Career
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OpenAI Residency 2026 applications are OPEN btw - 6-month full-time paid research gig in SF - ~$220K annualized ($18.3K/month) + relocation - NO prior ML/AI experience required, just strong technical fundamentals & fast learning - Work on frontier AI with top researchers Interviews starts in Jan 2026 Apply: https://openai.com/careers/residency-2026-san-francisco/…
BREAKING: Within the past 72 hours: - Apple's AI Chief steps down - Apple's Head of UI Design leaves to Meta - Apple's Policy Chief steps down - Apple's Head of General Counsel steps down
One year from now, you'll either be complaining that you never got started or celebrating all that you've done. The choice is yours.
Man how lucky are millennial devs, just as we’re getting too old and tired for this job, all the tedium gets magically removed and there’s an amplifier that makes all of our knowledge 1000x more useful (and necessary)
never say career break or unemployed just slap one of these stealth startups on your resume tackle any question with "NDA"
US hiring is slowing at an alarming rate: US-based employers have announced plans to add 497,151 jobs year-to-date, the weakest total since 2010 when 392,033 hires were planned in the first 11 months of the year. This also marks a -35% decline from the 761,954 announced during the same period in 2024. Hiring is now on track for its 5th consecutive annual decline. In November, companies announced just 9,074 hiring plans, the 2nd-lowest for this month since at least 2016. Meanwhile, seasonal hiring intentions fell to 372,520, the lowest on record since data collection began in 2012, with no new announcements in November. US hiring demand is at crisis levels.
If you have multiple interests, don't let anyone convince you that you should narrow your focus. You may be confused for a while, but if you stick it out, you will blow past everyone else.
Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt talks about how his whole early life was basically coding, and how AI just wiped it out. He says in his 20s all he wanted to do was write programs, all the way through college and grad school, and that this is what built his career. But now, every single thing he learned back then can be done by AI. "Each and every one of you has a supercomputer and superprogrammer in your pocket." --- From 'Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School' YT channel
have a feeling that the right thing to build if you’re an ambitious and talented young person is no longer a “software company”
The great surprise of the technical and financial requirements being removed from coding and video creation is that all the same people are doing it—and that there hasn’t been an explosion of new software builders and filmmakers. After a decade of the media telling us that the most glamorous life is entrepreneur, filmmaker, or short-form video influencer: no one new jumps at the opportunity when the primary obstacles are removed.
BREAKING: Apple’s chip chief Johny Srouji informed CEO Tim Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains at least for now.
Apple Rocked by Executive Departures, With Chip Chief at Risk of Leaving Next
I am not sure if other developers feel like this. But I feel kinda depressed. Like everyone else, I have been using Claude code (for a while, it’s not a recent thing lol). And it’s incredible. I have never found coding more fun. The stuff you can do and the speed you can do it at now. Is absolutely insane. And I’m using it to ship a lot. And solve customer problems faster. So all around it’s a win. But at the same time. The skill I spent 10,000s of hours getting good at. Programming. The thing I spent most of my life getting good at. Is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly. As much fun as it is. And as much as I like using the tools. There’s something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at. Now being mostly useless.
A friend in China recently asked me how to improve her English. She’d struggled with it for years as a student, labeled herself “bad at languages,” and now wanted to try again for her career. But she couldn’t sustain her efforts. I asked how she’d been studying. She said she bought grammar books, pronunciation guides, vocabulary lists, and tried to memorize them. Why? “Because I need to start from the basics and learn systematically.” There it was. Even years after leaving school, she still had the student mindset. The education system had brainwashed her into thinking learning must be systematic, bottom-up, textbook-driven. I told her: This is no way to learn as an adult. Instead, find content in English you’re already interested in. Decipher it with dictionaries and AI tools. Learn vocabulary from that content. Define the “job to be done” for English—a tool for communication and understanding—and work backwards. What are you trying to understand? Read that. Make that your textbook. As adults, we need to do a 180-degree reversal of how we learned as students. In school, you start with foundations and work upward. You won’t apply what you learn until years later. But the basics are also the most boring. If you try to learn this way as an adult, you’ll quit. Adults should do the opposite: Start with a real-world problem. Figure out what knowledge you need. Then go backwards to learn it. AI accelerates this dramatically. It’s a 24/7 world-class tutor that answers any question, as long as you know what to ask. I experienced this myself when trying to become more technical. A few years ago, I wanted to learn coding, so I watched intro CS lectures. I got bored fast. I couldn’t connect the content to anything I needed in real life. This year, I started using AI coding tools like Google AI Studio, Replit, and Cursor. I described my product ideas in plain language, and they turned into working products in minutes. Every time an idea became real, I felt elated, empowered. Before, screens of code gave me headaches. They reminded me of my inadequacy. Now, I saw code as just a tool to achieve my goals. I asked AI to walk me through the codebase structure, the languages and technologies, what each file did, how everything connected. I had it add detailed comments everywhere. After a few projects, I’d learned more about coding than a year of college CS lectures. It wasn’t “systematic.” But I’m not trying to become an engineer. I’m trying to become technically literate so I can use code as a tool. Why this reversal? • Students’ full-time job is learning. Adults have other jobs and responsibilities. After a long day at work, who has the energy for boring lectures? • Students must learn. The system forces accountability: exams, homework, class attendance. Adults learn purely by choice. Nobody forces you. This means sustainable learning requires intrinsic motivation. If it’s boring, you quit. • Students have defined goals. Do well on exams. Adults must define their own goals. Otherwise, you lose motivation fast. The common thread: Sustaining motivation is the key to learning anything as an adult. Because you’re not going to learn overnight. So if you’re trying to learn something, start with a problem or project. Figure out the job to be done. Work backwards. Learning becomes fun. Learning becomes sustainable. Forget “learn first, do later.” Do first, learn later. You don’t get good and then produce output. You produce output and then get good.
Just published the latest @a16z Build newsletter - our weekly roundup of exciting startup opportunities and founders to build with. Featuring open roles at @Waymo, @zipline, @vercel, @cursor_ai, and @Revolut - and with founders like @bspellacy, @8ennett, @joeygrassia, @BaijuBhatt, @ml_angelopoulos, @hollympeck, @thaiscbranco_, @sarahookr, @kylemathews, @davidmytton, and others. Time to build https://a16zbuild.substack.com/p/waymo-zipline-and-the-co-founder…
I have never relied on traditional interview processes to get a job. No DSA rounds, no system design grilling, no multi-step loops. Almost every role I have landed came through a single conversation focused entirely on the projects I had built. The reason is simple: proof of work makes interviews optional. I didn’t come from a big name college. There was no built-in reputation attached to where I studied, and no advantage from well known tags like IIT, GSOC, or Big Tech internships. Those signals help - they make it easier for someone to assume you are capable. Since I didn’t have those signals, I had to create my own. My approach was to build things consistently and put them out into the world. Over time, that body of work became my credibility. Every job I have gotten has followed the same pattern: Merkle Science One conversation. No coding tests. We talked about the projects I had built in college and how I approached solving problems. My second job (AI infra company). Again, just a couple of calls. The discussion centered around my previous work and the systems I had built. My current projects, my work on Water, is what opened the door. The project itself did the heavy lifting. In every case, employers evaluated me based on what I had already built, not how well I remembered algorithms. The only consistent strategy I have followed is building things that interested me. Not all of them were complex, but they were all real. FitMe — fitness assistant using pose detection (later published in IEEE) VirtueX — virtual try-on system using a laptop camera TigerDB — a simple key-value database created to understand database internals CricLang — a toy programming language built while exploring compilers Water - a multi-agent orchestration framework built purely out of curiosity These are just a few of the projects I have built. I have built many more projects that are not listed here. None of these were built for interviews. They were built because I wanted to understand how things worked. That curiosity produced a track record that employers could evaluate directly. One thing people often miss: building is only half of it. If your work isn’t visible, it can’t help you. You don’t need to be loud, but you need to be present: • Share what you’re building • Explain how it works • Show your progress • Post your learnings You don’t need viral posts. You just need to put your work where it can be seen by the right people. This is how I ended up with opportunities — not by optimizing for interviews, but by consistently publishing my work. Proof of work gives people: • A clear signal of your skills • Evidence of your ability to execute • Insight into how you think • Confidence that you can deliver These are stronger signals than a single interview round or a competitive exam score. ## Conclusion You don’t need elite credentials to stand out. You need a track record. If you consistently build and share your work: People will know what you’re capable of Opportunities will come through conversations, not assessments You won’t need to “perform” in traditional interview formats Everything meaningful in my career so far has come from this simple principle: Build real things. Share them. Let the work speak. You can read more such pieces from me on https://manthanguptaa.in/
Tech Twitter is wild... you can meet someone who changes your entire career. Let’s connect.
We should stop categorizing people as “technical” and “non-technical”