: "How can we create the conditions to just start? How can we feel the fear… and do it anyway?" (1) Create a process… and then trust in it. (2) Use the Procrastination Pomodoro. (3) 80% is good enough. (4) Feed your own feedback loop. (5) Don’t seek to make the right decision. Make the decision right.

featured in #380

8 Hard Truths I Learned When I Got Laid Off From My SWE Job

- Steven Buccini tl;dr: (1) Getting laid off is a profoundly lonely experience. (2) It’s gonna take longer than you think. (3) Interview invites are a poor proxy for your desirability. (4) You are going to have to do things that you don’t want to do. (5) Most offers for help are reflexive responses. (6) Honesty can only hurt you. (7) You probably should turn down that job offer. (8) You’ll learn more from getting laid off than you did at your job. 

featured in #379

A Guide To Fixing Developer Posture

- Gayle Laakmann McDowell tl;dr: "This post is about anterior pelvic tilt, the most common posture dysfunction... How do you know if you have an anterior pelvic tilt? Look at your belt. If you belt points towards the floor, you have an anterior pelvic tilt. Or, look sideways in the mirror. does your butt stick out? Chances are that you have an anterior pelvic tilt. I’m gonna break bad posture in 2 sections, lower body and upper body. The lower body influences the upper body, but upper body doesn’t always influence the lower body."

featured in #378