Timothy Hall

We just released Taro's newest course about what life is really like at FAANG. So much of the discussion about working at FAANG focuses on things like the scale of the work or the free snacks. But on the day-to-day level, an engineer at Google or Facebook doesn't think about these topics. They are spending most of their waking hours on things like: - how much scope do they have? - how much control do they have vs just being a cog in the machine - what do their coworkers think about them? As a 5 year veteran of Meta, I break down the real pros and cons of working in Big Tech. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gfkwVDf9

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Coding agents make traditional READMEs obsolete. Not because documentation doesn’t matter. But because static summaries of dynamic systems don’t scale. READMEs today: • Go stale fast • Nobody wants to maintain them • Slowly turn into technical archaeology They’re snapshots of a moving target. Coding agents change the interface. Instead of reading a compressed summary, you can: • Analyze the codebase in real time • Trace git history for architectural intent • Ask “why is this like this?” and get contextual answers • Generate setup instructions dynamically No staleness. No maintenance burden. No drift from reality. So what happens to READMEs? Two paths: 1) They disappear. Onboarding becomes “ask the agent.” 2) They shrink. Documenting only what’s outside the repo (3rd-party configs, env variables, human processes). And even that may fade as agents integrate directly with external systems. The README’s original job was compression. Coding agents remove the need for compression. We’re moving from: “Here’s a summary of the system.” To: “Interrogate the system itself.”

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I don't write dedicated "unit" tests for every public method or every function. Some might interpret that as not needing high test coverage. Just to be clear, my test coverage is usually 100% or as near as dammit. There's no code that isn't tested.

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There’s a quiet trend happening - Rust engineers leaving comfortable FAANG roles for small, high-ownership teams. Not because they want ping-pong tables or startup chaos - but because they want meaning. They want to build things where their fingerprints actually show up in the product. Every week I hear the same line: “I just miss building.” That’s why early-stage Rust hiring is taking off. The best engineers want to feel the impact of their work again. If you were choosing between stability and impact, which way would you lean right now? 🦀

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I’ve noticed a pattern in healthtech hiring failures. The role was scoped as “software engineer”. The reality was “product, security, data, and integration lead”. Titles lie. Responsibilities don’t. If the expectations aren’t explicit, you’re signing up blind.

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Developers weren’t just builders. They were gatekeepers. If you couldn’t code, you didn’t create. You waited. On engineering bandwidth. On roadmaps. On someone else’s priorities. Syntax was the wall. Know where the semicolon went? You shipped. Didn’t? You stood outside. That divide shaped more than workflows. It shaped status. Developers got the leverage. The scarcity gave them the power to decide what shipped and when. Everyone else adapted around them. It wasn’t about being smarter. It was about access — and access wasn’t evenly distributed. Some people were in the right rooms early, tripped into syntax, and built from there. Others never got the chance. That was the difference. But syntax was only the first kind of alpha. The second was quieter. Harder to see. More enduring. System knowledge. Knowing which database could survive Black Friday traffic. When to debounce vs. throttle. How to shard writes across regions. Not just writing code — architecting it. That’s the tacit layer. Built from war stories. Outages. Scaling pain. Years in the trenches. It’s still here. And it still matters. For now. I remember the first time I tried to shortcut it. I’d tell Claude what I wanted. It would spit out code. I’d paste it. It would break. I’d send back the error. It would try again. Loop by loop, something shifted. Reddit called it “copy-paste monkey.” They saw a hack. I saw a door opening. People who’d been locked out started building demos. Then products. Then real companies. The wall between “technical” and “non-technical” was never about intelligence. It was about translation. And now, translation is free. What matters now isn’t syntax. It’s clarity. How well you can think. Break things down. Iterate. That’s what the agent understands. And that’s what it rewards. The syntax advantage is gone. Developer privilege is flattening. System knowledge is next. Today, the agent can’t always choose the perfect database. But if you tell it the trade-offs, it will. If you give it context, it will architect with precision. That tacit edge still holds. But only for now. Soon, even that will be embedded. And leverage will shift again — to anyone who can think clearly enough to guide the machine. That shift isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s not going away.

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I see so many startups claiming they want to hire elite Software Engineers, but then demanding a coding task before even having an intro call. That’s not how you attract top talent.

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In the early days of code bootcamps, hiring grads was hard because we didn’t really know what to do with them. The company I worked for established a code school -> QA Engineer -> SWE pipeline and had a ton of success both getting value and training people. In a world of AI enhanced engineers, I think we go back to that. Manual QA has never been more important or effective.

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The best solutions engineer we uncovered in a month of searching wasn't. We knew we needed someone who had worked in a SaaS business, could code in TypeScript, was great with customers, and knew something about troubleshooting API integrations. Ideally they had some experience of automating parts of their work with AI and some understanding of LLMs. The startup we were working with wanted a Solutions engineer, and so, of course, we spent a lot of time talking to people with that title. We also spent time talking to Full-Stack engineers who wanted more customer-facing roles, Integration specialists with the right tech stack, Presales people, and Technical Account Managers. In the end though, the best person we interviewed for the role was someone calling themselves a Customer Success Engineer.  Job titles are not clear signposts. Good agencies earn their fees through thorough investigations and careful interviews to connect you with people who understand the work you need done and are willing to do it. Need a crew willing to put in the work on a role that is not being filled with the obvious options? Team SEEKR have room for one new client in September. 

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Sometimes I think it would be cool to have a job where I lead a team that's free to go forth and improve developer productivity in a non-trivial eng org, and then I remember that most productivity issues aren't technical: they're issues of people, process, politics, and inertia. Hard for a team to change unless they have super-senior commitment and backing.

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Woke up this morning thinking about a pattern I’ve been hearing a lot lately. In the last few weeks, I’ve talked to a bunch of CTOs who are all circling the same idea: AI is really good at writing automated tests. So let’s lean harder into TDD. Developers write and update all the tests. Unit, integration, API, end-to-end. All greens before you’re allowed to commit. And therefore, we don’t really need test automation teams anymore. Frankly, it’s hard to argue with the "principle". In a perfect world, that process is remarkably effective. A developer owning the whole thing, tests included, everything green before commit, that’s kind of the dream. In some ways, I actually agree it’s the right direction. But... After working with hundreds of developers over the last ~12 years, I’d say around 80%-90% of them have developed pretty rough patterns when it comes to quality. Not because they’re bad engineers, but because of the system we built. For years the implicit contract has been: “I’ll do what the ticket says. QA will catch the edge cases. Then I’ll fix whatever they find.” That mindset didn’t come from nowhere. We incentivized it. One of my QA engineers said something recently that stuck with me: “Imagine if we were building a house, and QA was the home inspector and we showed up to the house and saw it in the state as this dev environment” Developers are used to a very ephemeral world. Ship something that kind of works. Hand it off. Have another human crawl through it carefully. Get a list of cracks. Fill the cracks. Repeat. Years of that pattern don’t disappear just because AI can now write tests. What actually happens is the same handoff, just to a different place. Instead of handing half-done work to QA, they hand it to an AI. They won’t deeply review the tests. They won’t question the coverage. They won’t think hard about what’s real risk vs noise. The AI will catch 80–90% of things, sure. But the remaining 10–20% is where quality lives — and that still requires judgment, context, and experience. This is where I think people are underestimating the role of quality coaching. Automation isn’t just “write tests.” It’s test data. It’s environment management. It’s what you mock and what you absolutely shouldn’t. It’s avoiding duplicate effort. It’s deciding what actually matters to test. Please, for the love of God, don’t just have an engineering leader tell 5 or 10 developers to “own automation now” and expect it to work. What works is having people whose job is to audit, coach, challenge, and advocate for good quality patterns. You don’t need a massive team. One strong quality person can support multiple teams. A half-time quality coach can change everything. Elevate a senior QA. Elevate an SDET. AI makes this possible. Quality coaching is what makes it sustainable. If you skip that part, you’re not removing work, you’re just hiding it until it hurts more later.

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If you're looking for a new docs framework for your dev tool, I can't recommend Docusaurus enough. 1. You can change the appearance of any component—no matter how big or small—by ejecting its raw React code into your source tree. I've ejected almost all of its major components and restyled them with Tailwind. 2. It supports content written with MDX, which is like Markdown but better. MDX lets you write JSX tags so you can render React components (like badges and banners) directly inline your content. No more messy templating. 3. It bundles Prism for code snippet highlighting. So you if you want to change how each and every token of your language gets styled—which I do—you can override it with a simple centralized map—which I have. 4. You can swap out its on-site search engine with Algolia, now widely considered the best option for developer sites. It is, in other words, the perfect tool for people like me who are obsessed with every pixel.

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We don’t hire software engineers to solve LeetCode problems. We hire them to design scalable architectures. Debug complex systems. Balance speed with security. Collaborate with humans. And navigate messy, ambiguous problems. But too many interviews still boil down to: “Solve this algorithm puzzle under time pressure.” LeetCode rewards memorization, not engineering judgment. It filters for people who had time to cram, not the ones who’ve built secure, reliable systems. If you want to hire great engineers: Give them real-world scenarios. Let them talk through constraints and risk. Watch how they think—not how fast they recall a pattern. Because building software—especially secure software—isn’t about regurgitating solutions. It’s about understanding the problem well enough to solve it.

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Experienced developers: Stop saying you're "just a developer." You're not. You're a problem solver who happens to use code. I see 10+ year veterans underselling themselves every day: "I'm not ready to lead a team" "I'm never gonna be better than the 10x developers" "I'm not senior enough for that role" Meanwhile, you've: - Created products that made your boss rich - Prevented system outages that would cost millions - Built features used by thousands of users daily - Mentored junior developers who are now thriving But you focus on what you DON'T know instead of what you DO. Here's the truth: Imposter syndrome isn't about lacking skills. It's about lacking perspective. You compare your behind-the-scenes to everyone else's highlight reel. Stop it. Your experience IS valuable. Your solutions ARE needed. You DO belong in those senior roles. The companies that don't see your worth aren't worthy of your talent. Find the ones that are. ♻️ Repost if you needed to hear this today. What's one thing you accomplished this year that you're proud of? Share it below 👇

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