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How I ship projects at big tech companies
What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project
Sean Goedecke
Sean Goedecke's personal blog
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Visit seangoedecke.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2020 – Nov 2026
Career & Management 22AI & Machine Learning 17Software Engineering 16Tech Industry & Business 9Society, Policy & Culture 7Life, Learning & Writing 5
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LLMs reward expertise
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact…
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I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
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How I estimate work
There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software projects will take is very…
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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task…
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Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
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How good engineers write bad code at big companies
Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t worked at a big company, it might be…
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How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
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Getting things “done” in large tech companies
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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How I use LLMs as a staff engineer
What I use them for and what I don't
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Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
Four archetypes in software engineering
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If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
Using AI agents correctly is a process of reviewing code. If you’re good at reviewing code, you’ll be good at using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or the…
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Blog about things you don't understand yet
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing…
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Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just as hard to review. Many software…
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The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
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Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
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What it's like working for American companies as an Australian
My experience working across timezones for Americans
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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
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Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies
Why you can't skip to the top (but you can skip to the bottom)
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In defense of shallow technical knowledge
Whenever a new piece of technology comes out (these days, mostly AI) I go to some effort to understand it. Usually I end up writing a post about it, so I can be…