Steve Huynh

@DevinRhode2 Start working first

@ALEngineered What if you don't want a meeting, but the team expects a meeting to happen before working on the problem..

If you need a meeting to start the work then you’ll never really start. It’s universally better to get started and then meet to fix things and to change direction.

@Umesh__digital To answer your question, they don’t go bankrupt because the Meta ads platform prints money.

Interviewer: 100 million photos are uploaded daily to Instagram. Average photo is 3 MB. IG also makes thumbnails & 3 copies for redundancy. Combined, you get 2.7 petabytes per day. How is Instagram storing 2.7 PB every day and not bankrupt?

Promotions are not a reward for hard work, they are an argument that you can handle more scope. Saying that you do a good job with the work you’ve been assigned misses the point. You’ve got to show that you think at a bigger scale.

I trust people who can explain tradeoffs clearly. If everything sounds like the “right choice,” they don’t understand the problem yet and they don’t know what a tradeoff is.

Before optimizing anything, ask: 1. Should this exist? 2. Does it even matter? Only then can we ask “Should we be doing it this way?” Premature optimization has bitten me. So. Many Times.

Building a great solution to the wrong problem is worse than doing nothing. Oh, hello there AI, I didn’t see you.

Most problems fall into one of four categories:  - unclear goal  - unclear owner  - unclear constraints  - unclear tradeoffs Once you’ve determined which one it is, simply recurse.

A lot of work looks complicated until you remove the unnecessary parts. Then it is simple. A lot of work looks simple until you realize that a lot of the necessary parts were removed. Then it is complicated.

“Let’s take this offline” means the meeting was out of order. That’s your fault, not mine.

@KevinNaughtonJr Herman Miller Embody

looking for a new desk chair: what's the most comfortable office chair you've ever used?

If your roadmap extends past six months you’re functionally insane.

I can only trust people who change their mind when presented with better evidence. Stubbornness isn’t strength, it’s annoying. If you can’t tell me the last time you changed your mind, I don’t want to work with you.

The fastest way to endanger your career is to become reliable at low-impact work. You’ll be rewarded with more of it until you are replaced by AI that was trained on your priors.

On every team there’s the person who knows the most and the person who talks the most. They are never the same person.

You guys realize that Claude Mythos can’t be ethically released to the general public ever, right? That is, we just have to wait until the entire internet has been patched of all critical exploits, and all future code is forever scanned going forward. So no software should be released until it has been scanned by Mythos. But you have to be part of the handful of companies that have access to it. We are in a genie-out-of-the-bottle moment. When there’s a new major 0-day exploit, teams of agents will race to compromise systems while the means to stop them will be dependent on whether you are in the club or not (you are likely not in the club)

If you’re just going to post AI slop, let’s just cut out the middle man and post the prompt.

For me a great engineer has a combination of depth of knowledge and judgment. You can argue that AI has the former, the jury is still out on the latter.

A lot of “alignment” meetings are just people insisting that the work get done their way. If that’s the case just tell me what you want me to do.

If there's any chance you'll interview in the next year, or if you know someone who will, this was written for you. geni.us/BehavioralInte…

I spent two years putting everything I learned into this book: → 130+ behavioral questions → 72 example stories (entry level to principal) → A storytelling framework that replaces STAR → What interviewers are actually evaluating → Prompts for when you're struggling to come up with answers → A prep plan for interview day

My book launched today: Technical Behavioral Interview: An Insider's Guide. A thread on why I wrote it. 🧵 geni.us/BehavioralInte…