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23 articles in Career.
About this section
Career writing for developers is mostly written by people selling a course. This is written by people who hire, and who have been on the other side of it recently enough to remember. It covers what a hiring process is really weighing, why the strongest candidate on paper often is not the one who gets the offer, what moving from contracting into running a team actually costs you, and how to read a job description for the things it is not saying. Some of it is about our own hiring, including the parts we got wrong and changed. It is a smaller section than the technical ones and deliberately so: we would rather publish twenty posts we can stand behind than two hundred on how to answer interview questions.
All 23 articles
P.01A staff engineer is scoped by impact across teams, not seniority. Here is how to screen for that instead of promoting your best senior engineer.
P.02A DevRel posting draws speakers, content marketers, and ex-engineers who miss coding. How to work out which your product needs, what to test, what it costs.
P.03Forward-deployed engineer postings grew over 1,000% year over year, with comp at $300K-$550K. What the role is, why it exists, and what it means for hiring.
P.04Microsoft laid off 4,800 on July 6, 2026, hitting Xbox and commercial sales hardest while still pouring money into AI. What the pattern means for engineers.
P.05MLOps sits between the data scientist's model work and the DevOps engineer's infrastructure. What the role owns, what to screen for, and where people come from.
P.06Agent sandbox escapes, prompt injection, and tool-permission design are a distinct skill set from AppSec. What to screen for, and where candidates come from.
P.07Rails isn't the default startup choice anymore, but it didn't disappear. Where it still wins, where Next.js and Django beat it, and who should learn it.
P.08North Korea-linked campaigns hide malware in take-home coding tests, using steganography in SVGs to pass review. How to vet a challenge before you run it.
P.09Platform engineering has its own hiring cluster now, distinct from DevOps, SRE, and cloud architecture. How to screen for product thinking over ticket-taking.
P.10AI agents made broad, shallow knowledge cheap to fake. What's getting scarcer is the depth to know when the agent is wrong. Specializing versus generalizing.
P.11June 2026 data shows software engineer listings up 30% with 67,000+ open roles, despite the layoff headlines. Who's hiring, and where the market shrinks.
P.12Most developers lose money by negotiating too early, disclosing their current salary, or taking the first number offered. What actually works instead.
P.13The remote market is more competitive and more winnable than it looks. The developers who get hired aren't the strongest coders, they're the easiest to assess.
P.14AI projects flood every portfolio. Here's what actually distinguishes a developer's work from the crowd — and why the way you document your decisions matters more than the tech stack you picked.
P.15Burnout among developers isn't new. But the specific pressures of 2026 — AI-driven productivity expectations, skills anxiety, and the blurring of output and identity — create a different texture of exhaustion.
P.16The honest read on web developer demand after AI's impact, which roles are hot, which are cooling, and what the working week actually looks like across employment types.
P.17EditorPickI made 40% more freelancing than in year one of running an agency. Here are the real revenue, hiring, and cash-flow lessons that finally fixed it.
P.18EditorPickGoogle Summer of Code 2026 accepted 185 organizations. Here is everything you need to know — eligibility, timeline, stipends up to $6,600, how to write a winning proposal, and the mistakes that get you rejected.
P.19The developer career ladder split into IC, management, and hybrid tracks. Here's how each path works and how to pick the one that fits you.
P.20The developer employment landscape offers more options than ever. Here's an honest comparison of freelancing, agency work, and full-time employment to help you decide.
P.21Tech interviews are evolving. Take-home projects, AI-assisted coding, and system design are reshaping how companies evaluate developers. Here's what to expect.
P.22EditorPickA structured 100-day data science bootcamp roadmap covering Python, statistics, machine learning, deep learning, and real-world projects.
P.23A step-by-step guide to writing and publishing research papers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning — from ideation to submission.