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As we enter 2026, we’re looking again on the high items of recommendation we shared within the Profession Alert e-newsletter final yr. Whether or not you’re on the lookout for a brand new job or searching for methods to excel in your present function, learn on for the three hottest suggestions that might assist advance your profession.
Throughout a decade working at hypergrowth tech corporations like Meta and Pinterest, I always struggled with procrastination. I’d be assigned an essential mission, however I merely couldn’t get myself to start out it. The supply of my distraction various—I might always examine my e-mail, learn random documentation, and even scroll via my social feeds. However the end result was the identical: I felt a deep sense of dread that I used to be not making progress on the issues that mattered.
On the finish of the day, time is the one useful resource that issues. With each minute, you make a choice about find out how to spend your life. A lot of the methods folks spend their time are ineffective. Particularly within the tech world, our duties and instruments are always altering, so we should be capable to adapt. What separates one of the best engineers from the remainder of the pack is that they create methods that permit them to be constantly productive.
Right here’s the core concept that modified my perspective on productiveness: Motion results in motivation, not the opposite approach round. You shouldn’t examine your e-mail or scroll Instagram when you await motivation to “hit you.” As a substitute, simply begin doing one thing, something, that makes progress towards your aim, and also you’ll discover that motivation will comply with.…
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Considered one of my shut buddies is a hiring supervisor at Google. She lately posted about an open place on her staff and was instantly overwhelmed with functions. We’re speaking about hundreds of candidates inside days.
What shocked me most, nonetheless, was the horrendous high quality of the common submission. Most candidates had been clearly unqualified or had concocted totally pretend profiles. The usage of generative AI to routinely fill out (and, in some instances, even submit) functions is dangerous to everybody; employers are unable to filter via the noise, and legit candidates have a more durable time getting observed—a lot much less advancing to an interview.
So how can job seekers stand out among the many deluge of candidates? When there are tons of or hundreds of candidates, one of the simplest ways to differentiate your self is by leveraging your community.
With AI, anybody with a pc can trivially apply to hundreds of jobs. Alternatively, individuals are restricted by Dunbar’s quantity—the concept that people can preserve steady social relationships with solely about 150 folks. Being a kind of 150 folks is more durable, nevertheless it additionally carries extra weight than a soulless job utility.
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Cursor, the AI-native code editor, recently reported that it writes almost a billion strains of code every day. That’s one billion strains of production-grade code accepted by customers each single day. If we generously assume {that a} sturdy engineer writes a thousand strains of code in a day, Cursor is doing the equal work of one million builders. (For context, whereas working at Pinterest and Meta, I’d usually write lower than 100 strains of code per day.)
There are solely about 25 million software developers worldwide! Naively, it seems that Cursor is making a significant proportion of coders out of date.
This begs the query: Is it even value studying to code anymore?
The reply is a powerful “sure.” The above fear-based evaluation of Cursor misses a number of essential factors.…
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—Rahul
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