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Recently encountered an interesting take from a fellow senior engineer here on LinkedIn "Java the old way [...] should be abandoned. The new way [...] should be embraced and it should also be mandatory that old software must transition to it." Quite a brave assumption, given that the whole reason Java is still so popular nowadays is exactly because it's so stable and doesn't require every enterprise using it to rewrite everything from scratch each release cycle. Is it joyful for the engineer? Probably not. But it fulfills the most important quality of Java as a technology - it's meant to be run the same way for years. Regarding the point of that engineer. If those companies would be forced to rewrite everything in "new way", how many of them would abandon Java completely to move to something else? As engineers, we need to be aware of what are the selling points of the technologies we use. Do you hate old-school development style and want to jump on new things all the time? Go with Node.js. Do you want simplicity and performance? Golang is your friend. We are paid to make business better, so remember: technology is only a tool!

@Lenny's Newsletter, I love your newsletter for the product take and everything you offer, but I don't like the attached claim. I get that the success stories of people who didn't know something is "supposedly impossible" and yet they managed to do it are a beautiful inspiration. Like The Wright brothers who built the plane, even though many experts said heavier-than-air machines could not fly. The thing is, the consensus here was based on incomplete understanding of aerodynamics. The laws of physics allowed flight, it's just that people had the wrong models. Or let's take the another example: for years, people believed running a mile under four minutes was physiologically impossible. Doctors said the human body could not handle it. Then Roger Bannister did it and soon after, many others did too. This was a psychological barrier, not a physical one. Now let's compare these two to engineering. It's a very deterministic field, many impossibles are formal impossibility results based on e.g. computational theory and mathematics, not cultural myths or wrong thinking models. It's not like in the examples attached, there were any technical reasons Chrome extensions or desktop apps shouldn't technically work. Lovable generates code and Chrome extensions are just packaged JavaScript. Desktop apps are typically wrappers around web technologies or native runtimes that are also well defined and documented. If the underlying platform allows it, then it's technically possible. There is no fundamental law being challenged here. The dangerous part is turning this into a belief that you can build anything simply because you do not know what is impossible. In engineering, when someone says something is not possible, it usually does not mean "we lack imagination." It means "this is insecure," "this will corrupt data," "this will fail under real-world conditions" and so on. Those limits are not creative blocks, they are protective boundaries. Ignoring them does not make you bold - it means you will just discover them later, when the cost is higher. And for reference - I love AI and build a lot with it, never had so much fun in my job (and I'm saying it as a software engineer from passion!), and I'm all in for non-technical people using AI to build. I genuinely cheer for them and want more people to create, I just don't want the takeaway to be that limits are imaginary, because in engineering many of them exist to keep you, your users and your data safe.

✏️ If you are a software engineer, do you own a brag document? No? You're missing on performance reviews that could yield way better results for you! Having a brag document is something I learned while at Meta. Whenever I feel I'm proud of something, small or big, I add it there with a short commentary. When the time was coming up for performance reviews, I wasn't frantically searching through my past Slack messages, projects, or PRs - everything was ready for me in the document to put into my self-assessment. I've never forgot about any important contribution I made. That's the first thing I was suggesting on a very first call with every mentee I ever had, because most of them didn't have one. People often expect their managers will remember their achievements. But think about it - would you remember all achievements of 5+ people on your team, in addition to yours own? Brag document is your way to make sure your manager has got all the tools they need for you to succeed. 📈 How do you track your impact today? PS: At @Buffer, we've got now monthly reflections with our managers (think kind of perf reviews, but not 100% the same), which requires us to have our "brag documents" updated, that's what you call a motivation to have one. I'll be happy to write about it more if you're interested!

Wispr Flow please tell me the release for Android will be soon after that waitlist contest ends 🙏 https://wisprflow.ai/android-waitlist

We’re hiring an Operations and Automation Specialist on the People team at @Buffer! 🥳 This role will help improve how we work across a remote, global team by reducing friction in our day to day systems, strengthening how we share context and make decisions, and supporting thoughtful adoption of automation and AI. If you love tinkering, building practical solutions, and bringing clarity to how teams collaborate across tools and time zones, this is for you! 🌎 Fully remote 🗓️ 4-day work week 💙 Values-led, transparency-first culture 💰 $108,584 - $139,952 USD + equity 🔗 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gug2dPEn

Are you able to guess which voice is mine, and which one is an AI clone? After editing, I had to double-check to make sure which one is the original. Also, my dear wife @Olga Dąbrowska guessed it wrong. A little scary but exciting! Got my hands on @ElevenLabs recently, and it blows my mind how accurate it is with voice cloning. Makes me super proud the company is Polish! 🇵🇱 Side note: @ElevenLabs, when I was creating a Deep clone, I used my pro microphone as you suggested in the instructions. Went for like 30 minutes of talking, and when uploaded, it told me "The language of the audio samples does not match provided language. This can happen if the sample is low quality". Understandable, because when I played them, I could hear the background noise, but still made me annoyed because of the lost 30 minutes. I think it'd be better if you improved the UX by requiring a test 1-minute sample from the user to make sure it's okay to continue 😀

I got my hands on all @Replit, @bolt.new and @Lovable to try out the non-technical people's perspective on how easy it is to build apps that genuinely help them, and compared to closer-to-the-metal way of doing it with Claude, I'm not that impressed yet, but the direction is good! The idea for the app was simple: I want to buy an apartment with mortgage, and for years I was using an Excel spreasheet where I've got a simulation covering how much does the interest eats with assumption that I'm overpaying the mortgage, and a few extra factors like my salary changing, extra one-time payments like bonus from work, tax returns, or a sale of our old apartment. I tasked Replit with doing that. What's the most impressive is that it build it within a few minutes and it was (mostly) working, with literally no technical input from me! What's less impressive is that as soon as I started testing stuff and tasking it to fix some small inconveniences, I was discovering more inconveniences and bugs. That's fine - we can iterate on it! But 30 minutes later I completely run out of my $20 credits. So I defaulted to the known method: exported files, tasked @Claude to dockerize it, and fix all the stuff I noticed. Took me 10 minutes and I've got it running locally with the most annoying bugs fixed and a few small extra features. Replit will be awesome for non-technical folks when tokens are way cheaper, for now it doesn't even stand near the value that @Anthropic and Claude provide within its plans. Claude, I love you.

Salary up to $224,272, fully remote with benefits you won't see anywhere else (did someone say 4-day workweeks or the coffee shop coworking benefit from that video?!) We're hiring at @Buffer, come join us! Engineering: • Senior Backend Engineer (Platform & API): $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Engineer, Growth Marketing: $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Product Engineer (Frontend): $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Developer Advocate: $157,297 – $194,000 Marketing: • Senior Community Manager: $116,330–$144,213 Data Science: • Senior Data Scientist: $192,600–$224,272 All roles are: 🌍 Fully remote 📆 4-day workweek 📈 Equity included 💚 A kind, high-trust, values-led team Link to careers page in comments!

A few days ago I posted tips about applying to fully-remote jobs for async-heavy and distributed companies with lengthy application forms and how the writing skills are evaluated as an important factor. The post got a little more controversial than I anticipated, and I'm not able to fit into characters limit while editing it there, so I decided to address it in this article. I'm expanding on these common themes: - “ATS/AI Filtering - nobody even looked at my application” - “Length ≠ Writing Skill” - “The UI (short textareas) doesn't set expecations” - “Why do I need to spend so much time on it if I get ghosted anyway” - “Why don't you ask all those questions later on the actual interview?” - “If candidates write essays, employers should respond with equal thoughtfulness.” - “I don't know the product deeply yet to answer all these questions in depth” It's my take on why different hiring processes signal different cultures of the companies. Lengthy forms are not a fit for everyone - and that’s okay. Hiring is a two-way filter.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when applying to fully-remote jobs for async-heavy and distributed companies, is not spending enough time to answer all the questions in depth. If the company is fully remote, it means it relies on writing a lot. All of these questions, besides their literal meaning, assess how good you are at writing. If you submit your answers in the form of 3-4 sentences for each because you're short on time, you can as well just skip submitting the application at all - you'll save even more time! It doesn't matter how strong your CV is - if you fail at writing, you'll be rejected no matter what because it's so important at remote teams. So if you plan to apply to e.g. @Buffer (we've got a few openings now!), please take your time, it's your free advice! Edit: As you can see, there are a lot of comments with different takes on it. I address all of them here in the article (I was unable to fit into the character limit on this post unfortunately): https://lnkd.in/eujCswQQ

We’re hiring a Senior Community Manager at Buffer! 🥳 Fully remote (I'm posting it from Chiang Mai 🇹🇭), 🗓 4-day work week, 💰 $116K–$144K + equity. This role will help shape how Buffer shows up for creators and small businesses, from leading conversations in Discord and Reddit to designing thoughtful community programs and partnerships. If you enjoy bringing people together, facilitating meaningful conversations, and building community systems that scale without losing the human touch, this role is for you! 🔗 Link in comments!

It's the first time in my career when I feel uncertainty about the future. Not necessarily about being replaced by AI - I'm not afraid of that. But through the next years the industry will change a lot, we just don't know yet how exactly, and we'll need to adjust in new roles. So that's the uncertainty - what exactly will I be doing in a few years? It's especially interesting perspective for software engineers - in this field the growth mindset and constant learning were the backbone of your success. And in this phase of the change, right now, we've all got to maximize our learning time and effectiveness to adjust dynamically to how the industry changes, only then we'll be able to stay within. When I think about what AI is good at, and what it's missing, I see 3 clear paths for myself. #1 The first one is leaning more and more towards product. I am what people call a product engineer, and I think you've got to lean even more into product with all the change coming. The interesting thought here is - what does it mean for product managers? Will they be leaning more and more towards engineering now that it's easier? Will we eventually see those two roles merging? #2 The second one is working on AI itself. It's a green-field area, and LLMs aren't good im greenfield projects, so you still need that human touch and creativity for it. At the same time what I think gives you edge in AI development are hardcore mathematics and research skills, something I'm definitely missing, amd I'm not sure I want to catch up. #3 And the third one is SRE - when the stakes are high and you need 100% certainty your critical systems won't break, you'll still need a human review (possibly with a lot of AI help, but still it's human making the ultimate decision). That's another field I'd see myself in, especially given I've got past experience with high-stakes operation, current engineering skills and an interest in infrastructure things. Still, the product engineering is where there's the most alignment for me right now, and at the same time it's prone to the biggest changes because of AI out of these three mentioned, and possibly the most "endangered". Interesting times! I'm curious how do you see your future, do you believe our industry is fundamentally changing? What are you doing to prepare yourself for it and be on the forefront?

Politics at the workplace - there aren't that many phrases heating up the room full of engineers like this one. And yes - you should get good at it. What I noticed - people who deny the need to influence others at the workplace will call it "politics" - it's got a negative sound to it. But you need to remember - being better than your colleagues is not what leads to your promotion. We are humans - your manager is human, other managers and directors at the calibration meeting are humans, and the processes defining if you get the promotion or not are run by humans. They should try to remove emotional attachment to you to keep the process fair, sure - but it isn't really binary and it's not possible to remove it fully. Be a great coworker, learn how to communicate well, and create rapport with people who influence your carrer progress (or its lack). If you call it politics - fine, but complaining about it won't help you progress.

🔑 My little secret (though I'm sharing it now, so I guess not so secret anymore!) is that I screenshot all gratitude towards me in my workplace. It helps that we're fully remote and distributed globally, so a lot of it happens in Slack / Zoom & similar. Why do I do it? First thing is that I've got all praise handy when I need it for my performance reviews. It also helps when you're no longer working there and can reflect on how people perceived you. But even more important - when I feel down at work and lack energy, I can take a look at it to remind myself what I'm working for! Have you ever done something similar?

Fully remote, $157-$194K + equity, 4 day work-weeks - sounds like something for you? We're hiring for Senior Developer Advocate at @Buffer 🚀 If working on the edge of engineering, education and customer support is your thing, I couldn't imagine a better place to be than exactly here (or wherever you are, cause Bufferoos are everywhere)! A little context: We're building our Public API for the past few months and we're entering a critical phase right now, where we'll be releasing it to more and more of our customers. It's one of the most exciting projects I've been working on here, so this position is super close to my heart. If you're thinking about applying, I cannot wait for you to do so! ❤️

I love being an experienced software engineer in the AI era. Every idea I killed in the past because I didn't consider it good enough, I've got now tools to implement it in a few hours! The AI agents got so good over the past months that shipping MVP is dead simple if you know what you're doing. In the past weeks: - I've hit Claude limits for the first time - Created MVP for the app I always wanted to do: smart PR review notifications for GitHub (coming soon!) - Created my first app on iOS (and I don't know Swift or mobile development at all) - Started working on another app I've been thinking about for the past year The future is now, and I couldn't be more excited!

Reflecting on the current state of software engineering, I believe we're about to adopt 'writing' as a requirement, just like it happened with automated testing years ago. With tests - everyone followed when it appeared that companies doing automated testing have less outages and more reliable software. With writing - everyone will start mandating a proper writing and documentation when they see that companies doing that are ahead of them thanks to LLMs usage and feeding them internal documents. As a big fan of writing - I cannot be happier about that possible outcome! What's your take on it?

Amazed by how productive AI makes me in my coding workflows, I thought it'll make my email research way faster, but Gemini in Gmail is a tragedy. I've got 5 flights with 4 different airlines coming in the next 3 months that I booked weeks ago, so I don't remember the baggage allowance anymore. Thought it's a nice task for Gemini but it: - first wasn't able to find 3 out of 5 flights at all - when pointed to exact dates, still wasn't able to find the last one - finally found it - when corrected about baggage allowance in one of them, completely forgot about the 4 other ones - when corrected about that, distilled me a baggage allowance from completely different bookings I had What a tragedy 😅 any better tools for email research? Maybe @Superhuman would do better?

🌏 After 8+ years of working remotely as a software engineer, here are the programming languages I’d learn if I had to start again. Yes - you can find remote work in almost any stack. But if you want to maximize your chances, some technologies open far more doors than others, especially in fully remote and distributed companies. Here are the 3 most high-leverage ones, in my opinion: 1. JavaScript / TypeScript & Node.js The undisputed #1. JavaScript is needed everywhere on the frontend, and more and more companies use Node.js on the backend. One language across the full stack = massive hiring demand. It's also what I work with today, and the number of remote opportunities is honestly overwhelming. 2. Python If you ignore frontend side, Python is the clear leader in remote job listings with endless possibilities: backend development, automation, data engineering / data science, AI/ML, LLM-based applications. Every hype cycle of the last decade has had Python at its core. If you want versatility + remote-friendliness, this is it. 3. PHP People love to joke about PHP - meanwhile, it powers a huge part of the web and is still used heavily in new products (especially with Laravel). And then there’s the real secret: WordPress is a massive remote-friendly and freelance-friendly ecosystem. You can laugh at it, or you can make serious money with it. I did the latter. There were months when I made $10,000+ on the side after hours doing WordPress work - so there's definitely some money to earn here! A popular tech stack means: - More openings - More remote companies - More freelance gigs - More long-term security Yes, more competition too - but I’d still choose having more doors to knock on, and then focus on becoming one of the best. Do you agree? Would you add some other technology to the list? Let me know if you've got any questions about remote work or freelancing!

If you live outside of US and are a remote worker - you're probably as big enemy of location-dependent salary as I am. Working in tech as staff+ engineer in big tech and high-growth startups, your peers in NYC or SF are clearing at least twice as much as you are, for doing essentially the same work (assuming you're contributing on the same level). Company policy explains it's because of the cost of living (most often) and high competition for the most talented engineers (often). Recently, I've ended up browsing through @Oxide Computer Company blog, intrigued by their culture and approach to transparency and fairness. See what their co-founder @Bryan Cantrill wrote about location-independent salaries: "Some will say that we should be paying people differently based on different geographical locations. I know there are thoughtful people who pay folks differently based on their zip code, but (respectfully), we disagree with this approach. Companies spin this by explaining they are merely paying people based on their cost of living, but this is absurd: do we increase someone’s salary when their spouse loses their job or when their kid goes to college? Do we slash it when they inherit money from their deceased parent or move in with someone? The answer to all of these is no, of course not: we pay people based on their work, not their costs. The truth is that companies pay people less in other geographies for a simple reason: because they can. We at Oxide just don’t agree with this; we pay people the same regardless of where they pick up their mail." It's been quite some time since I've read something so powerful culturally, and I couldn't agree more. At @Buffer, we still have got some remains of location-dependent salary, but we're on a good path to eliminate it completely in the future, and that's something our leadership has got in mind, and I'm super grateful for it. Do you know any other global companies that pay independently from the location? 🌍

I rarely read books focused on a specific technology, because they get outdated pretty fast and it's just better to learn what you want online from docs. But if you're working with @Node.js - I have to recommend "JavaScript in Depth" by @James Snell. It gets into why JS works like it does (remember all the memes about 0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3?), and makes you understand "why" behind all things JS - and that won't get outdated! A few questions to check if the book would be useful to you: - do you know how V8 optimizes string manipulation? - do you know integer numbers in certain range are stored differently for performance reasons? - do you know how types are coerced? - are you aware that stream processing can throw errors that skip try/catch blocks completely? The book is still in the works, but you can already access it at @Manning Publications Co. and learn more about runtimes, strings, numbers and objects. I personally cannot wait for chapters about the errors, garbage collection, event loop, streams and thread workers!

One of the reasons AWS and Azure dominate the cloud market over Google: internal dogfooding pressure 🐶 I’ve been writing recently about dogfooding as a personal career superpower, but there’s also a business side to it. If you look at the cloud market, AWS and Azure dominate. There are many reasons for that, but one pattern stands out to me: how heavily these companies relied on their own products internally, mandating AWS and Azure usage for all new products and making conscious effort to migrate existing ones. That kind of usage forces uncomfortable questions early, and makes the product way better. Google's infrastructure history is different. For a long time, internal teams ran on highly customized internal platforms, and public GCP evolved more as a product for external customers. That doesn’t mean Google didn’t dogfood at all, but the feedback loops were different. And you can often feel that difference in day-to-day developer experience. This isn’t the only reason cloud market share looks the way it does. Sales motion, pricing, ecosystems, and timing matter a lot too. But dogfooding is a big contributor. Whether you’re building cloud platforms or internal tools, the lesson is the same: 🐶 If you want your product to get better, make it impossible not to use it. Happy to hear counterpoints from folks with different experiences!

Wondering how you can increase your chances of getting interviewed and accepted at Buffer, or any other company with a great culture and benefits, where hiring managers get thousands of applications? Let me share some lesser-known advice with you based on my own experience (and what I would do today). Let's skip the obvious - you've got to have required experience. If we're looking for a senior engineer, you've got to have a resume that proves it. Buffer is famous thanks to great culture, transparent salaries, awesome benefits like 4-day workweeks, and the fact it's been doing these things for over a decade. Now, how do you make yourself different from every other candidate, if we get so many qualified resumes? You prove that you are a match for us! You can notice that every Bufferoo posts on social media. For me it's LinkedIn and TikTok. Many of us have got followings that go in thousands of people. When you look at the application, there is a question about your experience with Social Media - and it's not there as a filler. It's genuinely important question, so if you start posting you're making a big difference here! No need to be a big influencer, just use social media to share your thoughts on whatever works for you. Buffer is built for creators, by creators, so it is a 100% must! As a side note: personal brand will help you when interviewing at any company like that, period. So even if it's not Buffer, it'll be beneficial for you to start creating. Culture is our most precious asset at Buffer, so we're protecting it a lot. You need to align with our culture to have a chance - that means you need to understand what it means to be a Bufferoo. Luckily for you we're very transparent about it, so just follow what we share on our Open Blog. Companies with similar culture often have got their open blogs, so just go and read them before applying. I've literally read every post before applying to Buffer! We're working fully remotely for years, and a lot of our communication is asynchronous, so writing matters a lot as a skill. Application is a first step to filter out people who do not communicate well. If you put 2-3 short sentences into each answer, you cannot expect we'll consider you a great communicator. Work on your writing skills! That also ties nicely to my first point about being a creator. All of those above will greatly improve your chances at Buffer, as well as any company with a similar culture. Including social media presence - I don't know about any company similar to Buffer where it wouldn't be welcome! At Buffer, we've got a lot of people who succeeded on their 2nd or even 3rd try. They still say it was worth it. I'm here for nearly 5 years, and over 50% of Bufferoos are here longer than I am - I think it speaks for itself if the effort is worth it. So if you want to get accepted at Buffer but failed any of the previous interviews - you know what to work on for the next position openings!

Last year I've read "Deep work" by Cal Newton - great book, though quite radical with the proposed approaches! One thing I've tried was setting an app blocker to not open random stuff like Instagram while I've got my focus time. Even bought a premium subscription for it. But after a week I've thrown it out - it was annoying me like nothing else, and I've realized I don't doom scroll too much anyway, so I'm not the target. Or at least that's how I explained it to myself. Anyway - have you ever used app blockers? Did they work for you? If yes, what was your secret to it? If not, what made you stop using them?

Some reflection on my creator journey after ~30 days of taking it seriously. I chose LinkedIn and TikTok as main platforms I post to, because I understand them better than others. My content is around career and growth in software engineering (but no hardcore technical stuff), remote work, culture and digital nomading. 📈 On LinkedIn, I aimed for ambitious goal to reach 1800 followers (started with ~1300), and I managed to exceed it and ended up with over 1900, 40% growth over 30 days! I got decent engagement on most posts, and what I noticed works (or not) for me: 👉 AI: initially I was writing my posts and enhancing my writing style with AI, but I don't like it. So I don't ask for suggestions to rewrite my posts, because it makes them lose my style completely, and all of them look the same. After a month spent actively on LI, I see it after a few sentences which post was written by AI, they all have the same structure. So I decided my posts won't be ideal, I'll sometimes have bad grammar as a non-native, but at least I'll be authentic. I still use AI to research topics though, but nothing content-related. 👉 I always try to end my posts with some questions, and it works - I get many comments where people share about their experiences regarding the topic I posted about 👉 I try to attach something to the post - so far mostly images, but I also want to try my luck with carousels and videos - I get better engagement when they're present. My post about books I recommend for software engineers had a simple photo I took quickly with me holding 2 books and it exploded. 👉 Thanks to engagement/comments I get, I have a lot of other ideas for future posts 👉 I often mention others and it worked for me great - I got engagement from some of my idols under few of my posts - they all have pretty big followings and I'm pretty sure some engagement on my posts came from them engaging and showing up on other people's feeds (who follow them). 👉 Fun fact for above: when engaging with my idols, I learned that some of them are happy Buffer users!! 👉 I noticed LI often surfaces old posts when you follow new people. so consistency seems to be important here. I get likes/comments on my older posts every day, so the consistency works for me 👉 I read a lot of newsletters, hackernews, reddit, and so on, and whenever I notice something interesting I save it as an idea in Buffer to comment on it later. I think it's the most important mindset shift that brought me good results - instead of "okay, I post because we should all dogfood now" I changed to "I'm the real creator now and want to have my personal brand and audience!" I won't fit into char limit here, but in my next post I'll share more about my TikTok journey cause it's a bit different than LinkedIn, and my reflections on creator goals in general, let me know if you'd like to hear my take on it! ❓ If you're a LinkedIn creator, why do you do it? Maybe your goal could inspire me?

Merry Christmas to everyone - but especially to all the on-call folks holding down the fort during holidays. At Buffer we do something I really love during the holidays. Instead of the usual 7-day on-call rotation, every engineer volunteers for just a single day between December 24th and January 1st. One day each, so everyone else can fully enjoy their time off without worrying that something might break. Nothing major has ever happened during Christmas (I only remember a tiny incident I had on my override a few years ago), but the peace of mind this gives the team is priceless. So to all the engineers on call today - may your logs stay quiet, your alerts stay silent, and your Christmas be calm. Happy holidays! 🎄❤️

Best secret to productivity at work? Becoming unblockable. I love how @Sean Goedecke put it in his recent article: "The easiest way to avoid being blocked is to have more than one task on the go. Like a CPU thread, if you’re responsible for multiple streams of work, you can deal with one stream getting blocked by rolling onto another one. While one project might be blocked, you are not: you can continue getting stuff done." That's a perfect description of how I like to operate, and I think it's the biggest differentiator between junior & senior engineers. You are never idle, AND you are not doing unimportant tiny things just to keep yourself busy. There's always something big to accomplish and move forward!

At @Buffer, we're known for our transparency, including salaries that are publicly available for anyone outside the company. I haven't heard about many companies like that - there are ones that have internal transparency, but it rarely goes outside the company's walls. Recently, however, I learned about @Oxide Computer Company. They build modern, high‑performance server racks - allowing companies to "own their cloud". And they've got quite an interesting salary philosophy - everyone is paid $235,000 - literally everyone in the company, independent from the job title! (with exception to sales people, who have got extra commission component) Do you know any other companies where it's all transparent like that?

The biggest blockers in my engineering career had nothing to do with code - these are 3 mistakes that were slowing my career. ✅ Treating my job like a checklist For quite some time when I was starting out I thought my job was “complete the Jira tasks in front of me.” That mindset capped my growth. The moment I started thinking in terms of product, not tickets, everything changed: Why are we building this? What problem are we solving? Is there a simpler approach? What happens if we don’t do this? Is this the right trade-off? Engineers who think beyond their ticket become 10x more valuable. They get more trust, more ownership, and more opportunities. ✨ Chasing perfectionism Pretty much every junior (my past self included) is obsessed with perfect architecture, perfect patterns, perfect abstractions, to the point of missing other important aspects. Clean code matters - but only when it matters. Most of the time, the business doesn’t value “perfection”; it values shipping, unblocking, and solving real problems. Perfectionism felt like progress, but it only slowed me down. Pragmatism is what accelerates a career - at least mine. 🧑‍💻 Believing technical skills were enough This one hurt the most. I thought if I became a great coder, everything else would follow. It doesn’t work like that: Technical skills open the door. Soft skills keep you in the room. Communication, ownership, leadership, clarity, writing, decision-making: these are the skills that turn a “good engineer” into a “senior engineer.” And you rarely hear that early on. If you’re at the beginning of your career, avoid these mistakes and you’ll grow way faster than I did. What slowed your growth early on? I’m curious to hear your histories!

Most employees miss the easiest way to stand out in their company: 🐶 Dogfooding - using the product you actually build. It sounds obvious, but if you look around, almost nobody does it. And that’s exactly why it’s such a huge opportunity for you to stand out. Work on a social media tool like Buffer? 💭 Use it for your own socials. Build software for photobooks? 🖼️ Create your own yearly album. Create tooling for monitoring AI training quality? ⚙️ Train a small model yourself and put it through the system. You see things your company would otherwise miss. You build better intuition. You give better feedback. You make better product decisions. And leadership notices it! Some companies even try to incentivize it. When I worked at Meta, you could get a monthly ads credit to support non-profits. Almost nobody bothered. The people who did, especially within teams working on ads? They learned more about the product in two months than others learned in a year. At Buffer, it’s an expectation that everyone becomes a creator. I’ll be honest - I resisted at first. I spent eight years around social media (Meta + Buffer), yet I barely posted myself. But once I changed my approach, it was an eye opener. The moment I started using Buffer the way our customers use it, I began noticing things I never would have seen as “just an engineer.” Dogfooding sharpens your instincts faster than any meeting or roadmap discussion. And even though everyone at Buffer does this today, if I were at a company where it wasn’t the norm, I would treat dogfooding as a cheat code for career growth. Because using your own product gives you something that’s impossible to fake: real, practical empathy for the user and understanding of the product. Leaders trust engineers who feel the product, not only the codebase. Do you actively dogfood your company’s product? If yes - what’s one thing you learned that you would’ve never spotted otherwise? * This post was proudly written as an idea at @Buffer, then scheduled for the next available posting slot for LinkedIn, and once it's posted, I'll be replying to comments from inside the product!