Career

Let’s learn to write a developer’s semi-annual performance review, using WWDC26 as our worked example. You didn’t screw up your own AI models and end up shipping a competitor’s. You “built a new foundation-model architecture in collaboration.” a new architecture built on foundation models developed in collaboration with Google using the technologies behind the Gemini family. You didn’t throw Apple Intelligence in the trash because it was so bad. After a “deep” engagement, you unlocked a “huge upgrade” to Apple Intelligence. ...

Who even counts tokens? Who counts the number of servers? Who counts the seconds per request? Who counts anything anymore? If it doesn’t matter how much you pay Anthropic or OpenAI for tokens, if it doesn’t matter how many instances are running on Amazon, if it doesn’t matter that an Azure function cold-starts for 10 seconds every single time — then the programmer probably doesn’t particularly matter either. Replaced one with another. The other with a third. Fired the third. Hired a freelancer with a Max subscription to Claude Code. It doesn’t matter whether the freelancer holds one job or ten. Doesn’t matter if they’re frontend or backend. Doesn’t matter the language, the framework. Only the subscription matters. ...

If developers already have their silver bullet — TypeScript — then managers have just found a new favorite: the AI-Native Team. It’s this idea that a small team can be as productive as a big team. Sounds like something you’ve heard before? Well, here’s the important addendum: as productive as a team of 50 people. So not even a team anymore — a whole organization. A department. The Builders The AI-Native Team doesn’t write code itself. It manages agents. It sets up agent factories for developing and delivering code. ...

I have a colleague who seems to have lost his mind on the AI wave. Before this he was an average engineer. He built good tools. Sometimes cool engineering decisions, sometimes not so much. All as usual. An engineer like any other. He played politics very well. Got promoted to Staff. Sat in meetings, aligned, synced, did his soft-skill things. All good. Then AI coding arrived And he probably decided: here’s my chance to level up the hardcore skills. Now I don’t need to negotiate. I don’t need to sit in meetings, or write design docs. I don’t need other people at all anymore. I can do everything myself. ...

People go into Big Tech for all sorts of reasons. Big projects. Big tasks. Big tools. A big ego. A big algorithmic past. In short — everything has to be big. Big. Big Tech. Only one thing stayed big But it just so happens that in recent years the only things that stayed big are the layoffs. The instability. The chaos. The politics. You go on vacation — and your project gets rewritten. You miss a meeting — and the platform gets migrated onto a different platform. ...

I remember when we used to repeat the mantra to each other — and from conference stages — that there is no silver bullet. It was practically a professional creed. And then AI showed up, and it turned out that wherever you add it, everything gets better. For managers. For products. For designers. For SaaS companies. Add AI to anything and it simply becomes better. Better how? Better in what way, exactly? And the way things worked before — why doesn’t that work anymore? Those are details. Digging into them feels almost impolite. So, anyway — the silver bullet is AI. ...

If an engineer at Big Tech can simply be fired, managers get hurt differently. They get converted into an IC — an Individual Contributor. On paper it’s a kind of tech lead: someone who both writes code and helps others write it. Except they code… so-so. The industry moved on without them During their years away from the keyboard, the industry changed so much that even the tools and the terms they used to rely on are gone. The ground they once stood on has been repaved twice. ...