This text is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers publication. Sign up now to get insider ideas, skilled recommendation, and sensible methods, written in partnership with tech profession growth firm Taro and delivered to your inbox free of charge!
As we enter 2026, we’re having a look again on the high items of recommendation we shared within the Profession Alert publication final 12 months. Whether or not you’re searching for a brand new job or searching for 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 corporations like Meta and Pinterest, I consistently struggled with procrastination. I’d be assigned an vital challenge, however I merely couldn’t get myself to start out it. The supply of my distraction different—I might consistently verify my e-mail, learn random documentation, and even scroll by means of 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 the best way 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 consistently altering, so we should have the ability to adapt. What separates the perfect engineers from the remainder of the pack is that they create techniques that enable them to be constantly productive.
Right here’s the core concept that modified my perspective on productiveness: Motion results in motivation, not the opposite manner round. You shouldn’t verify your e-mail or scroll Instagram when you look ahead to motivation to “hit you.” As a substitute, simply begin doing one thing, something, that makes progress towards your objective, and also you’ll discover that motivation will comply with.…
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Certainly one of my shut pals is a hiring supervisor at Google. She lately posted about an open place on her staff and was instantly overwhelmed with purposes. We’re speaking about hundreds of candidates inside days.
What shocked me most, nonetheless, was the horrendous high quality of the typical submission. Most candidates had been clearly unqualified or had concocted totally pretend profiles. Using generative AI to mechanically fill out (and, in some instances, even submit) purposes is dangerous to everybody; employers are unable to filter by means of the noise, and bonafide candidates have a more durable 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 tons of or hundreds of candidates, the easiest way 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 individuals. Being a type of 150 individuals is more durable, 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 strains of code each 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 1,000,000 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 share of coders out of date.
This begs the query: Is it even value studying to code anymore?
The reply is a convincing “sure.” The above fear-based evaluation of Cursor misses a number of vital factors.…
Learn the complete publication here.
—Rahul
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