Career Development

The Observation I recently watched a new graduate join a team. Fresh out of school. Zero real-world experience. Zero familiarity with the codebase or tech stack. That’s typical—every new hire starts there. What wasn’t typical: he went from “where is the repo?” to helping the team with non-trivial tasks in just a couple of weeks. Not months. Weeks. What Changed Twenty years ago, ramping up in a complex codebase with an unfamiliar tech stack took a minimum of a couple of months to become fully productive. That was normal. Nobody expected you to be fully functional in weeks. ...

“So, what kind of engineer are you?” “I’m a Python engineer.” Every time I hear this, I cringe a little. Not because Python isn’t amazing—it absolutely is. But because somewhere along the way, we’ve started defining ourselves by our tools instead of our craft. I’m sure you’ve heard it too: “I am an AWS engineer,” “I am a React developer,” as if the tool has become their entire professional identity. ...