Tag: #career
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 229 posts
Turning a Side Project Into a Career Asset — A Definition of Done, a Ship Date, and a Retro
Most side projects die not from a shortage of talent but from having no definition of done, no ship date, and no retrospective. Projects that turn into assets meet three conditions: other people can see them, your judgme
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#side-project#portfolio#growth#productivityCode Review That Teaches, Code Review That Wounds — What Makes the Same Note Land Differently
Code review does three jobs at once — finding defects, spreading knowledge, and sharing ownership of the code — and most teams do only the first and lose the other two. This post covers the Google approval bar, where a r
2026-07-26 · 11 min read #career#code-review#engineering#feedback#teamworkHow to Judge the Timing of a Job Change — The Question That Separates Running Away From Levelling Up
When you are torn about leaving, what you need is not courage but a standard. One sentence — would I stay if the problem vanished — separates the escape move from the growth move; a learning curve gone flat is a signal w
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#job-change#decision-making#growth#job-searchHow to Prepare for a System Design Interview — 45 Minutes Graded on How You Narrow Down, Not on the Answer
A system design interview has no right answer, so what gets graded is not what you drew but how you narrowed it down. A time budget that splits 45 minutes into 5, 10, 15, 10 and 5, the latency ladder worth memorizing by
2026-07-26 · 11 min read #career#interview#system-design#engineering#job-searchThe Craft of Salary Negotiation — Two Sides That Already Chose Each Other, Lining Up the Terms
The reason your hands freeze in front of an offer email is usually not a lack of information but embarrassment. Yet an offer means the company has already decided to pick you, and all that remains is two sides on the sam
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#negotiation#salary#job-search#communicationWhy Jobs Come from Acquaintances of Acquaintances, Not Best Friends — The Strength of Weak Ties
The Strength of Weak Ties, the 1973 paper by Granovetter that ranks among the most cited in sociology, flips intuition on its head: the decisive information for job seekers came not from close friends but from acquaintan
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #humanities#sociology#network#career#relationshipsWorkplace Phrases That Work — 23 Communication Scripts You Can Use Verbatim
Skilled communicators at work are not improvising — they run prepared patterns. This post picks nine awkward moments everyone hits every week — admitting you do not know, voicing disagreement, reporting a slipped deadlin
2026-07-20 · 7 min read #career#communication#workplace#soft-skills#writingBeing Good at Conversation — Not a Way with Words but the Design of Listening
Good conversationalists are not people who talk well but people who get the other person talking. Built on evidence like the Harvard conversation study showing that follow-up questions raise likability, and the finding t
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #career#communication#conversation#relationships#soft-skillsPrinciples of a Resume That Gets Read — Clarity, Not Flash, Decides Who Passes the Screen
A recruiter gives each resume only the first few dozen seconds. What the resumes that survive those seconds have in common is not a dazzling career but a structure that reads well. The formula that turns duty lists into
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #career#resume#job-search#writing#interviewA Reputation for Great Work Comes from Doing Things Early — 7 Proactive Work Habits
Two people with the same skills can end up with very different reputations, and the difference is mostly timing. Sharing before being asked, sending an agenda before the meeting, showing a draft before the deadline, prep
2026-07-20 · 7 min read #career#productivity#workplace#habits#soft-skillsThe Craft of a Forward Deployed Engineer: Requirement Archaeology, Domain Modeling, and Optimizing for Adoption
A previous post mapped the knowledge an FDE needs — Linux, networking, Kubernetes, databases, security. That map gets you in the door. It says nothing about what you actually do once you are inside a customer's building,
2026-07-15 · 10 min read #career#fde#solutions-engineering#software-engineering#palantirWhat to Learn Deeply, What to Skim — A Learning Strategy for the AI Era
When an AI answers almost anything in three seconds, what is still worth learning deeply? Cognitive psychology has an uncomfortable answer: memory is built by pulling information out of your own head, not by having it ha
2026-07-12 · 12 min read #career#learning#ai#software-engineeringFrom Senior to Staff: What Actually Gets Evaluated
Plenty of engineers believe that shipping more, faster, is the path to promotion. But open an actual public engineering ladder — Dropbox, CircleCI, Rent the Runway — and there is no axis called output. There is scope, co
2026-07-12 · 12 min read #career#software-engineering#growth#staff-engineerWhen Code Generation Gets Cheap, Which Skills Go Up in Value — What Depreciates and What Appreciates
When code generation becomes cheap and abundant, value does not vanish — it moves to whatever is still a bottleneck. Right now that bottleneck is verification, judgment, and integration. Building on Jason Wei's asymmetry
2026-07-12 · 14 min read #career#software-engineering#ai#skills#code-reviewDoes AI Actually Make Developers Faster? What the Measured Numbers Say
Two randomized controlled trials reached opposite conclusions. One found developers using AI were 55.8% faster. The other found they were 19% slower. But METR, who produced the second number, published a follow-up in Feb
2026-07-12 · 18 min read #career#ai#productivity#software-engineering#developer-experienceThe 2026 Developer Job Market — What the Data Shows, and What It Does Not
It feels like the worst market in a decade, yet BLS projects 15% growth over ten years. Both are true. I pulled the raw Indeed postings index (Feb 2020 = 100, peak 233.87 in Feb 2022, 72.51 in June 2026), layoffs.fyi (12
2026-07-12 · 9 min read #career#job-market#software-engineering#hiringPreparing to Become a Forward Deployed Engineer: A Map of the Software Knowledge That Matters
A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a role Palantir invented: an engineer who embeds with a customer and deploys, integrates, and configures the product inside the client's real environment. The role is surging again as
2026-07-11 · 6 min read #career#fde#software-engineering#palantir#solutions-engineeringThe 2026 Robotics Company Map — The Humanoid Showdown, VLA Models, and the Engineer's Way In
2026 is the inflection point where humanoid shipments jump about 7x year-over-year to a forecast of 50,000+ units. From Figure, valued around USD 39B with its in-house VLA model Helix, to Tesla Optimus Gen 3 entering mas
2026-07-09 · 7 min read #robotics#ai#vla#trends#careerThe Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Fully Dissected — the Hottest Role in AI Right Now
As the finding that 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots show no measurable impact makes clear, AI's bottleneck today is deployment, not models. The role built to close that gap is the FDE — an engineer embedded in the custome
2026-07-07 · 8 min read #career#fde#ai#palantir#rolesMost Arguments Are About Ego, Not Ideas
When we argue, we believe we are contesting ideas, but we are often touching the other person’s sense of self. Through cognitive dissonance, identity-protective cognition, and the backfire effect, this piece explains why
2026-07-06 · 5 min read #communication#psychology#thinking#career