career

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices.  I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type.  Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though … Read more

Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs … Read more

So, I got laid off again… This time it was the week before Christmas, last time it was a week into paternity leave. Both great timing, I know. Last time I didn’t feel like writing about it since it was … Read more

Seniority The first kind of career destination we’ll consider is senior individual contributor (IC), which usually means something like “high-level engineer”. A senior IC doesn’t run their own firm, or work independently. They’re at the top of their game technically, … Read more

Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she’s been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds … Read more

Technical debt is easily the most used buzzword these days. People say, “We are moving fast on our MVP while minimizing technical debt!”. They mention technical debt in there to sound cool or something. I just laugh because everything is … Read more

12 min read · Nov 12, 2018 I like to write, and occasionally I idly consider the possibility that I should do it for a living. Then I remind myself: writing is a structurally terrible job. Whatever dreams you have … Read more

Career Choices A short story by Paul Hsieh, MD 17 Mar 2023   It started innocently enough, a retrospective public health analysis of mortality across professions during the past three years of the COVID-19 pandemic.   The young public health … Read more