Anthøny H.

The open source team I'm a volunteer for at Couchers.org is looking for (volunteer) UI/UX Designers. Come join us, we're fun! Our Figma designs can't keep up with our engineers...halp? Maybe you're taking a sabbatical and want something on your resume for that time. Maybe you wanna see what it's like to work on a project that has nothing to do with stakeholders or investors, where we just do stuff our users want and we think is cool. Maybe you're passionate about traveling and old school couchsurfing vibes and wanna nerd out about it on a team with other travelers. Or maybe you just love designing stuff and are looking for some public portfolio pieces? Join our volunteer team! More info here: https://lnkd.in/g_PwevB9 On a side note, if you're a software engineer with some experience in Javascript or Python and looking for a fun project, we're always looking for more people too. (Please I need more people to review my PRs lol). #uxdesign #uxui #figma #design #opensource #volunteer

13

2 Comments

So I can officially say I'm a "Staff Engineer" - again! I first made Staff Eng almost 8 years ago during my time at Etsy. And after leaving that role I've been stuck either at Senior (because the next step up was Principal and I wasn't there yet) or without a title (for...a lot of reasons). Of course, when I was given a formal title again, I was bumped down to Senior. Titles are weird, let's just state that outright. They're uneven (sometimes out of necessity and with some good reasons). And arguments that you can be effective if you're called L5 or L55 do have some merit. At the end of the day, though, pay structures, career progression, and lots of day to day things like the meetings you're invited to depend on a title, for better or worse. There's probably a blog post to write about when I switched companies and took a hit on the title at some point in my future. For now, though, it's great to be recognized for my work.

205

8 Comments

On this random Wednesday, if you’re a software developer thinking, for no specific reason, about pivoting into the impact space and want to talk about what FreeWorld is doing and why we’re growing so fast and how you can help, please reach out.

69

4 Comments

I’ve spent my last four and a half years at Brex. Joining back in January of 2020, a lot has changed between myself, the company, and the world. Over my time at Brex, I’ve seen or experienced: - Rolling out career ladders, working towards a staff engineer promotion, and moving into management - Onboarding hundreds of engineers, resulting in the growth of the company from under fifty engineers and three hundred employees to over a thousand employees - Surviving three different rounds of layoffs, and countless numbers of re-organizations - Moving from a product engineer helping to build and launch Brex Cash, to an internal platform tech lead focused on developer productivity for a rapidly scaling organization, back to working on product as an engineering manager helping to re-launch our Bill Pay product integrated into our expense management software Since 2023, I've been writing down some key learnings from my time at Brex. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eXRV8NNz #TechCareer #SoftwareEngineering #Fintech #StartupLife #CareerGrowth #EngineeringManagement #ProductDevelopment #DeveloperProductivity #TechInsights #Scalability #OrganizationalGrowth #TechLeadership #Brex #TechLearnings #EngineeringJourney

155

5 Comments

It's probably no surprise to anyone that knows me well, that I love self-development podcasts. One of my favorite is Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich (aka Money for Couples). I recently got this email newsletter When I ask people what their Rich Life looks like, most people say something like: "I want to do what I want, when I want."   Success is rarely a dollar amount. Most people want a lifestyle. In the workplace, this means having a flexible job.    Which might look like: -Never having to do the daily commute to the office -Having a schedule that lines up with when you’re most productive -Taking a spin class in the middle of the day -Picking up your kids from school every afternoon -Living in different countries for several months at a time If this describes your idea of a great job, Pinterest is for you. Check out the 75 open roles in engineering: https://lnkd.in/gapDB_u3 At Pinterest, we hire smart people and trust them to do a good job. We don't track how often you badge into a building or how many days you show up in the office. We care about the business impact your code generates. We know that in person collaboration is useful, and we come in the office about 1/week. This isn't an unbreakable rule that you will get punished for violating. We want you to be your best you and to do your best work. We believe that flexibility enhances creativity and productivity. If you see something that calls to you, reach out and I am happy to answer questions.

85

5 Comments

I’ve been playing around with YC Founder Matching and it seems like everyone and their mother is interested either in 2-sided marketplaces or B2C businesses, even though they’re ostensibly the least profitable and hardest-to-get-off-the-ground business models there are. Why do people do this? You only have to take a glance at enterprise vs individual pricing to want to switch gears.

4

1 Comment

For my eng managers / rusty engineers out there, tell me if this sounds familiar. After some meetings get rescheduled, you suddenly realize you now have a two hour block of free time(!). You decide to try and fire up your dev environment to make some small changes or dig into a new service you’ve been eyeing for a while. As you start you environment, you immediately run into configuration issues and errors with an upstream service. After asking around and tinkering for a while, you manage to get your services up and running. You try to make some changes and want to test them out, but someone else is using staging and you have no idea if you’re PR is going to break a downstream dependency. You try to manually route where requests would go in the codebase and analyze unfamiliar unit tests. You look at the clock and realize it’s time to get back to other meetings, leaving your PR for yet another day. So many engineers run into these issues on a daily basis, leading to teams relying only on unit tests for changes or abandoning something that should have been a quick fix in an unfamiliar area. At Crafting, we build our sandboxes so they seamlessly integrate with all your services, allowing engineers to get up and running instantly before testing against a shared staging environment without having to worry about manual configurations and coordination. Stay tuned for more exciting news coming soon!

83

9 Comments

As some of you may know, I will be releasing Traverse on the 28th of August. So, what exactly is Traverse? Imagine a vibrant social media platform crafted exclusively for travelers. With Traverse, you can document, track, and relive every one of your incredible journeys. It’s your go-to place to share your adventures, pinpoint the countries and cities you’ve explored, and visually map your travels alongside your friends'. But there's more – much more. You can also share your upcoming travel plans, dream itineraries, and even find fellow travelers to join you on your next adventure. Perfect for solo travelers looking to make new connections! Excited? Visit our landing page, join the waitlist, and be among the first to experience Traverse. https://traversego.com/ (It seems as though LinkedIn got rid of hyperlinks)

28

3 Comments

"I don't like leetcode style interviews!" See I wasn't making it up! Kurtis Nusbaum tells us more about why engineers don't like leetcode and the types of interviews that lead to a more enjoyable and effective interviewing experience.

4

1 Comment

Any SWE Managers here? Check out the Levels.fyi End of Year Report one-pager for SWE Managers! SWE Managers make up a lot of the higher offers we see submitted to Levels.fyi, mainly because of their (usually) very high equity grants that come as compensation for the scope and impact of their roles. This time around, I’ve collected a few of our highest paying companies by median TC as well as some of the highest verified offer submissions we’ve seen and their TC breakdown. For instance, take a look at the highest verified offer for a SWE manager role, with a whopping $900k equity grant after taking into account Meta’s stock growth for the year. Along with a $285k base and $90k bonus for the year, this SWE Manager has a total annual TC of ~$1.2M! Check out more SWE Manager salaries here: https://lnkd.in/ggHNmpYC #salarytransparency

76

3 Comments

Some advice to new grads joining the tech industry :) 1. Be patient (avoid burnout). It's so easy to take on 4 projects at once. At Palantir, I've found that there's interesting problems, both business and technical, everywhere you look and no-one will stop you from taking on more than you should. However, you'll often perform better on 2 tasks than you will on 4. It's so tempting, especially as a new grad or a young engineer, to work at 100% capacity all week every week. That means evenings and weekends. The whole concept of 100% capacity means unsustainability. Yes you will need to burn the midnight oil to meet deadlines but you can't do that every week. Even taking time off can't exactly fix burnout. Pace yourself, and growth will come. 2. Collaborate and get signal. It's very tempting to just dive into a technical problem that you think will meet a need. To spend dozens of hours coding and perfecting a solution. If you're trying to learn a skill, that's great, but if you're trying to build something for other people to use, make sure you get validation before you invest your time. Make a write-up, collaborate with potential users or someone who can help decompose the problem faced by potential users. 3. Don't just take on random tasks. When you're junior, it's tempting to take on small, random tasks in the hope of impressing people or getting recognition. It doesn't work like that - getting reward comes from owning something over an extended period of time. Taking on random tasks certainty helps with learning or building credibility within your team, but it may not have the impact you hope for. 4. You'll find yourself be pressed to make decisions that you don't feel equipped to make. The most important thing is that every decision you make should have a reason - tech can be a high stress environment but this shouldn't lead you to be randomly clicking buttons. Have a reason behind each click. You sometimes cannot afford to spend months doing research into what the best solution is. Getting feature requests in or making an emergency bug fix may lead to tight deadlines - sometimes you can only make a best effort attempt at gathering information, and go forward with a decision from that. But always have a reason. Good luck, and Palantir Technologies are hiring!

152

5 Comments

If you really need multiple backend repos before you have multiple teams question whether you should be multiple companies. If not you’re probably better off as a monorepo if so you’ve got bigger concerns. At UpContent we’re actively retreating from the architectural complexity of micro-repos, as a smaller team it’s just unnecessary and most tech these days support multiple separately deployable components/services in a mono repo. Exceptions might be tiny services that don’t hit your main db and for whatever reason are in another language. People always forget that part of microservice architecture principles were separate databases and no shared code. People also forget they were a way for large companies to segregate duties with fully autonomous teams each owning a service not a strategy for startups with one team. Multi-repo is a very valuable tool in the tool box but it is one for after your first team split and when you process in place to handle cross team coordination.

1

There are countless ways to enhance your skills, confidence and impact, and Irina Stanescu's post is a good summary. I have one more suggestion. Ask around. You spend so much time with your colleagues, fellow engineers. You program in pairs, you review code, you discuss tickets, and you plan your sprints. Here's the thing: 95% of these discussions is about the short term, and rightfully so, because we're paid to get things done. What about the remaining 5%? 🤔 When was the last time you asked a teammate for a book recommendation? 📚 When did you last watch together a tech explainer video? 🎥 When did you last write a post asking for course recommendations? 💡 At the lunch yesterday, did you share memes or news from the last big conference? 🌍 You can do this today. Tomorrow. Whenever. You don’t need to act on every idea, but you’ll discover new inspiration - and maybe, just maybe, influence your organizational culture toward a stronger growth mindset. 🌱

3

Software and AI/ML engineering friends - this is a killer opportunity to work for one of my favorite platforms (and one that I use literally every single day). Let me live vicariously through you (especially given my complete lack of engineering skill). #job #hiring #discord #engineering #software #data #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #machinelearning

1

🎉 Big News! We've just launched the third book in our System Design Playbook series! I don't want to brag too much because, well, I'm just the guy who created this, but together with my tireless team (shoutout to Rohit Jain and Shubham Chandak!), we've worked hard to make system design concepts simple and digestible. Preparing for FAANG interviews, I remember the struggle of finding comprehensive resources—concepts were all over the place, and explanations often left more questions than answers. We aimed to fix that. Here’s what we packed into this book: 1. 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗶𝗱𝘀: Lots of diagrams because, truly, "𝘈 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴." 2. 𝗡𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: No buzzwords, no fluff. Just clean, straightforward explanations that make sense. It's tough to write simply, but that's where the real effort lies—𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯’𝘵 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘺, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 - 𝘈𝘭𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘌𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘪𝘯. We've included a sample from our latest chapter on Designing YouTube to give you a taste of how we approach teaching complex topics in a way that sticks. Download Full eBook: 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲: https://lnkd.in/dzUXgTwb 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: https://lnkd.in/dXPvFzju Happy learning!

46

6 Comments

My profile says I work at Yelp, but I actually left once! Storytime :) I don't regret my decision, I got to work at Boosted.ai and help build out their tech stack! It was super exciting to help build a business from scratch with an amazing team. I loved it! However part of my motivation for leaving was faulty. One thing that really frustrated me was that I felt like nobody challenged me anymore. I had a ton of implied authority on my team. I was a rank and file software engineer like everyone else, but I was the last remaining engineer who helped found the Core Android team. I did the quarterly planning, and project management for the team. I helped mentor and train the new folks. My manager was managing another team, so I was given a ton of free reign to run things the way I liked, and he took care of the people side of things. It was a great setup, but everyone just... did what I said. I'd spend time putting together a detailed tech spec for something I thought we should build, and people would thumbs up and go "cool, when do we start!?" instead of giving any feedback. There was no way I nailed it on the first go... My mistake was making a false narrative and not validating it. I told myself that everyone trusted me because of my seniority, and wouldn't push back on me no matter what I did. I never validated whether this was true, and I never talked to my team about it, or my manager. Heck, I never even mentioned it to a mentor! I let it fester into a problem where I said I needed a change. We tried moving me to another team where I didn't have expertise, but by then I was already looking at Boosted. The stories we tell ourselves are incredibly powerful. They can build you up, but they can ruin your career, your relationships, or get you seriously hurt. In this case it took me down a different path, that helped me grow and evolve, but I would have been better served to deal with that issue head on. Talk to people, find ways to be challenged. Maybe I made it unsafe for folks to challenge me. Maybe a million other possibilities. I wonder what other stories I'm telling myself that I should validate?

55

19 Comments

Hiring Manager vs. Director Rounds: Why Are They Look Similar yet So Different? 🤔 As ICs, have you ever felt like HM and Director interview rounds ask similar questions but expect different answers? At the JE/SE level, this distinction can be unclear due to limited visibility into their goals. Let’s decode these two perspectives so you can tailor your answers to their expectations and ace both rounds with confidence! 🚀 Please read the blog for How to Build Answers Based on Their POV https://lnkd.in/gbc2dygw #InterviewTips #CareerGrowth #Leadership #JobSearch

11

2 Comments

Hey LinkedIn, design me a job! I'm an accomplished software engineer who has spent the last 12 years on a wide variety of (mostly non-tech) adventures. I've been looking for a tech job for 18 months now, and keep coming up dry. So... maybe a pure software role isn't the place for me any more? What kind of job would YOU hire me for? Here's what I've accomplished over the decade-plus since I moved on from Google: - Built a successful fine furniture business (from design to construction to delivery). - Built and deployed a full social network from scratch (using Node.js, React, AWS). - Co-developed and ran a ceramics studio (I was COO in charge of marketing, communications, online sales, finance). We survived the pandemic as a brick-and-mortar business! - Launched a woodworking school and taught more than 100 students, one or two at a time. - Lead the construction of a 2,000-square-foot steel building from blueprints to finished walls. - Built out a 100 square foot tiny house on a trailer. - Wrote half a novel (lol the other half is coming, I swear!). In short: I'm a smart, friendly person who isn't afraid to take on new challenges and adopt new skills. I'm an enthusiastic learner, I work hard, and I have a customer/service-first mindset. Although I definitely appreciate specific job leads, this question is more about the types of opportunities I should be looking for. I'm open to suggestions. What kind(s) of job(s) do you think would be a good fit for me? Thanks!

6

1 Comment