Want to try out the newest framework and spend time with recruiters to learn what the market wants? Come Sat-Sun on the 20. - 21. June to Berlin! See you at hrhackathon.net

Quite a valuable read to all the engineering managers out there. You should have a short, 500 word document with your engineering strategy lined out so everyone knows where you’re heading with your programming efforts.

A great read how to frame interviews questions that you want to ask companies. In most cases firms expect you to ask questions. And often, the quality of your questions to the interviewer are taken as a proxy to measure how interested you are in the job. This blog posts gives great examples how you should frame your questions to get the most information while not pissing off the other person (e.g., don’t ask “does it suck to work here?”)

Some say the best is to make yourself irreplaceable at a firm so you can’t be fired. Others say to do just the opposite. Postmortems or collaborative wikis or other methods to keep track of internal knowledge so everyone knows everything. It is healthier for the firm to do the latter.

Part 1 will set you in the right mindset if you’re standing before a new job and offer negotiation. Quite a long read but it has many useful snippets that you can adjust. E.g., if a firm pushes you to sign their offer, you can say: “I’m afraid this doesn’t work at all for me. There’s no way that I can make a decision on this offer within a XX day window. I’m currently wrapping up my interview process at a few other companies, which is likely to take me another week or so. Also, I need to talk to my significant other, and family abou this. So, I’m going to need more time to make an informed decision.”

If you have another 30 minute, read part 2. It has more useful bits about negotiation. I find some things aren’t applicable in Europe or I disagree with them such as:

- interviewing with >5 companies and “playing them” versus each other

- stressing BATNA

- bringing up personal expenses as a reason why one needs more money (it is private info and the firm shouldn’t care)

But overall it is a very educational read to help you understand how to think about salary negotiation, if you can adapt it to the European mentality.

If you compare software engineering to other fields, you will notice that we have a very different attitude to release cycles, quality, the definition of done and the level of surprise when bugs happen. If a bridge collapses the architect is shocked, if a server crashes the software architect isn’t. Does it have to be like that?

A good read after the article before. The author describes all the different issues one has with programming. Show this to juniors or people who want to break into programming because it is summing up all the headaches you will have, when you get into tech! 😅

I wrote this to explain the reality of recruitment and the reasons for spam on Linkedin. Incentives of all players aren’t aligned. Things “work” (or not) as they are and won’t get better. Platforms like LinkedIn make the situation worse by giving the tools to scale spam.