Jean Hsu

The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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Setting a vision is just the start. Think about the bold moves needed to make it happen. Sundar, Google's CEO, set a daring vision to tackle climate change. That's where the real work begins. Executing a vision requires bold and tough decisions. Google is buying nuclear energy to feed its AI data centers. Other big tech companies are following this lead. This is a big kudos to Sundar and his leadership team. They are executing on a sustainability vision. Leadership is about taking action. And Sundar is showing the way.

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🤔 Looking at YC's latest Request for Startups struck me: Every category—gov tech, manufacturing, fintech, space—has AI humming under the hood. 🔄 Maybe it's not about having AI (like it's not about "having electricity" ⚡). It's about reimagining whole industries with it. 🚀 Checkout the whole article: https://lnkd.in/gcQkKMja

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"Early-stage startup" and "maternity leave" sometimes feels at odds. Many parents opt for the big companies during their parental leave years, but I've taken three maternity leaves at early stage startups. As I transition back into full-time work after this last parental leave, I took some time to reflect on how the three leaves I've taken have been similar or different. I hope it is useful to others! (link in comments)

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This resonated with me today: "“One flaw of designers (as people) is pretending faster is always better and quick always equals efficient. A fast pace can feel good and productive short-term, but there are many long-term consequences: losing productivity, overlooking important things, and undermining diversity. It is not efficient to move so fast that we exhaust ourselves, overlook the obvious, or break everything along the way, yet we often make that assumption.” It's from Assembling Tomorrow and I highly recommend the book. https://lnkd.in/gK43NueY

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The best use case for overseas development I've heard: We have customers in the eastern hemisphere. To support those customers better, we're standing up product, dev, and support teams to help serve those customers needs. Two key ingredients in making that successful: commensurate pay and the same level of performance and accountability as US peers. #software #international #teammanagement #overseasdevelopment #startup #leadership #coaching

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Stop calling AI a “product” — it’s just a feature. That was the insight from a product manager I spoke with, who’s deeply exploring AI-native solutions. It got me thinking about how our office workflows—built over decades—are so ingrained that we treat knowledge workers almost like assembly-line laborers of intellectual tasks, rather than craftsmen guided by unique skills. The magic of AI is that it doesn’t need to overthrow our entire work paradigm; it slips right into existing workflows and quietly takes on tasks that once demanded constant human focus. Until now, every management approach had to accommodate our human need for rest—imagine an “intellectual machine” that finally doesn’t require it. Here’s the big question we’re all wrestling with: Can AI seamlessly replace entire office roles? Share your take in the comments! #AI #FutureOfWork #ProductDevelopment #KnowledgeWork

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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A NOTE ON SPONSORSHIP TL;DR: Many startups DO sponsor. Been holding off on writing a long-form post about everything I’ve learned during this recruiting cycle till I’m all done, but I’d like to address this real quick. Whenever I tell friends (or the occasional coffee-chat folk) that I’m focusing on startups (I'll explain my thought process soon but for now, read this: https://lnkd.in/eJVn-b9g — while his argument is about wealth—which isn't as true in 2024, trust me–I did the math–it still holds true for learning and growth), they’re usually surprised: “Do they sponsor?” “On a visa? Isn’t that a big risk?” I’ll dive into both of these questions eventually, but let's address the sponsorship question, as I couldn't find good answers when I started considering this path a year ago. The biggest risk (especially if you don’t have major commitments—like kids or a stay-at-home spouse) is…🥁🥁 getting laid off. That’s it. People talk like you're gonna be sent to the gulag or something. And as recent events have reminded us—layoffs happen at big public companies too. So, IMO, the only hedge is to be very skilled at something marketable. So, do startups sponsor? Short answer: Some do, most don’t. Nuance: Enough startups sponsor that if you're considering this path, don't sweat it. If you made it to the US (especially on scholarship), this is almost an order of magnitude easier (only a slight exaggeration). Here are a few patterns I’ve noticed to help you in your search: 1. Startups with immigrant founders/CTOs/early engineers are often welcoming to internationals. You can often tell by their LinkedIn profile (foreign college or work experience are good clues). 2. Series C and beyond are very likely to sponsor; for earlier stages, look closer at the employees’ profiles. 3. Treat this as a learning process. Sometimes, a cool startup might not sponsor, but that answer isn’t always public. Shoot your shot—message the founder/CTO, learn what you can, and share that info. Help the next person in line. Personally, this is my way of contributing to open source ;) ;) And let’s keep it real: Sponsorship isn’t that hard. For most companies, it’s mostly a cost thing. Most of the process can be outsourced to an immigration law firm with a bit of legwork from you. Also for engineers, the cost of sponsoring is about the size of a sign-on bonus. I’m always transparent that I *might* need sponsorship (the real answer depends on if I stay with the company beyond 3 years), so I treat their response as a cultural fit check. You want to work for a company that respects the hustle—moving to a far away land where you don’t know anyone, not seeing your family for years, navigating constant visa anxiety, all to create shareholder value🫡 One last thing. Remember–everything is negotiable.That’s especially true at places with less bureaucratic processes like startups. Just had to get this out there—found myself repeating it way too often! A great week ahead!

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After an absolutely amazing 3 years (to the day quite literally), I am leaving Retool for my next adventure. It’s been a wild (and fun) ride of growing and scaling engineering from a group of 13 to an org of 100+, building 4 net-new product lines, and expanding the business. The thing I’ve always held strongly is that the team here *just ships*, and reflecting on my time, it’s heartwarming to think about how much landed: not just our new products in Workflows, External, Mobile, and RetoolDB, but everything ranging from runtime rewrites, to new component libraries, multiplayer, debug tools, our AI suite, new source control systems, a new IDE — the list just goes on and on. Retool is an incredibly special product, company, and organization to me — not just because of my time and experience there, but because of what we are trying to do: bring more good software into the world, especially when most internal tools don’t get the TLC they would otherwise need to be good. It spoke to me from first principles as a builder (both software and orgs) when I first joined, and continues to do so today all the same. It’s an incredible group, and one that I’ll miss so dearly. David Hsu and Anthony, thanks for bringing me in several years back and leading this charge. And for those reading who aren’t familiar with Retool, you should absolutely check it out; it’ll accelerate your eng team, but more importantly, your business overall. As for me, in terms of what’s next: I’m excited to build again. More to come there, but after a 10 year hiatus, I'm back to the startup-founding days!

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What's going to happen to NVIDIA now that they've reached 3tn market cap? For the current employees and long timers... I've read stories of mid-level engineers who reportedly earned more than $60M via stock appreciation. Imagine the numbers for the more senior folks. How will NVIDIA keep folks around who are post-economic? And for all the new folks... The value proposition is complex. The company is the most valuable (by market cap) in the world. If they are heavily compensated via RSUs, the assumption is that there is significant remaining upside to be gained. It's incredibly difficult to continue orders of magnitude stock appreciation after reaching the absolute zenith... NVIDIA is an obvious tech darling - it looks and feels like a version of Google in the mid to late 2000's - but I'm really interested to see if the immense financial success of the stock will end up driving out the core talent group (eg, the long timers who are now mega rich) while also limiting access to new upstart talent who don't see a path to outsize financial success. Curious what others think!!

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This is a perspective I've been thinking about for a while, and I appreciate how colorfully pg puts it here. However, he does not explicitly define Founder Mode, except for contrasting it with being "a faker." I don't disagree, but I think I have a more subtle take. With the "don't just hire good people and let them figure it out" sentiment - I think that advice hits failure modes because people take it too literally and end up abdicating their authority instead of scaling it. I also think some founders should fully step away from their company as their involvement can hinder the company's success instead of nurture it. In both cases, you're not making decisions grounded in reality. I do know that managers and leaders who aren't zoomed in and present in the day-to-day work with their teams tend to make really crappy decisions. And because they have large areas of ownership, they can really steer the company into the rocks because they are - unwittingly or otherwise - willfully flying blind. So if being in Founder Mode means that you're in the work with skin in the game and not just phoning in your remit, you've got your hands in the dirt enough to understand what's growing and what's dying, you're constantly responding and adapting to the dynamics of your context, you're making timely decisions that keep your teams productive and grounded, and you're hiring good people and empowering them to do their best work, then I don't see much of a difference between being in Founder Mode versus being someone who is owning their work. That's just doing your damn job, and doing it well.

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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