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As we enter 2026, we’re having a look again on the prime items of recommendation we shared within the Profession Alert e-newsletter final 12 months. Whether or not you’re searching for a brand new job or in search of methods to excel in your present function, learn on for the three hottest suggestions that would assist advance your profession.
Throughout a decade working at hypergrowth tech firms like Meta and Pinterest, I continuously struggled with procrastination. I’d be assigned an necessary challenge, however I merely couldn’t get myself to start out it. The supply of my distraction different—I might continuously examine my e-mail, learn random documentation, and even scroll by my social feeds. However the consequence 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’re making a choice about easy methods to spend your life. A lot of the methods individuals spend their time are ineffective. Particularly within the tech world, our duties and instruments are continuously altering, so we should be capable of adapt. What separates the perfect 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 whilst you await motivation to “hit you.” As an alternative, simply begin doing one thing, something, that makes progress towards your objective, and also you’ll discover that motivation will observe.…
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Certainly one of my shut mates is a hiring supervisor at Google. She just 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 stunned me most, nonetheless, was the horrendous high quality of the typical submission. Most candidates had been clearly unqualified or had concocted fully faux 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 by the noise, and bonafide candidates have a tougher time getting seen—a lot much less advancing to an interview.
So how can job seekers stand out among the many deluge of candidates? When there are lots 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. Then again, persons are restricted by Dunbar’s quantity—the concept that people can preserve secure social relationships with solely about 150 individuals. Being a type of 150 individuals is tougher, but it surely additionally carries extra weight than a soulless job software.
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Cursor, the AI-native code editor, recently reported that it writes almost a billion traces of code each day. That’s one billion traces of production-grade code accepted by customers each single day. If we generously assume {that a} sturdy engineer writes a thousand traces of code in a day, Cursor is doing the equal work of 1,000,000 builders. (For context, whereas working at Pinterest and Meta, I’d sometimes write lower than 100 traces 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 necessary factors.…
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—Rahul
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