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Articles by Brian Jenney
Use Your Year-End Review to Reach for a Promotion
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Hard work rarely speaks for itself. When I landed my first job as a software engineer, I had a simple plan: Work hard and somebody would notice.
Why AI Can’t Replace Engineering Teams
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! If you’re an engineer, you may feel like your skills aren’t commanding the premium they once did. Many engineers have faced layoffs or restructuring. But even for those of us who still have jobs, something corrosive is happening.
Changing Your Career Isn’t Easy
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! When I changed careers at 30 to become a software engineer, I expected it to be hard. I expected to struggle to fit in, and I expected to bomb a lot of interviews (I did). What I didn’t expect was how few people would support me.
3 Skills That Will Matter More in the Age of AI
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! If you have kids, they’re probably back in school right now after the summer break. Mine are too. My kids range from 9 to 20 years old, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what their future careers are going to look like.
An Engineer’s Guide to Surviving a Layoff
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! I lost a cushy engineering management position at the same time I purchased a business, with a mortgage, three kids, and every other financial obligation of being an adult. It was one of the most stressful stretches of my life.
Applying Different Forms of Mentorship
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Asking someone to be your mentor is weird.
Bring a Product Manager Mindset to Your Next Engineering Job
If you haven’t already seen a job listing for a “product engineer,” you probably will soon. The job everyone’s suddenly hiring for, this role is like a cross between a product manager and an engineer (as the name suggests). And it’s a hiring trend worth paying attention to. Companies are opening more of these roles every single month, but they’re struggling to fill them. The reason has almost nothing to do with engineers’ coding skills or years of experience.
Negotiating Your Salary Is About More Than Money Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Scroll through LinkedIn right now and you may find the same advice repeated by well-meaning people: “In a market this rough, just be grateful anyone will hire you. Take the offer.” I could not disagree more.
When Career Risks Are Worth Taking Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about, you can ask it here.
Why Public Speaking Skills Are Worth Investing In
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! You want to become a senior developer. A CTO, maybe. Start your own company, perhaps. Or maybe you just want to land your first role in tech. You will not get there from raw engineering skill alone.
Behind the Scenes of a Technical Interview
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table several times over the past decade.
The Pros and Cons of Job Hopping as an Engineer
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! I’ve changed jobs more times than I ever imagined I would. In the past 12 years, I’ve worked at seven different organizations. Some of those moves were forced by layoffs. Others were deliberate bets on my own trajectory.
What Size Company Is Right for You?
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Early in my career, I walked into a shared office space on my first day as a full stack software developer and sat down between the CTO and the CEO to get onboarded. There were four of us in total. Before the day was over, I received my first assignment.
What Size Company Is Right for You?
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum's careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i* partnership with tech career development company [Parsity](https://www.parsity.io/) and delivered to your inbox for free!* Early in my career, I walked into a shared office space on my first day as a full stack software developer and sat down between the CTO and the CEO to get onboarded. There were four of us in total.
The Computer Science Degree Isn’t Dead Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! There is no shortage of people telling recent engineering graduates that their degree was a mistake and that AI is coming for their jobs before they even land one. I respectfully disagree.
What to Consider Before You Accept a Management Role
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! The Individual Contributor–Manager Fork: It’s Not a Promotion. It’s a Profession Change. When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it. More money. More stock. More visibility.
What to Consider Before You Accept a Management Role
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i* partnership with tech career development company [Parsity](https://www.parsity.io/) and delivered to your inbox for free!* The Individual Contributor–Manager Fork: It’s Not a Promotion. It’s a Profession Change. When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it. More money. More stock. More visibility.
Working With More Experienced Engineers Can Fast-Track Career Growth Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! The Worst Engineer in the Room My salary doubled. My confidence tanked. That’s what happened when I had just joined a five-person startup in San Francisco in my third year as a software engineer.
Improve Engineering Communication by Translating Technical Detail
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Engineers Aren’t Bad at Communication. They’re Just Speaking to the Wrong Audience. There’s a persistent myth that engineers are bad communicators. In my experience, that’s not true. Engineers are often excellent communicators—inside their domain.
Keep Your Intuition Sharp While Using AI Coding Tools Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! How to Keep Your Engineering Skills Sharp in an AI World Engineers today are caught in a strange new reality. We’re expected to move faster than ever using AI tools for coding, analysis, documentation, and design.
Remote Work: Thrive With Communication Skills
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Standing Out as a Remote Worker Takes a Different Strategy My first experience as a remote worker was a disaster. Before I joined a San Francisco-based team with a lead developer in Connecticut, I had worked in person, five days a week.
How to Thrive as a Remote Worker
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i* partnership with tech career development company [Parsity](https://www.parsity.io/) and delivered to your inbox for free!* Standing Out as a Remote Worker Takes a Different Strategy My first experience as a remote worker was a disaster.
Are You Ready for AI in Your Next Interview? Original
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! We’d like to introduce Brian Jenney, a senior software engineer and owner of Parsity, an online education platform that helps people break into AI and modern software roles through hands-on training.
🔒 With AI Nothing Is Safe
🎥 With AI Nothing Is Safe - PSW #905 This week in the security news: - Linux process injection - Threat actors need training too - A Linux device "capable of practically anything" - The Internet of webcams - Hacking cheap devices - Automating exploitation with local AI models - Lame C2 - Smallest SSH backdoor - Your RDP is on the Internet - These are not the high severity bugs you were looking for - Low hanging fruit - Your TV is spying on you, again - no such thing as "offensive security" -...
🔒 How North Korean Spies Are Hacking Developers via Job Interviews
🎥 How North Korean Spies Are Hacking Developers via Job Interviews A detailed insight into a North Korean campaign targeted at hacking software engineers, how they sneak malware onto your system, and what you can do to protect yourself.
This is Why You’re Struggling to Learn JavaScript
Press enter or click to view image in full size The summer of 2013 I decided I was going to be a coder. I already knew HTML and CSS, so I bought this gigantic “JavaScript for Dummies” book. I’m talking phonebook-sized. I read that thing cover to cover all summer as if by the last page I’d suddenly be a developer. I never claimed to be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. I genuinely thought learning all the syntax from a book would mean I could sit down and just… code.
A Debugging Framework for JS Developers
I’m going to share a story of a particularly stressful bug I had to fix years ago while working at a start up and the method I still use to track and fix critical issues in JS code. (yes, even in the age of AI 🙄) The CTO actually mentioned this bug fix when I got promoted. If video is more your thing, you can watch me walk through some tips here. Here we go: It was past midnight on a Thursday when our platform team finished a data migration.
I Used to Suck at Coding Interviews. Then I Quadrupled My Salary.
Five years ago, during an interview for a senior dev role, I had a panic attack. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t get my words out. I had to ask the interviewer to restart the call. I was embarrassed, shaky, and 100% sure I’d blown it. Plot twist: I got the job, but it was one of many interview disasters I’ve had over the years. And it showed me just how broken my approach was. Here’s the thing: I was already decent at writing code. I wasn’t struggling to do the job. I was struggling to get the job.
If You’re Over 30 and Trying to Learn to Code, Read This First.
Not a quick YouTube tutorial. Not a how-to guide. I’m talking about deep, uncomfortable, make-you-question-how-smart-you-are type of learning. The kind that rewires your brain. For most people, it hasn’t happened since school and that’s part of the problem. There’s a reason the traditional path to software engineering involves school. Structured learning, homework and feedback loops train your brain to endure confusion, repetition, boredom, and struggle.
Building Your First AI Agent
Last year I joined an AI start-up and started building my first agent for a large project we were working on. It was exciting and messy. No one on the engineering team had any expertise with AI or working with LLMs. This “agent” was supposed to take a prompt, determine if we could actually handle the request and then do a search of either a vector database or do a web search. It might return some text or an array of objects depending on the outcome. It was bloated, inefficient and costly.
The 3-Step Learning Framework No One Taught You
Most people don’t actually know how to learn. They follow tutorials, binge YouTube, copy code, and then wonder why they feel stuck the moment they have to build something original. It’s not a lack of intelligence. It’s a lack of system. In a field like software development, where the tools change monthly and the fundamentals take years to master — having a learning strategy is more important than knowing a tech stack. But most new developers don’t have one.
3 Coding Interview Horror Stories (And What You Can Learn From Them)
Brian Jenney · Follow 4 min read · -- Failure is part of the game. Still hurts tho. If you’ve been through the job hunt as a developer, you probably have at least one horrific interview experience. The kind that makes you reconsider your entire career, your life choices, and whether or not you should go live in the woods. Well, I have a few of those stories. And while they were painful in the moment, I like to think they each taught me something.
What New Coders Get Wrong About Software Development
Brian Jenney · Follow 4 min read · -- Pictured: reality slapping you in the face According to Tik-Tok, the life of a software engineer is big bags, chill schedules and centering divs. So many divs need centering! Reality is a bit different. Before you decide to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to learn to code and switch careers, there are a few things you should know about what you’re really getting into.
I Got Laid Off and Hired in the Same Month. Here are 4 Takeaways
Now I can follow my life's purpose and launch that startup the world needs: Uber, but for cats! I will be officially laid off this month. You know the drill: Zoom call, locked out of systems, thanks for your service. So sad, too bad. I just verbally accepted an offer yesterday - weeks before my official separation date. It's worth mentioning that I have 25k+ followers on LinkedIn, 10 years of experience and connections in the industry. This makes my strategy different than yours. Or does it?
The 3 Mental Shifts That Separate Code-Bots from Software Engineers
If anyone can learn to code then why do some software engineers make hundreds of thousands of dollars? Quite simply, software engineers transform complex logic into code. They take an idea and understand how to implement it with a programming language or system. They understand the trade-offs and maintenance costs of their solutions. Sometimes they even have to explain this to other humans who may not speak in code 😉.
I’m an Engineering Manger and I’ve Seen All Your Resumes: Here’s 4 Ways Junior Developers Can Avoid the Dreaded NO Pile
In the last 2 years alone, I’ve read through at least 100 resumes for open positions at my current company for junior developers. In addition, I’ve done around 500 calls with developers from around the world and seen hundreds more resumes and LinkedIn profiles. As an engineering manager, when I get sent a stack of resumes to look through, I will divide them into 3 categories: 🔴 NO! 🟠 Maybe… 🟢 Yes! Your goal as a junior developer is to avoid the NO pile.
From Hired!… to Fired! Avoid these 2 Developer Career Death Traps
As an engineering manager I’ve had the privilege of promoting engineers on my team and offering people their first role in tech. It’s one of the most rewarding parts of the job. Besides all the meetings of course, that’s the icing on the cake 😉. Unfortunately, I’ve also had the not so fun task of promoting people OUT of the team 😬. I’ve also spoken to a few junior developers who finally landed their first role…. then got fired.
How It Feels to be the Worst Developer on a Team and How it Accelerated My Career
2 years after I joined my first company as a developer I knew it was time to leave. The decision was not easy. I liked my co-workers, managers and the company. But I knew that in order to grow as a developer I needed to be exposed to a more modern tech stack and different ways of working. I successfully passed an interview for a very early stage start-up using EmberJS, Rails and Postgres. At this time I had been using C#, SQL and AngularJS. My salary also doubled. Making the move was a no-brainer.
Big Fish in a Small Pond or Small Fish in a Big Pond?
I’m going to break down the strategy that took me from an underpaid, mediocre developer to an engineering leader through a series of strategic job hops. I love to code and help people reach their goals. I also like making money, gaining influence and status. You probably do too. Developers are generally obsessed with salary, getting to senior levels and owning their own companies. I think this is good overall.
3 Tactics to Multiply Your Salary in Tech
Yeah I know, money isn't everything. But it's something right? I've been broke and not-so-broke. I prefer not being broke any day of the week. In a little under 8 years I've successfully 5x'ed my salary. It wasn't by learning a dozen programming languages. I didn't make it to FAANG. I've never been the best coder on any team. I applied 3 tactics I copied from a much smarter developer who understood the game of money in tech. I'll share them with you in a minute.
The Junior Developer With 7 Years Experience
I met a junior developer with 7 years experience. His resume actually looked pretty good. When we started the interview though... oof. He had been writing JS for nearly a decade but could not use ES6. He struggled with a simple problem that required iterating over an array and merging some objects. How was this possible? My guess is that he had spent all the time at his current company basically doing the same tasks over and over and over. I'm sure he was excellent at THAT particular company.
The React Pattern You Never Heard of That You Should Be Using
I'm going to show you how to make your React codebase more flexible and less complex by leveraging a little known pattern for React components: The Compound Components pattern. Implementing the Compound Components pattern gives you the ability to create components that can be reused in different ways, without adding lots of if else statements. This will make your code easier to maintain and understand and maybe even impress your team mates.
Maybe You Are an Impostor
Six years ago I transitioned careers at 30 to become a software developer. Since then, I’ve worked at 4 different companies and been promoted to senior developer. At each stage of my career I’ve had a not-so-small voice in the back of my head questioning whether I was really qualified to be in my current position. Was it luck? Did my presence help to fill some diversity quota? Did they make a terrible mistake by hiring me, I wondered.
Excited for LA tech
After 20 years in the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley tech world, my husband and I are packing up the kids and dog and moving to LA. Neither of us had jobs lined up in LA and it’s not like its possible to save money while living in SF with 3 kids, but I was having a #girlboss moment and feeling confident that I could move to LA and find my people… and find I did! I did a whirlwind get-to-know-LA-tech tour.
Career Tips from Top Business Schools
I spend much of my time talking to MBA students, administrators, and professors at the best business schools in the world. Discover their advice. Businesspeople are the masters of job hunting and networking, which is why they have the best career tips. After all, business schools train students to build a long-term career that reaps professional and financial rewards.
Finally, an Article About Recursion in Javascript That Doesn’t Use Fibonacci
I am going to try my best not to use any played out jokes regarding recursion in this piece, but being well into my career as a father, there are no guarantees. The idea of recursion is actually pretty simple: a function that calls itself. Now, putting this principle in practice to write something useful is another bag of beans.
My Most Embarrassing Coding Mistakes… So Far
And how to avoid them I’d like to attribute any git commit of mine in the first year (or two) to someone else.. anyone else In the better part of the last decade, I’ve written a lot of code, and now, through the lens of experience, I see just how bad some of that code was. How bad you ask?
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