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1) ✂️ Layoffs predictions are (probably) overblown
The recent brutal layoffs at Block have made headlines and reignited the conversation about the job market for engineers, AI, and so on.
The problem with headlines is selection bias: layoffs always make the news, but are they representative of the state of the market?
It doesn’t seem so.
On Indeed, for example, job postings for software engineers have steadily increased since mid last year 👇
And in our industry report from Q4 last year, we reported how Directors, VPs, and CTOs are skeptical about AI reducing our need for engineers. They actually think we’ll need more 👇
Here are a couple of revealing quotes from the survey:
As cost of delivery goes down, more use cases have positive ROI so demand goes up
— Director of EngineeringWe will continue to grow headcount. AI will simply increase the productivity and output of that headcount
— Director of Engineering
You can find the full survey here:
2) 🔨 In the best teams, normal people do great work
When people talk about world-class engineering orgs, they often have in mind teams that are top-heavy with staff and principal engineers, or recruiting heavily from the ranks of ex-FAANG employees or top universities.
But I would argue that a truly great engineering org is one where you don’t have to be one of the “best” or most pedigreed engineers in the world to get shit done and have a lot of impact on the business.
It’s actually the other way around.
A truly great engineering org is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.
Anyone can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. That’s not hard. And putting all the spotlight on individual ability has a way of letting your leaders off the hook for doing their jobs.
Instead, it is a huge competitive advantage if you can build sociotechnical systems where less experienced engineers can convert their effort and energy into product and business momentum.
We talked more about normal engineers and 10x teams in this amazing article written by Charity Majors 👇
3) 🎙️ Your second brain with Claude Code
In January I interviewed Thiago Ghisi, who is first and foremost a good friend of mine, former Director of Engineering at Nubank, and now on a sabbatical!
During his time off Thiago got into an ambitious personal project, using Claude Code to analyze decades of personal data. He created what he calls a “second brain on steroids” by converting notes, emails, and data dumps from various services into a searchable repository of his entire digital life.
The project began with migrating 15+ years of Evernote notes to Obsidian, then expanded to include:
📧 Gmail data — 20 years of emails, parsed to extract meaningful communications and create daily activity digests
📱 Social media dumps — Twitter, LinkedIn data converted to searchable formats
📚 Kindle highlights — extensive parsing of Amazon data including Whispersync information
🎙️ Content creation — transcripts of podcast appearances and articles written
“I ended up with Claude Code, just reading those data dumps and extracting things in Markdown. For example, I got my Gmail dump... And I got Claude Code to parse all the emails that I ever sent.”
He shared the full story in the interview 👇
You can also find it on 🎧 Spotify and 📬 Substack
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See you next week!
Luca