In the most literal sense, you are jumping to a small pond from a big one, you can often be moving from a company with thousands of engineers to one that has ten.

The big fish in a startup, may still be good engineers, but are they great? Their ego would often be in for a bruising if they were dropped into the competitive hierarchy of a big company with industry leading experts on staff, which you have just left and were particularly adept at managing.

In the up close and personal ego management of startup engineers, “what got you here, won’t get you there”.

Like any W2, the move from big tech to startups isn’t from hell to heaven, but simply to a different set of tradeoffs, a different list of things to resent, a different motivation to build your eventual escape.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

Fast Feels Good

All the rumors, movies, and Silicon Valley Seasons 1 through 6, are true.

Startups are the wild west.

Certainly from day 1 until product market fit.

But often well beyond that, until dozens or hundreds of employees, where you still have that chaos, the dynamism, the lack of rigid process and structure and malaise that sets in for big enterprises.

At the first startup I switched to after my first stint in big tech, the first few weeks were a breath of fresh air.

• Pull requests didn’t even require reviews, merge when you were “confident”

• No expense reports, toss it on the corporate card and say sorry to the part-time CFO if you spent too much

• Rapidly changing roadmaps

• Endless new projects landing on my plate

• No HR training, let alone any HR!

The speed of it all was really exhilarating after the soul-numbing HR training days, waiting for PR stamps from slow teams, endless discussions on quarterly and annual planning and strict adherence to meeting the agreed upon OKRs, regardless of if that was the right course of action anymore.

But every coin has two sides...

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

Everyone’s Line is Different

Unfortunately, when the “move fast and trust me” culture breaks down is when the veterans – who have been there 18 months instead of your 18 days – decide that your line of when you felt “confident” to merge your code, was deliberately and clearly malicious, since it is different than their line.

• How could you ship this?

• Don’t you know this is bad code?

• How could use AI for that? We only use AI for this?

• You’re not done yet? Are you sure you’re cut out for startups?

The whiplash of being told from different people simultaneously that you work too slow but also too fast and reckless, that you don’t use AI enough to improve your velocity but also you’re using it too much for the wrong things, and on and on gets old real quick.

• How about we require PR reviews? More feedback to easier onboard new folks to coding patterns?

  • “Fuck no, that’d slow me down”

• How about we have a docs site where we document architecture, best practices, how-to guides?

  • “Sounds like a lot of work, who’d ever read it?”

• What if we have an onboarding doc for our business domain which reviews basic lingo and doesn’t assume every hire has decades of industry experience?

  • “Yeah but we need my custom acronyms so my Typescript file name isn’t longer than 20 characters.”

Without the more professional atmosphere and larger organization forcing normalization, better onboarding practices, stronger documentation culture, and compliance mandated PR reviews which also allow for better cross-pollination of best practices, startups regress to the lowest common denominator of whatever the loudest veteran voices agree to hold themselves to, which can often be an impossibly high bar for new engineers to quickly onboard and meet.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Ready to turn your life around? Subscribe & start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

Managing their Paranoia

Managing upwards, peers, and down ends up requiring a slightly different set of skills in startups.

While you’re still obviously working with humans, startups can tend to quickly develop cult-like niche cultures, with the corresponding paranoia of outside forces and new hires.

Some big companies maintain that level of commitment and buy-in, but most as they grow slowly lose the white hot passion, fury, and schizophrenic detachment from reality which can come to characterize startups.

When confronted by a particularly paranoid colleague or boss with accusations and suspicions that you are a malicious actor, it’s important to take their concerns seriously, even if they are patently ludicrous.

Non-judgemental serious listening will do wonders to soften interactions and improve outcomes at work, and in all relationships. Judge all you want after the fact, or in your mind, but if people feel you won’t judge them, they will blab away all their closely held, dirty secrets, many of which can be critical knowledge for you to capitalize on in the future.

For example, one senior colleague hired me largely under the delusion that I could effectively be his clone and enforce similar standards and best practices as he was burning out trying to enforce amongst the growing engineering team.

When he saw some code I shipped that wasn’t quite perfect in his eyes, he came to me visibly emotional, feeling betrayed, let down, disappointed, regretting why they even hired me when I could ship something so bad in his eyes.

(I hadn’t discovered a custom method that they preferred to use over the language standard library version.)

I listened to his concerns intently, and agreed with his premises and goals, but acknowledged the current gap in execution and my intent to improve on it with continued feedback and guidance.

His eyes softened and the paranoia faded away.

It’s in the little interactions that you can build or burn social capital at your W2. Every moment counts.

Slot Machines: Expectations Management

Furthermore, what works in the interview to get the job and close the offer, can slowly lose it’s effectiveness once on payroll.

The mirroring of opinions, tone, and priorities which is much easier to do in short initial interactions during the interview process, must gradually be phased into a more lasting persona which you can sustain long term.

Managing that transition and ensuring it is slow enough to not cause alarm requires great tact.

Read more

Past posts have had deep dives on Github Copilot, Cursor, Cline, and Roo. But, AI tooling and workflows have continued to advance at breakneck speeds.

Signup as a paid subscriber for ongoing AI deep dives as new tooling and models come out and are tested by yours truly against projects ranging from small side projects to 5M+ LOC enterprise monorepos.

Today, we’ll first cover Amp Code from Sourcegraph, which I’ve seen nearly no public discourse on, despite performance that rivals Claude Code with built-in model performance & price optimization.

Next, will be Conductor, an agent orchestrator Mac app which, while sometimes flush with memory leaks, has finally given me a taste of the AI psychosis that I’ve seen the worst AI hype men at the W2 high on for the past year.

Let’s dive in.

Read more

Let’s dive in.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

If you have the hand, bet hard

Like in poker, winning hands do exist.

Imagine you had what you knew was the best possible hand, a Royal Flush. And you stuck with your timid usual bet size, even though you knew you had a winning hand.

It’d be utter foolishness, sheer cowardice.

Job offer negotiations are much the same way, especially once you’re nearing the peak of your career.

New grads, unless they have killer intern or paid consulting experience as a teenager (yes, I knew a guy who was getting paid to program in his teens), will need to mostly settle for what they get.

But, once you have some years under your belt, your strategy must change.

Continuing to toss out timid small bets is a sure way to lose long term.

Especially in tech, you only have maybe 18 good years. From age 22 to 40 if you’re lucky. Past 40, you’ll be soon be shuffled out to management or laid off, the grey hair never lasts around the office.

By your late 20s, you’ll have 5 years of experience, but still have some youthful energy and ambition. Do not shortchange yourself by not taking advantage of your prime earning years.

Like a girl who comes of age in beauty and wit, but wastes a decade away to eventually settle for a B-tier guy, many in tech do the same wasting their prime earning years because they were unwilling or unable to negotiate.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

Would you hire “you”?

In your current role, you should always be positioning yourself for your next promotion.

Or, to have the project experience, public opensource credibility, industry notoriety, or technical skills that will let you improve your pay in your next job.

While I’ve long been a proponent philosophically of opensource software, and enjoyed the opportunity to be lead maintainer for some large projects at my big tech W2, even I underestimated the leverage it would give me when on the job hunt.

But that’s just me, for you there may be other opportunities that when you seize them could open doors down the road.

The key is to have an honest assessment of what you bring to the table. Drop the ego and evaluate yourself as if you were the recruiter, hiring manager, CEO of the company you’re trying to work at.

• Would you hire “you”?

• Would you be willing to fudge the RTO rules and let “you” go hybrid or remote-only?

• Would you bump the comp to get “you” to sign?

Be honest. There should still be some small doubt, but if your and anyone’s reasonable, honest, true assessment is that you would be their top candidate for the year, then you must negotiate hard.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Ready to turn your life around? Subscribe & start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Never split the difference

Life is a series of negotiations so you might as well get good at it. If you haven’t, go read the Chris Voss book.

Frankly, your negotiating position must be feasible.

You can’t go in too hot and ask for $100M / year. You’ll just get turned away like the lunatic you are (barring 5 people on the planet who could swindle Meta out of it during the peak of the AI bubble).

But, you can and should always be pushing your next employer to the edge of what they can accept.

The negotiations first start with the recruiter. For my most recent job, I was very friendly but firm that I would accept nothing less than

Read more

Eventually, you reach a point in your career where you can afford to fuck around.

Maybe, you have a second job already lined up (or started).

Maybe you’ve already hit your financial independence number and are just cashing in the easiest money you’ll ever make another few years while you can still tolerate it.

Or for some, you have confidence in your ability to find another job, so are willing to stick to the mantra “live free or die hard”.

While many may not be at that point, physically, spiritually, or financially yet, it’s worth considering the options available to you when you reach that point.

For example, if there’s a colleague or exec who’s getting on your nerves, you can simply work systematically towards getting them fired.

Once you have counted the cost, the fear of retribution or getting the pink slip yourself fades away.

You can then help management do their job and get rid of the annoying, incompetent, often DEI quota filling interlopers, who far too commonly these days, ruin the W2 workplace for everyone else.

Last week I got the joyous news that my tactics had worked as planned, again, and the most annoying colleague on the team was now the most newly departed.

Today, we dive into the dark arts of getting your colleagues fired.

No crying in the casino

Now, obviously, this is a extremely high risk, high/low/no/negative reward game.

Much like success on X (Twitter), you largely need to be doing this for love of the game.

The outcome is rarely materially beneficial to you, though it may make the W2 slightly easier to bear.

And this is best done against people that are a nuisance from their incompetence or lack of culture fit, not out of personal vendetta.

If it gets exceedingly personal, it becomes harder for you to appear like an unbiased observer pushing for this for the benefit of the company.

This is the last warning I’ll give on this matter.

If you go for the king and miss, don’t expect to leave with your head.

If you try this and fail, you may be fired yourself.

Now with that out of the way, is a game really worth playing if there’s no risk?

The art of the hitman

Taking out a colleague has risk.

Taking out an exec many levels above you is daring.

Pulling off either coup is an accomplishment that shows you are a master practitioner of power politics, a tenacity in manipulating others into your desired outcomes, and sense of timing on when to twist the knife.

Stakes are high, but your chance of success is almost never 0%.

I’ve gotten three people fired so far, working on a fourth, so this playbook has worked in the past for me. It may work in the future for you.

Document their failure

Think of it like an anti-hype doc.

In a hype doc, you document all your wins, your work, your reasons for promotion.

In an anti-hype doc, you’re collecting evidence to get someone fired.

With a hype doc, you naturally share it with your manager and higher level execs as they evaluate your promo packet.

But with an anti-hype doc, you’ll need to find creative ways to publish segments of it, since dumping the entire doc will be seen as totally unhinged and not worth the risk.

Instead, if they cause a SEV or outage, you can bring up in the comments of that doc how they caused similar SEVs before from their carelessness and ignoring your feedback, and then go and link to those SEVs.

For one colleague, I was able to document 7 major outages they caused by refusing to solve a core architecture bug because they were ideologically opposed to reversing.

But, with all their failures spelled out clearly in a doc that dozens of high-level engineers reviewed, they couldn’t run anymore. They were pulled off the project two months later, and fired within the year.

The key is to be calm and simply ensure that the facts are presented clearly for everyone to read.

Make them crash out publicly

With the Socratic method, you continue to question someone’s beliefs.

If they can withstand the questioning and provide well-reasoned justifications for their position, it indicates that their view is the truth.

If they can’t, and crash out, then it probably indicates that they are, excuse my rough Greek translation here, “utterly and totally full of shit”.

With this in mind, your goal is to ask leading and clarifying questions, which must do both:

• maintain plausible deniability, you don’t want to totally give away your position in case you get accused of attacking them in public

• box them into a corner where they can’t justify their current actions, and lash out

The beauty of doing this in a public Slack channel is it is written, you can take screenshots, others can easily see it, you can link to it in an email to the CEO (which yes, I’d recommend).

You’ll know you won when the person starts hysterically escalating to your manager or wanting to call a meeting, at the same time that your Slack DMs are flooded by colleagues linking to the thread astonished at the unhinged hysteria unfolding from your adversary.

Meetings, like any live conversation, are obviously more risky since it is realtime. You must be quick on your feet, you don’t have time to reflect and come up with a well-formulated written response. You must maintain your calm demeanor and poker face when asking clearly leading questions. Tucker Carlson does this extremely well in his more adversarial interviews.

Better yet, you really want to make sure that the meeting is recorded if possible. If it truly goes south, the recording will save you from accusations since HR or the execs brought into mediate can watch the clip and decide for themselves.

In a recent case, I managed to gradually dial up the heat so hard on two subjects that the meeting moderator had to step in to tell her to settle down and that it wasn’t productive anymore the way she was responding to me.

In all cases, you must maintain your composure and be intentional and deliberate in how much you want to dial up the rhetorical flourishes, go too far and you’ll seem like a pompous prick who just likes debating himself in the commons, too little and you’ll seem sheepish and not achieve the crash-out you need to take the next step.

Escalate, even to the CEO

Once you have sufficient evidence, and have achieved a crash out on Slack or in a recorded meeting, it’s time to escalate. It’s time to put their record in front of someone who can pull the trigger.

Whether to their manager, higher level execs, or even to the CEO, your goal is to get this person on their radar and attempt to force the issue.

Framing here is critical, it must always be that you humbly request their attention to this critical matter which if not resolved will threaten the viability of the business.

Under no circumstances can you come across as someone with a personal vendetta because that inherently will have them distrust your account of the facts.

You need to frame your message as if you are a neutral bystander, a peaceful observer, a simple autistic engineer who stumbled across this bad bug and was surprised to find someone who had failed to solve it seven other times.

To dial it up further, you can layer in lines implying that you’ve heard similar concerns from others who were too afraid to speak out publicly because of the power this person wields in this domain.

And lastly, you’ll want to link to the most damning evidence. Don’t go crazy and send 20 links. Send the top one or two. Don’t summarize them much. Let the crash out speak for itself.

Give the exec some unanswered questions that they can come back to you to clarify. This gives a sense of back and forth which builds trust.

For example, in one recent accusation to the CEO, I didn’t even mention my adversary by name, but loosely alluded to her title and let the linked Slack thread imply who I was speaking about.

The CEO replied in 2 minutes asking for clarification that I was talking about her by name, I confirmed, and he tasked the CTO with investigating it. Her most public project was cancelled within two weeks and she was shuffled out shortly thereafter.

One thing to be wary of is in going to the target’s manager directly.

Managers can often be defensive of their flock, especially if your target is an IC engineer. For high up execs, there’s less paternalism since they are all jockeying for power as managers of managers.

All that to say, if you want to take out an IC engineer, you’ll likely need to just keep layering on the public proof of their idiocy, since going to their manager directly will likely have your accusation snuffed out quickly.

Collect your scalps

As you get good at this, you will develop a reputation as someone who is not to be messed with, or an asshole, but I digress. If you’re pulling moves like this, you’re clearly not someone who loses sleep at night over being liked at the W2.

Again, this is not the game you want to play if you’re trying to coast, fade into the background, and casually collect your W2 until they forget why they’re still paying you.

This is a game for glory, for the art of it, to prove you can, to strike fear in the heart of your enemies, for delivering the justice that many deserve, but too often escape in corrupt corporate bureaucracies.

Decide now whether you want to even play this game.

It is entirely optional, and you can succeed and escape the W2 without it.

But, if you do play…

Play to win. Don’t skinny dip in the Rubicon. Go all the way. Collect your scalps.

And lastly…

Read more

From the first recruiter’s message on LinkedIn, to booking that technical screen, then another.

And now, you’ve arrived. The on-site interview day. In person. Full day.

Here’s what to expect and how to nail it.

Next week, we’ll cover how to close your offer and negotiate exceptions to almost any policy that the job listing and recruiter says is impossible.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

Candidate Stress Test

While there was a brief gap during COVID, on-site interviews have long been the mainstay of the hiring pipeline, especially for big tech roles.

In person, the candidate can’t run, they can’t hide.

You can’t fidget under the table, or get hidden help from Cluely or the latest AI cheating tool.

It’s just you and a whiteboard, or full screen shared laptop.

And it’s not just one interview, you’ll often have 5 or more, usually including a breakdown like this:

• System Design & Architecture

• 2 x Pair Programming (Data Structures & Algorithms)

• Past Experience

• “Culture Fit” lunch interview

• Business discussion with CEO or Product Manager

• “Sell” interview with CTO or Hiring Manager

Let’s briefly go through each.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

System Design & Architecture

Part of the standard interview prep guides, I won’t go super in-depth but you usually are given a task like building a popular platform, but starting at a smaller scale, and then growing it.

For example, build a flight booking platform. Or build Booking.com for hotel rooms but start at the scale of a single boutique Bed & Breakfast. You get the gist.

The key part of this is that the interviewer will drill down further and further to surface how you breakdown a task and identify future bottlenecks in your design.

You’ll usually be talking in front of a whiteboard the whole time as the interview peppers you with follow ups and you madly scribble diagrams on the whiteboard as you talk through your thinking.

Deep dive domains for a standard fullstack engineer role can end up including any of the following:

Read more

Enterprise companies the world over are shoving AI down the throats of both employees and customers.

New chatbots & 1990s Microsoft Clippy AI helpers are everywhere, and in some cases I’m sure helping someone. Engineers in big tech are now being measured on PRs submitted per week and AI tokens spent.

Is anyone better off? Are we slow-rolling towards disaster?

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

The difference between elephants and mice

Everyone knows mice are nimble, they dart around. Elephants seem to be slow, lumbering, beasts. And yet, occasionally, they can move very quickly, fast enough to trample dozens of people to death who didn’t get out of the way.

Startups are mice. Big corporations are elephants.

While engineers at startups are usually free to use whatever they want to get the job done and ship the product, engineers in big enterprise companies are often hamstrung in unique ways.

On the one hand, they often are limited in what tools and technologies they can use, whether by wanting to limit tech stack fragmentation, or the IT & security departments wanting to justify their existence by blocking even the most benign tools because you didn’t file a JIRA ticket to get it on the whitelist.

Yet like the best 5 Year Plan from China, enterprises tend to rely much more on heavy handed top down mandates and policies. Unlike startups, well-known for granting more agency to employees out of necessity to move fast, ship or die; enterprises have established business lines and live under the sometimes true limitation that moving too fast could kill their golden goose.

So, while this usually plays out as being chained to JIRA and other dated tools, sometimes leadership gets anxious.

Maybe a competitor has pivoted. Maybe one of the core products has stopped growing. Maybe one of the execs just got a divorce and needs a way to squeeze out a quick win before bonus season.

Regardless of the reason, enterprises can sometimes very suddenly lurch in a new direction with a Code Red, Priority 00, new top-down mandate. Recently, that new mandate many places has been “Adopt AI, or else”.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

Doesn’t work? Doesn’t matter as long as it uses AI.

AI adoption is easy when it’s useful. Convince an engineer to spend a weekend playing with Claude Code and many will come back a believer for a lot of use cases.

AI adoption in the many cases where it is not useful is not organic. If it doesn’t work, nobody would use it unless forced. And so they are, with many misguided top-down mandates rippling across the enterprise world.

When the real constraints of current AI capabilities are ignored by leadership, many things start to happen.

First, rewarding AI usage, despite it not being useful (or overselling its benefits in demos), only serves as a toxic precedent. Instead of rewarding outcomes – like most companies did before, now tool choice is the top or dominant marginal criteria for promotions or layoffs. Instead of incentivizing real productivity gains, it only encourages exponential token spend.

Execs like seeing a line go up, so token spend as a proxy for productivity becomes the new KPI, despite not proving at all direct correlation between token spend and increased real productivity (effort turned into output) or customer impact.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Ready to turn your life around? Subscribe & start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Second, skeptical employees are rooted out, dismissed by leadership as luddites, and increasingly ostracized and pushed out of the company. The AI psychophants and hype mongers though are held high, presented as the “New Soviet Man” to emulate, as they work late into the night prompting away testing the latest tools mentioned on X, Hacker News, or Reddit.

Are the AI agents their slave? Or as they increasingly are tethered to their computer watching he tokens wiz past, are they becoming a slave to their bots?

Third, lack of AI adoption is a perfect scape goat for management.

They tell the Board of Directors that stock price performance will turn around next quarter now that true 10x velocity has been unlocked with AI. When even aggressive AI adoption fails to improve any roadmap timelines, managers can turn around and blame the unvaccinated – or the non-psychophants for not AI-ing hard enough.

AI caused SEVs are shoved under the rug. PR code review standards start slipping as the rush to increase PR metrics incentivizes mutually assured destruction amongst team mates, stamping and landing each other’s slop and hoping to not be holding the Oncall pager when it gets deployed. Endless slop and even transparently net-negative projects are looked over because they have the magic glitter of AI sparkling on the mounds of shit.

Management can now rest easy knowing that their fickle hearts changing the roadmap every 7 weeks is not the problem. Product & Design can relax, it’s not their ego-trips to ship flashy rollouts that impress their Dribbble followers, but confuse customers, that is the issue. No, it’s those pesky engineers not adopting AI and shipping fast enough.

Far from freeing engineers from the burden of making sand think through their code, AI has become a fever dream for management that they have no intention of waking up from. The slave driver’s whip simply comes down harder with easy passing week of rising AI token spend but flat to down real productivity.

Software engineering at many companies is going through their own Luddite revolution, not unlike the introduction of the weaving machines which made obsolete tens of thousands of textile workers in the 1800s over a 20 year adoption period.

Yet, so far the outcome isn’t yet looking like unemployment, but a massive re-underwriting of the programmer / employer negotiating power dynamic.

Long gone seem to be the days of sheer desperation and competition amongst the biggest companies in the world fighting to employ programmers with fat salaries, equity packages, endless benefits, and over the top offices.

While AI may be leading to some real productivity gains in some cases, there seems to be a massive pricing in of future productivity gains by management who have cut hiring to bare bones levels, especially amongst the junior ranks.

And not unlike growth stocks, pricing in future gains is all fine and dandy until it’s not. When most of your present value is from revenues to be made far into the future, a small change in those expectations can crash the stock.

How will countries survive in a future of declining birth rates?

How will companies survive in a future of declining internal expertise on their complex systems?

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $120 for 30 mins.

– Fullstack

New Chernobyl Loading...

In many ways the Chernobyl disaster sits as a warning against the Soviet style culture of dissent suppression and total fealty to ignorant leadership decisions.

As has now been documented extensively, engineers and site managers closer to the nuclear power plant operations were consistently overruled and ignored by politburo apparatchiks who were sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away, with no nuclear physics or engineering training.

Critical actions were delayed, held up, or the opposite ordered, leading to an exacerbated reactor meltdown disaster which destroyed the habitability of the surrounding town and area, and contributed to potentially tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths from radiation exposure on the unsuspecting public who had not been promptly evacuated to avoid global embarrassment, and many disaster workers killed in the weeks and months following from radiation poisoning who sacrificed their lives to stop the meltdown.

The modern ego-trip of management overruling engineers on the topic of AI adoption is shaping up to have many of the same fatal flaws.

Eng leadership who aren’t in the trenches actually using AI in existing 1M LOC codebases are quick to lurch from LinkedIn post to blog post conclusions and demand they be hastily implemented across the company, without even a care for success metrics or adversarial debate on whether this idea even applies anymore. AI models, guidance, and patterns are changing every few weeks and yet eng leadership is always behind the ball but need to appear like they are in charge to their management.

Worse still, is if they are called on the net-negative impact their rushed rollouts are happening, some can pull out the health insurance company bag of tricks and deflect, deny, and depose anyone who gets in their way. Complaints that “the engineers need to get with the program”, “we need to mature and not get left behind”, and “the time for debate is over” are not signs of strength, but of weakness.

The adoption of new technology and techniques must be through successful persuasion of engineers, not by force. Otherwise you risk killing your golden goose, namely competent engineers with deep knowledge of operating and improving the complex systems which run your billion-dollar business.

Relying on fake metrics to justify rule by fiat fools no one with a cursory knowledge of statistics. Relying on force and threats fools no one who knows that success metrics are critical for engineers to trust and align on a plan. Unfortunately, eng leadership often attracts those who are skilled at back stabbing and political maneuvering, not the technically competent or persuasive.

Eventually the A players start to leave for less toxic cultures or better opportunities. Those that remain work harder under the fear of layoffs. Management wins at least in the short term by headcount attrition reducing labor costs and more output from the remaining fearful employees. But, this rarely is a sustainable strategy.

Read more

The next day there wasn’t.

Could the locals the next day continue to act the same way under the Taliban as they had under the Americans? Some tried at great cost. Everyone else adapted.

When the regime changes, you need to be ready to adapt. The ground has shifted under your feet.

A fragile tree is one that snaps when the wind suddenly changes direction.

Your job is to become anti-fragile, able to keep that W2 paycheck flowing as you build wifi-money and plan your escape, regardless of what is happening around you.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

New leadership always makes a splash

When new leadership is hired, especially at higher levels of management, and for sure the C-suite, they want to make a splash.

They have to make a splash.

They’ve been hired to make a change.

They’ve pitched a roadmap, a mandate, and cashed a fat signing bonus.

And come hell or high water, they are going to crack some skulls and get it done.

So, as soon as you get the email that a new CTO, director, or org leader has been hired, your ears should perk up. They’re almost never coming to simply just stick with the status quo.

They’ll be bringing their own ego, opinions, and be pushing for big changes so they can do well on their performance review, even if by changing the rules from under the rest of you you might fail your next one.

And remember, much of this will all go unspoken, in whisper campaigns and accidental admissions from your manager of what happened in the EMs only meeting. Your job is to keep your ear to the ground and skate to where the puck is going to be.

Otherwise you’ll be stuck in line waiting for the last chopper out of Vietnam.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

Bonjour code monkeys...

A particularly notorious example that comes to mind was from a few years back.

The previous CTO had just spent 2 years merging tech teams across the business units, and pushed for huge migrations to unify the tech stack, despite a decade of mostly siloed development. He was soft spoken and did generally have a hard time driving the fast change that the board was counting on, even after two rounds of major layoffs.

So he was canned, and a French, long time Google exec was hired to take over as CTO.

Not even weeks after his announcement, rumors had already started to start that entire roadmaps were being torn up. Migrations to unify the tech stack? Waste of time.

One by one, senior engineering leaders reporting to him began to disappear. Some without even a goodbye note in Slack. Even some of their teams got shuffled away as projects got cancelled.

Read more

Today, your introduction to the ever looming “stack rank” tactics, which are always Coming Soon TM, and how you can still win despite the hysteria that will grip both your colleagues and manager.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

What is “Stack Rank”?

“Stack ranking” is a performance management technique of bucketing employees into top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. The poor and sometimes below average are PIP’d out, and then 6-12 months later the cycle begins again.

While the bucket names may vary by company, the technique has been tantalizing for management since it first became famous under CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, in the 1980s, who made a point of firing the bottom relative 10% of employees every year, regardless of how they were actually performing.

It always appears as the apple to Eve, delicious to eat. But even a single bite can destroy the culture of a company, because of the toxic incentives it introduces, which become nearly impossible to root out.

For example, when employees internalize that they will be ranked against their team members, or other employees at their same level, there now is an incentive to not openly collaborate, even to obstruct or sabotage other’s projects to make yours stand out.

The longer it lasts, the more rounds employees are put through, the harder it is for the survivors to avoid becoming crabs in a bucket, nipping at each other to avoid getting cut next round.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

As detailed in the Vanity Fair 2012 case study on Microsoft’s adoption of stack ranking in the 2000s under CEO Steve Balmer, many of the spectacular failures of the Balmer era (remember Windows Vista? Zune? Windows Phone?) could trace back to the corrosive nature of stack rank on the culture of collaboration, an endless stream of public failures as employees at each opportunity failed to work together to solve problems before launch, or speak honestly of problems emerging before they had metastasized to disrupt the entire roadmap.

While Microsoft softened the practice post-Balmer, other companies like Amazon have stuck with it, even dialling up the heat with “calibrations.” Managers make their initial assessments of their team, but then during weeks of closed door “calibration” meetings, managers fight it out against each other, supervised by their director, arguing to protect their team against the other managers itching to fire other’s engineers, since it means they can maybe keep their prized engineer.

Often, managers end up choosing scape goats to sacrifice or throw under the bus during the negotiations to protect their top team members. Worse still, some go a step further and treat hiring as “Dinner for Schmucks”, deliberately hiring a low performer so they have an easy mark come next round when they need to protect their top performers again.

Safe to say, even the best managers often fail at this, and many a good engineer end up laid off amongst the cross-fire. The engineers that last through this, are molded by it. Amazon and Microsoft engineers have become notorious industry-wide for the combative and ruthless approach they bring with them, even when they leave for another company which doesn’t use stack rank.

In engineering especially, fostering competition amongst engineers is a sure way to slow velocity, kill reliability and quality, besides destroying morale.

And yet your W2 will probably try it, especially if the stock price or internal valuation models drops low enough.

Ask me how I’ve learned so much about it? (My W2 adopted it in recent years.)

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Ready to turn your life around? Subscribe & start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

How does it start?

So how do you know that it is starting? What are the warning signs?

First, interest rates go up.

What? Central bank policy causes my director to start “stack ranking”?

I’m serious, the end of ZIRP started the clock for many companies, and within months of rates rising, public and private valuations began to fall. This ripples into bigger investor focus on stock based compensation diluting their shares. Cheap debt and massive valuation rewards for future growth disappear, so management teams scramble to please Wall Street.

Actual high performing teams don’t need to talk about it

While most companies have some sort of annual performance chat with your manager before your annual raise (to keep you ahead of inflation if you’re meeting expectations), you can sense that stack ranking might be coming when the all hands meeting topics become more focused on performance.

In a healthy company, the focus is on the mission, the latest demos, the next projects, the opportunity. When companies turn inwards, and focus on “performance management”, the start of cost cutting is a sign that something has gone wrong.

Ironically, many top performing teams rarely need to discuss performance. They are already intrinsically pushing towards the frontier of their possible output, excited by the mission, the opportunity, and enjoying working with other “A” players who want to do the same.

The closest you’ll get is a Steve Jobs character coming to say that what you built isn’t good enough to ship, you can do better, you must do better; which is still far different in tone and substance than the HR and legal approved nonsense that you’ll hear spewed from many leaders when they breach the topic. Some will even be so nervous being the mouthpiece for the process that even the socially unaware autist engineers in the audience will pick up something is off.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $120 for 30 mins.

– Fullstack

What you measure, will be gamed to death

Next, will come an increasingly fanatical and irrational focus on metrics.

Lines of code. Pull requests opened. Time from pull request open to merge. Number of deploys per week. Number of interviews. Number of AI tokens spent.

Do any of these actually signal high performance? Maybe.
Can almost all be comically easily gamed by engineers? Obviously.

And so, instead of improving performance, velocity, or reliability, you incentivize engineers to focus on refactoring and splitting up one medium PR into 7 small PRs.

Or using corporate AI tokens to build personal side projects since token spend is all that matters, there’s no checks on what the tokens are being spent on.

When one metric becomes too obviously gamed, the midwit managers find another.

“Just one more metric bro, please, this one will work, I promise. One new metric in a new dashboard, that will solve our performance and morale. The engineers won’t be able to gamify this one bro, I promise. Please bro, just one more, this one will work, I know it...”

As anyone with above a room temperature IQ should know, “Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcomes.” When the incentive is to game the metrics, they will be.

And fight this all you want, but management sets the rules of the game. Your only power is to play it better than your colleagues.

Remember, you don’t need to be able to outrun a bear, you just need to be faster than your most annoying hiking companion.

The corporate surveillance state looms ahead

ChatGPT hadn’t even been out for a year, and Microsoft had introduced in 2024 a creepy AI feature called Recall where Windows would take a screenshot every few seconds, and then provide suggestions of how you could use your computer better. After backlash, they made it optional.

But that was simply the trial run with alpha models.

The next wave of coming corporate spyware will blow away all the key loggers, power hungry Crowdstrike daemons, and forced whole computer backups of today.

The next ones will be AI powered, include full screen capture analysis, and perform sentiment, time, and productivity analysis with such detail that managers will need to change their pants the first time they get access to the dashboards.

As I am keen to remind you, and myself, time is running out.

The corporate panopticon is closing in.

And we have years, not decades, to escape the W2 before life in the fishbowl becomes truly unbearable.

One could say the same about our increasingly surveilled and AI powered societies...

How to still win while in the W2 mines

So, how do you win in this hellish rat race? Can you even win?

You can win, and with these tactics below, you will.

Read more

You’re tired of building the same components and CSS for every client, so you cook up a system. It’s pretty slick, and you make your money from clients anyways, so you opensource the design kit.

At first, just a few stars roll in on the Github repo. But then, thousands, even more. And you’re now the top frontend CSS repo.

Everyone’s using it. So, you build a premium components library on it. Everything you’d need to build a design website, a web dashboard, even a progressive web mobile app. And you throw up a Stripe link and see if people will pay.

A few do. And then a few more. Again and again your phone buzzes with the notifications.

Soon, enough are coming in you (and your two buddies you built it with) quit your jobs. You eventually hire 4 more engineers to help build the next version.

Life’s good. You made it!

Something useful, something people are willing to pay for, and a base layer common good released opensource to the public that all can use for free.

A perfect equilibrium. All is right with the world.

Until one day, a few years later, the growth curve started tilting the down, and never pulled up.

This is the story of Tailwind CSS, and what it’s near total destruction from the AI revolution can warn us about the state of opensource software going forward.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

Down 80%, with no sign of stopping

All the talk last week was of Tailwind CSS, the much beloved utility styling frontend library which for years has grown in popularity to become one, if not the, dominant component frameworks for web development.

And yet despite their generational run, traffic and revenue were down 80% since the launch of AI. They just had to lay off 75% of their engineers.

The second order effects of making software effortless to write with AI means the end of an entire class of opensource software (OSS) projects.

Without devs organically going to the documentation site, there was no way to upsell their premium components packages. And with AI being able to generate thousand line complex components with for $0.12 of credits anyways, why pay $65 for components up front?

So far, the AI generated components have lacked the polish of Tailwind’s premium offerings, but how long will that edge last?

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today for $1/month.

Even in recent months, some corporate executives have gotten the whiff of AI eating the world, and decided that continuing to support existing libraries and maintainers isn’t a priority anymore.

I’ve seen industry wide titans and 15 year veterans of US big tech software companies have their opensource projects cancelled, and managed out without severance, despite building and supporting libraries used in almost every Android app used on Planet Earth.

Within just a few short years, the economics of opensource software has gotten turned on its head.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Ready to turn your life around? Subscribe & start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

Winner takes all, even more

Opensource libraries are abstractions.

They hide some of the complexity of doing something, and make it easier for devs.

Instead of writing every byte yourself, an http client can take a request in JSON and then handle the complexity of TCP for you.

Existing top libraries per category have dominant downloads and usage, sometimes 10x or 100x the next similar library that can do the same thing in that language. Devs flock to what works, is proven, and has enough momentum and backing to remain well supported.

In previous years, a new library would get published on Github, and some of them would organically accelerate in popularity until they were the default library among developers.

From word of mouth, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit, Slack, and a variety of mediums, an upstart could take on the most established library and have a possible shot at winning.

Devs would get loured in by the hype, skim the README and docs to get a feel for it, and maybe try using it next project.

With AI, this organic discovery doesn’t happen anymore.

AI spits out working code, you merge the PR and move on.

Devs often don’t even check the new libraries AI is pulling in to their project, because if it works? Ship it!

And AI, unlike the fickle programmers of old, is not easily swayed by the newest shiney library to rack up the stars on Github. AI predicts the most likely successful code, which means the status quo.

While launching a new opensource project was as difficult as launching a SaaS before, now it is much, much harder. There’s no SEO hacker technique to insert your new library into the AI foundational model code generation module.

The status quo has been crystallized, this may be the beginning of the Long Night, to borrow a concept from .

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $120 for 30 mins.

– Fullstack

Brief relief for Tailwind CSS, but the bleak trajectory holds

Given the widespread adoption of Tailwind CSS industry wide, there was an outpouring of support for the beleaguered founder, Adam Wathan, who admitted the depressing nose dive the company was in across his podcast on X and while closing Github Issues from community members who wanted to make it even easier to never visit the Tailwind CSS documentation site (& be upsold on their premium components).

(and as usual, OSS consooomers showed up on their best behavior)

If you have the time, I’d recommend giving the podcast a listen. It articulates well the black pill perspective of the impact of AI on coming millions of people.

It won’t be just Uber drivers getting replaced, but potentially millions of white collar previously prestigious jobs.

Thankfully, Tailwind appreciators across the industry forced their employers to do the right thing and step up as sponsors to bolster the project and keep it from fully collapsing. MRR jumped from $75k to $130k in a week, mostly from new corporate sponsors.

But despite a brief jump in sponsors for Tailwind, the bleak trajectory holds.

Opensource software has suddenly transitioned from simply being very difficult to monetize, to now nearly impossible.

Old monetization models of either 1. premium features (Tailwind) or 2. premium support (Jetty), are quickly being phased out. AI can generate any premium features on demand for $0.12 in credits, or answer any premium support question or problem in seconds.

This will leave only hobbyists or corporate opensource maintainers, no more self-employed solo or tiny software shops.

Pour a cold one out. It truly is a sad day, and yet another unexpected casualty of the AI revolution.

But like any revolution, it’s best to not get caught on the wrong side of it when the bullets start firing.

The time to learn how to be ruthlessly effective with AI was yesterday.

Time is ticking, and either we’ll all be out of a job... or only those that can use the AI to have 10x impact will remain employed.

Given what I’ve seen, I’m still betting on the latter. Time will tell.

If you want to survive, all I can say is this:

Read more

But what happens when AI falls into the wrong hands?

You’re thinking Russia, North Korea, Iran? No.

I’m thinking HR.

The next layoffs won’t be televised, but they will be powered by AI. Buckle up.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

Like chimps discovering a fork

Before the current era, HR was largely limited in their ambitions. They had to wait for new functionality to come years later in their HR software. Workday. Greenhouse. SmartRecruiters.

Since they couldn’t build anything of their own (tempermentally expected given it’s HR), they were handcuffed to the limited capabilities that SaaS providers offered them.

But, in the age of AI, those shackles are falling off.

In some cases HR is learning to vibe code themselves. It’s like watching a chimp learn to use a fork.

But, in many more cases, internal software engineers are naively giving HR the rope with which they’ll soon be hanged.

Grow your Substack with Poaster.App

Use Poaster’s custom AI model to pull the best quotes from your long form writing, and automatically post them to your socials.

Skip the army of virtual assistants, start today from $1/month.

Class traitors that can code

Internal software engineers who casually help HR are best seen as class traitors in the communist sense.

While HR may come and nicely ask for help, handing the nukes over to Somalia because they ask nicely is still not a sane or responsible use of your talents.

Consider the following example.

HR is in charge of performance reviews annually. Quarterly is too much work. They encourage engineering managers (EMs) to comb through their individual contributors’ (ICs) work scattered across Github, JIRA, emails, Google Docs and summarize (with links back to the evidence) their work and impact. This is often weeks of work per EM if they have the usual 8-15 direct reports.

Performance reviews feed both into promotions, compensation, raises, and into layoffs.

“In the age of AI, surely this can be automated!”, one bright but naive software engineer exclaims, and proceeds to build a script which can provide in-depth performance review reports for each person in the company with working links, stats, and their stack rank position across their team, org, and company.

Feeling oh so accomplished with their 4 hours of vibe coding and refinement, they run a test batch of reports and send out a demo to the company for how easy it is now for anyone to leverage AI to update their hype doc!

But rather than broad thanks, the response from colleagues is muted. And within an hour the backlash has reached their org’s director who tells him to pull down the saved reports for now to stop the complaints.

Get 35% off for 1 year

Social credit scores approach, in every domain

But why were the performance review reports pulled offline?
Why were people upset?
Why didn’t they want an easy way to update their hype docs?

Obviously, such great power in the wrong hands will be abused.

And now that the repo and reports were published, the genie can’t go back in the bottle. The EMs know, HR knows, even the ICs now know that a new age is upon them.

What was far too costly to do manually regularly, can now be done monthly, weekly, even continuously, at minimal cost by AI.

And without the sufficient friction to stop abuse, whether it’s making a million microservices or excessive test coverage or now automated performance review reports, it will be abused.

Get 35% off for 1 year

Taking these trends forward, what does this mean for the corporate surveillance state?

Performance reviews will become continuous functions. HR dashboards will now have alerts when your weekly PR counts or throughput start to trend down. Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) will start quarters early, not needing to wait months for EM documented infractions, AI will always have the evidence.

Come layoffs, it won’t just be a bunch of sweaty McKinsey consultants in a conference room drawing a line on an Excel sheet sorted by compensation + most recent performance rating. Now HR and management will have dashboards where they can easily model cutting the bottom X % based on realtime employee performance.

While Bridgewater, Ray Dalio’s hedge fund, received endless scorn when it came out that they had manually implemented a continuous evaluation system before AI, forcing employees to rate each other throughout meetings on iPads, that system of control and fear will now be scalable across every company, without the cultural friction of needing to force everyone to manually rate each other constantly.

And as many AI fear mongers have now rightly predicted, the age of AI will be used far beyond simply mass realtime surveillance, but conceptually as a way for the elites in every hierarchy to finally be freed from the burden of accountability.

Management has already accomplished that in a small way by outsourcing layoff decisions to consulting firms like McKinsey, but in the age of AI this will extend to every major decision.

• Promo? Sorry, the AI said no.

• Raise? Sorry, the AI said no.

• Laid off? Sorry, we can’t override the AI.

• Social credit score dropped? Sorry, the AI said to reduce it.

• Health insurance claim denied? Sorry, the AI said no.

• MAID (medically assisted suicide) opt-out request denied? Sorry, the AI said no.

• Thought crime appeal? Sorry, the AI said no.

Public government contracts with Palantir for AI enabled surveillance systems, dashboards, and data ingestion and normalization services already point to that coming future.

For smaller organizations though, you can choose where to apply your talents.

And if you decide to naively give HR and management the scripts to do AI performance evaluations, don’t be surprised when they use the rope you gave them to eventually hang you for false crimes.

What’s the upside?

Well, AI SEO is still in the early innings…

Read more

And a special thank you to the readers that continue to make this possible. Without your support, I wouldn’t be able to continue writing.

Now, let’s ask the paid subscribers, was it worth it?

tl;dr: “It was” – paid subs

This year there has been tactical coverage of AI and how to use it to get faster promotions, work multiple W2s, build wifi-money, and escape.

Practically, there were new deep dives on how to optimize your big tech RSUs, ESPP, and business travel; multi-part series on how to onboard to a new job, and even how to avoid getting hacked during your next job interview.

On the more esoteric front, there was coverage of Canada’s 2025 outlook, federal election (with results as we predicted), economy, real estate, immigration, healthcare, and other national trends.

And of course paid subs always have access to the growing back catalogue of timeless tactics that have now helped dozens get faster promotions, juicier job offers, build wifi-money, and escape.

Get 35% off for 1 year

This Substack is your spork

Rest assured, the best is yet to come.

After having built two new AI-powered SaaS products over the past 10 weeks, I’ll be sharing how you can do the same.

Promos at the big tech W2 are critical, but not sufficient to “make it” out of Shawshank.

Don’t fear AI putting you out of a job, make others fear how fast you can ship.

For fellow Substack writers, if you want to grow, it’s time to become a Poaster.

Escape. That’s what I want for you in 2026. That is my purpose in writing.

If you’re ready to leave the standup meetings and HR performance cycles behind, it’s time to invest in the sharpened prison spork you need to start digging your way out of the Shawshank Prison of your W2.

This Substack is your sharpened spork.

Enjoy the turkey, practice some gratitude, and then snag a paid sub for the lowest price it’s been all year.

2026 can be the year you escape, if you have the right tools and know which direction to dig, which we’ll be covering in depth on this Substack, but only for paid subs.

Is your freedom worth $0.32 per day? Become a paid sub today.

Get 35% off for 1 year

BowTied Fullstack is on Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok

But the sadness isn’t for him, it’s really for you and your colleagues: the left behind.

Most cases, he’ll land on his feet. 10x engineers tend to do that.

But what does it say about the culture that spat him out?

What prospects does that leave to the remnant who remain?

Today is a bit of a more stream of consciousness post on the inevitable tragic end to greatness when it encounters the black hole of bureaucracy.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

For a limited time, you can get a paid subscription for 35% off.

Get all the tactics you need to succeed in tech for the biggest discount of the year.

Ready to turn your life around? Start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

Get 35% off for 1 year

On he who flys to close to the sun

The 10x engineer. Truly top 5 in his niche worldwide. Industry renowned.

And yet, some hormonal mid-level manager will still cancel their project and force them out. All to score brownie points with the squeaky wheels of less impressive, and slightly jealous pleb engineers endlessly complaining. Or their even more incompetent boss, who simply needs to squeeze the financials one more quarter, and needs a head on a spike.

Management assumes an engineer is an engineer, just hire another!

But, that is not the case.

Despite everything you are told to believe in the current year, great men do exist.

And when you fire or manage them out, your company often will not find another.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

After the plug is pulled

While they may have joined when the company was smaller, more ambitious, more willing to give them a long leash to manifest incredible new technologies, now you use JIRA. Now you have tri-weekly status updates. Now you need to get something, anything, any demo out before earnings.

No one of the caliber of the departed will be excited to join now.

And so the A players thin out, and eventually disappear completely.

Like an endangered species, but critical and taken for granted.

The B players and below remain, but morale sinks. Lower and lower. No amount of manager pep talks or all hands can turn it around.

A players inspire by their presence. B players muddle along without a leader.

A players give the lower players the unrealistic hope that if they work hard enough, they might get there someday. One or two might actually do it.

But like the loss of beauty, of architecture, of fine art, life without the greats becomes dull, boring, sliding toward Dunder-Mifflin.

It is managements low IQ, middling taste, and totally inability to respect the art form, the aesthetic, the perfection of the right abstraction, that lets them callously decouple and drop out the engine from their flying plane, and then be surprised quarters later when engineering velocity continues to fall, good players keep leaving, and the spark of innovation is all but a smouldering and smoking pile of ash, no longer the roaring fire that made competitors jealous and produced products quickly that made customers happy.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $100 for 30 mins.

– Fullstack

Memento Mori

But, I digress.

More than ever, managers are happy to take the risk. Let that blowhard go. He was past his prime anyways. It’s the “age of AI”, anyone can be a 10x engineer now, right?

Right??

Wrong. 10x engineering isn’t just the velocity, but the quality, the high bar, the encouraged path of everyone else to rise to their full potential.

APIs that are clear, abstractions cut and prudently demarcating the right boundaries and capabilities, communicating and persuading adoption across teams, without top down fiat being required to force them.

Seeing your mentors, greats you learned from and looked up to, managed out on cowardly procedural grounds after almost 15 years of loyal service and incredible output, is sobering.

More and more, I meditate on my own coming end.

My wife now points out my gray hairs.

My 20s were long ago, and not so very long ago.

In your 30s, it’s time to put up, or shut up.

By your 40s, it’s a race against the clock. Every day, you’re living on borrowed time.

Tick tock, the executioner’s axe awaits over my head and yours.

Get your big tech juicy job offer. Land your promos. Build your wifi-money. And escape.

You don’t have much time. And neither do I.

Poaster is now in Beta. Future posts will cover case studies of how to build a SaaS like Poaster in a few weeks using AI, and how you can do the same. Only for paid subs.

Get 35% off for 1 year

BowTied Fullstack is on Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok

The main breakthrough came at the end of the article (yes, paid subs only) which was a new async workflow for leveraging AI tools without having to supervise them as they slowly work.

Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex.

They all tend to require you to sit there watching them work slowly away, tokens in, tokens out.

Realistically, you end up jumping to X, doing other things, and 20 minutes later you remember to go check them. Sure enough, they got stuck or are asking for more input.

What I’ve discovered is a new workflow that matches what you’re used to when working with human colleagues. Both in terms of delegation and efficiency, but also reducing context switching for yourself.

This post is going to be an in-depth tutorial of exactly what I’m doing every day to build my new SaaS, which is launching soon.

Follow @PoasterApp and @FullstackQuotes on X for more.

Given some of the sensitive nature and novel strategies I’ll be discussing, this will be for paid subs only.

For anyone looking to escape their W2, this is the type of post that makes your subscription for the whole year worthwhile.

At least, that’s what readers keep telling me, especially after the last post:

Buckle up, the post that might change your life starts now.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

What is Github Copilot Agent?

I have found Github Copilot Agent to be exceptional. The results are routinely better than other tools I’ve tried locally.

How does it do it? Primarily by leveraging longer running structured AI stages (planning, research, implementation), MCP servers, and a much better system prompt, even than Copilot within IDEs which I have used extensively.

Copilot Agent also has model price optimization, which has only recently came in a basic form to some OSS IDE plugins like Roo and Cline. Planning stages are done by a more expensive reasoning model, and implementation is done by cheaper models. This makes it possible for Copilot Agent to work incredibly well for only $10/m.

I’ve yet to exceed the model allocation credits. With Cursor, I was hitting limits within an afternoon, and was going to have to stop coughing up a lot more than $10/m to keep using it.

The one unexpected cost that I have exceeded is Github Actions CI minutes. Base plans include 2000 minutes. But, when each Copilot Agent session takes 15-20 minutes, that quota can get used up quickly. Thankfully only another $15 in CI costs was enough to cover me last month with heavy usage.

All in cost for a month? $25.

For the results, it can’t be beat. Claude Code, Cursor, any other setup I’ve tried burns through that in credits in a few days.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $100 for 30 mins.

Ready to turn your life around? Start here and report back your wins.

– Fullstack

Github Mobile App: their best kept secret

The Github mobile app may be one of Github’s best kept secrets.

For years, it was how I appeared productive at the W2 while I was at Home Depot or the gym. I could still review PRs on the go, file issues, and get my “exceeds” performance rating as I dunk on my colleagues who are chained to a desk like they’re cavemen LINK.

But now in the age of Github Copilot Agent, the mobile app is even more dangerous.

For example, now even when I go into the W2 office, I can file new issues, monitor PRs throughout the day on my personal phone, tag @copilot in comments to address feedback in new commits, or even written the code changes I want as a suggestion comment and committed it myself. All from my phone.

Copilot even can be tagged as a reviewer on their own PRs and end up often finding improvements because the reviewer model is trained and tuned differently than the implementation model. I have it as an auto-reviewer on every PR and it’s caught lots of bugs.

Effectively, I can use AI to make forward progress on my wifi-money SaaS projects all while still doing my W2 to pay the bills.

And all without having to manage an army of D-tier foreign sweat shop contractors which was the old way to do this.

What about Replit? Lovable? etc.

Replit has taken a similar approach, investing in their mobile app to make it easy to monitor their agent’s progress, but Replit is more expensive, and pushes vendor lock-in on their deployment platform and all-in-one agent management.

It’s not my style, but it works for some.

For me, I’m happy to have a Ruby-on-Rails project, have Copilot Agent writing PRs, and deploy it on some dirt cheap VPS for $10/m.

10 minutes: Morning Issues & Delegation

Everyone has a morning routine. Snooze alarm. Browse X. Quick workout Cold shower. Coffee. Go to work.

That’s all great, but you’re going to need to do a lot more if you want to escape your W2.

Read more

As always, no black pills. Despair is demonic.

And in this case, it is not hard to put down the pill box.

The SaaS which five years ago took 2 years to build, I can now build in 2 weeks.

Read that again.

2 years, is now down to 2 weeks.

Now like the saying goes, you can never cross the same river twice, because both you and the river are different. I’m a much better engineer now than 5 years ago. But the tools are hugely powerful in the right hands.

AI in the hands of 10x engineers is a sight to behold.

Even, among business founders, I've seen some get an MVP out in a month that previously they would have barely been able to scrap a wireframe design together on Figma in the same amount of time.

The era of only needing 2 weeks to ship is here.

This post will go in depth into my latest workflow leveraging AI tools which has let me ship two full SaaS apps to production in under a month.

For those planning your escape, this may be among the highest ROI posts you read this year. Pour a cup of coffee and sit down for this.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.

2 years down to 2 weeks

5 years ago I did one of my first wifi-money SaaS startups. It took 2 years to get to production and in front of customers.

Part of this was my inexperience at the time, but part of it was having to do every single thing by hand.

• Want to crawl a website? Go read Selenium docs, fiddle around with the debugger and test.

• Want to extract text from a PDF? Go read Tesseract docs, spend a week getting it setup, tune the weights and do more tests.

• Want to crawl in parallel? Weeks doing load testing and fixing batch management.

• Want to scale beyond prototype? Read docs and eventually realize you need to add MySQL indexes.

• Want to deploy with memory limits? Spend weeks converting from docker-compose to Docker Swarm, realize your boxes Docker version broke your secrets management, finally get it working.

• Want to serve https? Figure out Traefix proxy router and

• Want to handle auth? Setup an Authelia sidecar and figure out how to integrate it with your container & deploy setup.

• Want to have a database backed feature flag abstraction and frontend? Spend a week building it from scratch.

• ... and on, and on

The pain from having to figure this all out from first principles resulted in [KtSaaS](https://ktsaas.io). I took everything I learned, and published a generic template anyone could use.

It worked, and still is not a bad template.

But, would I take that same approach today? Hell no.

Using today's AI tools, and a more batteries-included stack like Ruby-on-Rails, I can build the same SaaS but in 2 weeks instead of 2 years.

And this isn't in theory, this is in practice. I just did this twice in the past month.

I'm not kidding, you can escape.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?

DM me on Substack or X with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to turn your life around? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Level 1: Copilot Virgin

Github Copilot was one of the first AI coding products out of the gate in 2023.

I've written before about how I used it to work an extra consulting contract on top of my regular W2. In that case, the consulting company I was working for even covered the licence cost for me, so I didn't have to think about cost at all.

And generally, it worked well enough even with early ChatGPT-3.5 models to make me productive in Python which I had never used in a professional setting before.

The one thing that started to make my eyes wander was the new agent mode and diff UI that other AI coding products were launching with, and Copilot didn't clone until a year later.

Level 2: Cursor Creator

Beyond just asking ChatGPT conversation mode coding questions like a buffoon, you'll want AI tools which have a tighter integration into your codebase and development environment.

One of the first tools which made a big splash when it launched was a VS Code clone (literally, they forked it) called Cursor.

Cursor added a nice diff UI and chat sidebar, and over time have tuned their models or prompts to be shockingly effective.

For example, in an afternoon, I was about to write a Typescript CLI tool that extracted text from an input PDF file using Tesseract (a local OCR library). When I attempted this previously, it took 2 weeks.

After plowing away for a few hours though, you quickly start to hit API limits which gets pretty annoying. They have paid plans which expand your limits a bit and add some markup on top of base model prices, but I wanted to see what else was out there which might be cheaper.

Level 3: OSS Optimizor

Cursor hadn't even been out for more than a month or two when open source alternatives launched which let you use your own API key to a model provider and skip the Cursor markup.

Better yet, they were vanilla VS Code plugins, not an entirely new IDE app to download, so they work a bit easier with your existing workflow.

I snagged some API keys and initial credits for OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and xAI Grok models, and got to work.

Read more

As we passed buildings, the guide pointed out the local city monument signs.

This person lived here. This battle was fought there. This church was built then. And on and on.

Someone raised their hand to ask, "All these monuments, are they protected by UNESCO? The UN's special protection of world monuments?"

The guide stopped walking and turned around, lowering their voice, "No, there's no UNESCO protection of any of these monuments."

"But, how do they remain preserved then?", the anxious tour participant pleaded.

Turning back to walk again, the guide continued the tour.

Whether monuments or culture, most are not protected by UNESCO.

And even the ones that are, risk ruin if the local populations are not all working together to ensure their survival.

The engineering culture passed down to new hires should be seen in the same light.

In the best cases, they receive a 10x engineering culture, now theirs – if they can keep it.

For others, they receive an engineering culture warts and all, that with enough time and effort they could help improve, smoothing out the rough edges, and fanning the flames of ambition which banish apathy.

Or they could let it continue to rot away, continuing the slow trend towards stalled velocity and business failure.

Today, we do a deep dive on engineering culture, what is it, how to build one, how to preserve one, and the cost to your ability to build wifi-money and escape if you don't.

Ship fast, or software that will last? Now, you don't have to choose.

Fortune 500 or well-funded startups usually snatch up all the 10x programmers. Turns out, not all of them.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio on Deca Labs.

Forming an Engineering Culture

Like any culture, an engineering culture is the implicit embedding of values, ways of doing things, slogans, technical opinions, amongst a group of people.

For startups, this may entirely overlap with that of the team since the team of 5 or 10 engineers is the entire engineering organization.

But for most larger W2s, the engineering culture sits beyond the team, in the best case capturing and setting as de facto the values, practices, and opinions that should be shared across all teams, regardless of domain.

While companies are small, say under 100 engineers, the right charismatic senior engineers can set the culture. During all hands meetings, pair programming with new engineers as they join, and ensuring that other senior engineers are aligned on the same values and practices, a culture can be set which has vast synergetic benefits given the shared context that all engineers now can operate within.

For companies that manage to retain their founding engineers, setting culture can be much easier. Initial hires onboard with the founding engineers directly. Once trained and inculcated, when they onboard future new hires, there is minimal loss of culture in the next generation hired.

In a tiny team, differences get ironed out quickly and aren't allowed to fester, in contrast to how they can more easily grow in a huge team where everyone is spread thin and few have the time, influence, or authority to chastise a new hire for their foreign values or behavior.

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you can keep it

Unfortunately, few engineering leaders consciously think about culture in a non-LinkedIn, non-cringe, pragmatic way.

Sure, the LinkedIn cucks will prattle on about culture for hours if you let them – especially if they are holding a microphone on some panel on stage, but few know how to form, let alone preserve, a high functioning 10x engineering culture.

Without a 10x engineering culture, your company surely will slowly die mired in slowing velocity, productivity, and growing insurmountable levels of tech debt, with your 10x engineers jumping ship like rats quarter after quarter.

Read more

The first step to building social capital which will let you get promoted, push technical direction, and have influence in the company, is being seen as baseline competent, which requires onboarding successfully.

So, what happens if you don't?

You don't kill your ego, so your onboarding goes a bit rough. It drags out for a few months, you're on track for your first performance review being "doesn't meet expectations".

Well, this post will go through a few stories of how it played out for some colleagues who failed to onboard.

Safe to say if the carrot of the last post didn't motivate you, maybe the stick of this one will.

Onboard quickly and successfully, anon.

The rest of time at the company may depend on it.

Ship fast, or software that will last? Now, you don't have to choose.

Fortune 500 or well-funded startups usually snatch up all the 10x programmers. Turns out, not all of them.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio on Deca Labs.

New Grad

I knew a girl, fresh out of school, first job. Data analyst role though she ended up needing to do some some basic Python programming.

She got along well with her manager, and the team. Quickly understood the social dynamics and the high level overview of the first task assigned.

But, when it came down to the actual programming she hit the usual predictable onboarding roadblocks.

The laptop had data analyst permissions, not the standard looser programmer OS image. So, she couldn't install Python or run her code at all.

It was a small innovation team in a sprawling organization, so there was no starter template repo or new engineer documentation.

She didn't know how to setup a fresh Python project for use with Jupyter for prototyping, and then a production data cleaning executable.

So, what did she do?

Thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

She worried and became an anxious mess.

Googling in vain for almost 2 weeks, never once letting her manager or teammates know that she was hard blocked.

Finally, after almost a dozen stand up meetings just stalling – politely, confidently, and initially believably – the manager assigned someone to pair with her and figure out what was wrong.

Sure enough, there was some JIRA ticket that had to be filed to grant her permissions. But, of course that took another few days to get approved.

By then, she'd spent the first 3 weeks hard blocked and producing nothing. Her manager was not impressed.

Freaking out, she came to me.

I shared the same recommendations from the [last post](LAST POST). Timebox all efforts to 15 mins - 1 hour. Then, immediately escalate, say you're hard blocked, and ask the team or someone to pair program on getting unblocked.

It took her a while but she finally started to get the hang of it.

But instead of 1 hour to timebox, it'd still be 1-2 days. And through it all she was unable to undergo the necessary ego death to become comfortable asking for help.

She ended up convinced that she couldn't be a programmer. When really, she just was unable to admit that after her Bachelor's and Master's degree, she still needed to ask for help and had a lot to learn.

She quit 6 months later and struggled to get a recommendation letter from her manager, which obviously made it a bit more difficult to find her next position as a non-technical policy analyst.

If you're not willing to ask for help and continually learn, you'll never succeed.

Intermediate Engineer

A new guy joined a sister team one day. He'd been hired as an intermediate, well paid for his age. He had I think 4 or 5 years experience.

But, immediately he had a hard time fitting in socially on the team.

He was a sports bro, betting on every game, loud, Eastern European, upbeat & positive. A stark contrast to the much more subdued, level-headed, traditional nerd interests and mannerisms of the existing team.

He talked a good game technically, but soon that was the only thing he had a reputation for. Talk. He couldn't ship.

His manager was exceedingly aloof, so he was able to fumble around nearly a year before the tensions rose.

I was called in to pair program on his latest project and help fix his "velocity issues".

We started pairing once a week, then twice. Soon it was nearly every day.

He had an awful habit of drilling down for days, layer by layer in the code. Endless pointless goose chases.

Constant complaints about how the existing code had been written. Some of it valid complaints, some of their code was horrendous. But many complaints, simply were protecting his ego with endless accusations that his colleagues were idiots.

And through it all, still no PRs submitted.

I pushed hard coaching him for many months on the previously mentioned tactics of time-boxing, cleaning up other's bad code as you encounter it, but for him there were other big issues.

For one, scoping.

Read more

Now what?

After your first job, few future employers will care about your education, or any internship, or anything else on your resume.

Your first job can be make or break.

• So how do you ensure you succeed in your first full time role?

• How do you ensure you can land your first promotion quickly?

• How do you land a good reference letter for when you want to jump to your next job?

First impressions are huge.

While this post best applies to new grads, it is equally valid for every new job.

Today, we'll be outlining how you can nail your onboarding period, and set you on the path for success in your new job.

Ship fast, or software that will last? Now, you don't have to choose.

Fortune 500 or well-funded startups usually snatch up all the 10x programmers. Turns out, not all of them.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio on Deca Labs.

Ask questions, or it's your fault

While your employer will expect you now how to use a for loop, check language docs, Stack Overflow, leverage AI, and open a PR on Github, there's a huge amount that will be company specific.

What do I mean?

• Custom internal configuration of their CI / CD that runs on every PR and handles deployments

• Custom IDE or local env configuration

• Custom internal code structure, libraries, idioms

• Custom formatters, linting rules, style idioms

• Custom JIRA or ticket workflows

• Expectations around Slack availability, announcement writing voice

• Thoroughness expected of PR reviews

Every company will have their own culture (what's cool to joke about around the lunchroom table) and their own technical culture (all the company specific water you'll be swimming in).

The tricky thing for onboarding is rarely do any companies have a detailed document you can read where all of this is explicitly outlined.

First off, a special thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

Often, and especially at smaller companies, it's a mixed bag of:

• random blog posts

• internal docs

• heresay from authoritative colleagues who have shaped the culture

• mutually enforced cargo cult copied practices by colleagues who know how to play by the rules – regardless of whether they feel strongly about them

This means that learning how to be effective involves being curious.

• Ask questions about why things are done a certain way.

• Ask to pair with someone end to end to land your first small PR and deploy the changes.

• Ask what metrics, logs, exceptions to check to confirm it works as expected and hasn't broken anything.

Remember: If you don't ask, it's your fault.

If you do ask and docs insufficient, explanation insufficient, pairing doesn’t work; then it’s your team's fault.

But avoiding asking questions to save face will only make it seem like you're full of ego and unwilling to learn how to do things right and fast.

Timebox, then Ask

Learning from first principles on the new job is mostly to preserve your ego, and not the best approach.

Sure, you could spend hours combing through every layer of the codebase and CI and deployment configuration and grok how it all fits together, but that will take days and weeks and in the meantime your team will be left wondering: "wtf is that new guy doing?"

The better approach is a balanced one of timeboxing.

Read more

• A client on an old version of software needs to download their data before their vendor migrates them to a new version.

• An upstart fintech startup wants to populate latest financial data for free before committing to paying for expensive data licensing agreements.

• An indie hacker wants to aggregate data on all key influencers in a given industry and sell access to the data set.

• A new crypto app wants to pull social media trend data to offer a way to bet for or against certain hashtags.

In all these cases, Selenium was the only way to pull mass amounts of clean data, consistently, from some of the most locked down websites in the world.

Ship fast, or software that will last? Now, you don't have to choose.

Fortune 500 or well-funded startups usually snatch up all the 10x programmers. Turns out, not all of them.

Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.

Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.

Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio on Deca Labs.

Leveraging AI, it's now even easier than ever to write software that uses Selenium to extract data from any website, captchas be damned.

This post is a deep dive on how to do this, whether for your own project or for a client.

I've already made five figures just from data scraping related projects where I used Selenium.

How much could you make?

First off, a special thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

What is Selenium?

Selenium has long been the dominant library for web scraping and remains a powerful tool.

Notably, Selenium has the power to control a full Chrome browser, enter input into text fields, click links, and effectively simulate human actions on almost any website.

Paired with a captcha breaking API (see my preferred one below), the online world is your oyster.

Selenium has well tested libraries for Python, Java, Node, and many languages. I even shipped a Kotlin starter project called KtSaaS which included a Selenium crawler.

While popular in frontend app integration tests, Selenium can also be your tool to make any website your personal API.

While AI offerings are slowly starting to dabble in AI controlled browsers and scraping use cases, the lack of determinism and risk of hallucination means for many use cases a Selenium scraper will be necessary if you plan to use the data for mission critical tasks.

Map, Reduce, Clean, Export

A scraping project comes down to four key phases:

• Map: Iterate through the full set of input data (web pages)

• Reduce: Aggregate data into a structured, durable location (JSON in S3, rows in a database...)

• Clean: Iterate over aggregate data and sanitize input data, often websites will use human readable formats for timestamps or other data which you'd prefer to parse into more easily usable machine formats like Timestamp.

• Export: Export your aggregate data in a format that you can use in your final product (CSV file, paged JSON response in a REST endpoint...)

Each of these will include some amount of coding, architectural design, and devops, depending on your project.

For coding parts, using AI coding tools, you can easily write your scraping software using Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or whatever your vibe coding tool is of choice.

For maximum accuracy projects, I'll generally use Selenium and often set breakpoints with a debugger and step through my script to confirm the values extracted are as expected with the Selenium controlled browser clicking along.

For less critical ones, you can simply check the final JSON or S3 results where you dump your crawled data.

For your most YOLO projects, you can even leverage the latest AI tool crawling programs like OpenAI's Operator tool and hope that the AI crawled data will be accurate enough for your use cases.

At the end of the day, you'll need to assess for your project or with your client what level of diligence is required for the task at hand.

Map

The Map phase is where you'll write your Selenium crawler.

Read more

It was a contracting gig, 8 weeks, fulltime. I'd be coming into an existing backend project and getting it ready to launch.

All while working my big tech W2.

Previously, this would have been very difficult. Stressful even.

But with AI, could it now be possible? (It is.)

Maybe even easy? (It was.)

And now, a year later, can it still be done to double your income? (The IRS is going to love you.)

Buckle up. It’s time to share some of the tactics that have unlocked my first wifi-money - and maybe soon yours.

First off, a special thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

What is Overworking?

Working multiple full time W2 jobs, at the same time.

Your employers don't know you are, but the IRS certainly does. When you start earning double the first year, let me know how the taxes look.

If you’re looking to ramp up consulting or contract work, I’d seriously consider setting up a corporate vehicle, both for limiting liability but primarily for tax planning purposes. Do your own research, every state/country will have slight differences.

For taking on a second W2, or 3rd, or 4th… check out r/Overwork on Reddit. You’ll see first hand some of the tradeoffs in people’s stories of success and failure.

Learn from their experience, so you can make fewer mistakes.

Lastly, you need a good kvm switch. IYKYK.

Overworking, whether contract work or multiple W2s, can work well as a short term boost to earnings.

But long term, multiple W2s isn’t for everyone. W2 is more demanding on your time than contract work, with meetings and social expectations of an employee - not a hired hand.

I also would worry about losing my primary W2, which is already well optimized to less than 2h/day and getting “Exceeds Expectations” performance reviews every quarter. There are many stories of the second W2 calling the first when they find out you’ve been overworking, and then you get fired from both.

I’ve chosen the mix that works for me, and that can change by the season.

As for you anon, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Today's post shares new strategies on how to leverage AI to max your earnings at either your primary W2 and consulting contract work or secondary W2s.

Buckle up, this could be your first step towards earning money outside your W2.

And that's when everything will change. You won't be able to stop.

Overworking with AI: Mindset & Tactics

So, how do you leverage AI to overwork?

How can you keep up with consulting expectations while keeping your "Exceeds Expectations" rating at the primary W2?

How do you double, maybe even triple your income leveraging the latest in AI tools?

This post may unlock a future you didn’t think possible.

Fundamentally, there a few major mindset shifts and key tactics that will make overworking possible, while continuing to fade effort with your primary W2.

Without some nuance here, you will risk losing your loafty, cushy W2 and be worse off than you started.

No reward without some risk. But you’ve got to be smart about this.

Read more

The first major meme of the election has dropped: a stereotypical Liberal Carney supporter flashing the boomer salute at younger generations who can’t easily buy a home, get a high paying job, nor plan for retirement under boomer supported mass immigration policies & NIMBY zoning practices.

The first election fight between the generations is well underway. It won’t be the last.

While many are still in denial, the race is now a nail-biter with Conservatives and Liberals consistently both within the margin of error, and on seat count Liberals even seem to be pulling away.

A lot has changed politically since December when Conservatives could gloat about their 99% likelihood of victory in an election against Trudeau. But fate and the Liberal Party had different plans.

This post covers the successful Carney Coronation, the collapse of both Conservatives and leftist NDP since January, and what comes next under the probable election result of a new Carney mandate & 4th consecutive term for the Liberals.

First off, a special thank you to the readers who pay to make this newsletter possible.Your support lets me continue to share tactics to grow your tech career and in-depth reporting on Canada’s economy, politics, and national trajectory.

Are you looking for 1:1 coaching on anything from your tech career to Canadian real estate?

DM me on Substack or X (formerly Twitter) with your proposed topic, I’ll let you know if I can help. Skip the mid-IQ takes on Reddit, pay $100 for 30 minutes of information you can trust.

Ready to work through the paid subscriber tech career tactics archive? Start here and report back your wins. It’s a growing club of winners, and we’re waiting for you to join.

– Fullstack

The Carney Coronation: Complete

As noted in the Canada Outlook 2025 post, PM Justin Trudeau resigned in January kicking off a leadership race within the Liberal Party for a new leader to take over as Prime Minister, and lead the party into the next election.

Despite being behind former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in initial polls, my bet was on Carney from the beginning.

If I had to place my bets, it would be on Carney, who despite not holding a seat in Parliament, has been courted by the Liberal Party for the position multiple times since 2012, and has been waiting in the wings for the right opportunity. He is a smooth operator who performed competently as head of Canadian and then British central banks, and amidst various roles across banking and international policy.

[...]

Despite Freeland polling slightly ahead in initial polls, I still give Carney the edge.

Sure enough, by a kickoff on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, backroom party machinations disqualifying two fast-rising Indian candidates, Chandra Arya and Ruby Dhalla – only after they had already paid their 6-figure non-refundable deposits to the party, and a slick campaign run by none other than Trudeau's long time handlers Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, the Carney coronation was completed on March 9, 2025 when he secured 85% of the vote.

To rub salt in the wound, the Liberal Party even disqualified sitting MP Chandra Arya from even running for re-election in order to forcibly vacate his seat so Carney could run in the Ottawa riding of Nepean.

Nothing was ever going to stop Carney's coronation.

To any readers here or on X (formerly Twitter), this will not have come as any surprise, though it is a sharp contrast to the roller coaster that most Canadian commentators took their followers on for months claiming it would be a close leadership race.

Snap Election & Poll Swings

Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 14, quickly appointed a near identical cabinet to Trudeau, and then called a snap election on March 23, with election day set for April 28, 2025.

As Carney’s coronation as party leader approached, Conservative poll numbers under leader Pierre Poilievre started to deflate, in line with the previously shared theory that many swing voters were polling against Trudeau, not for the Conservatives.

Many voters currently polling for the Conservatives put the blame for Canada's current demise rightly at the feet of Trudeau, but would be willing to consider a new candidate leading the Liberals, given the longstanding strong reputation the Liberals have especially among immigrant groups as the party that brought them in to the country.

[...]

If Liberals can successfully further tar Conservatives with the deportation and perceived anti-immigrant policies of the American MAGA movement, polls could swing quickly back to a tighter race, especially given the fast growing recent immigrant vote.

This played out exactly as predicted, with the race tightening and even now flipping to the Liberals, far from the 99% likely Conservative majority that polls were predicting in January. The seat projection is even more dire given the popular vote is not distributed uniformly by riding, and shows the Liberals pulling away.

To say the Liberals may have just perfectly executed a last minute leadership switch to now cinch a majority government after almost a decade already in power is not an understatement.

Clearly, the Canadian public can still be played like a fiddle by Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, who by ratcheting up the Trump threat – through retaliatory tariffs & COVID-level mass propagandized hysteria ("elbows up", American product boycotts) – swung the narrative for the election away from a referendum on the "lost decade" under Trudeau to a "war time leader" election against Trump.

Carney's grey hair, more serious demeanor, lower pitched voice, intelligent sounding answers at press conferences, and decades long history acting on the world stage through central bank and UN positions stands stark against the sometimes perceived unseriousness of lifelong smug political quick talker Pierre Poilevre, who has served as a Conservative MP since he was 24 years of age, and became leader largely on his viral social media clips dunking on Trudeau & his cabinet ministers during Question Period in the House of Commons to rowdy applause from Conservative back benchers. While his critiques may well have been correct, the difference in optics could not be more stark.

Conservatives Choke

The Conservative campaign under Poilevre has floundered for months since the 2 legs of their unstable stool of a platform were kicked out by Trudeau's resignation announcement and Carney's cancelling of the carbon tax upon becoming Prime Minister. This was called out back in January as a major risk to the Conservatives.

With Trudeau out, much of the Conservative messaging over the past year solely focused on him starts to sound a bit stale, and their strategic reluctance to commit to major drastic policy reforms and plan to coast to victory on anti-Trudeau sentiment may not be a winning strategy anymore.

With Trudeau & his carbon tax gone, the Conservatives have simply pivoted to update all their fear mongering ads from the Trudeau Liberals to the Trudeau-Carney Liberals, without pivoting to materially address any of the most pressing issues to voters, like the rampant and destructive mass immigration since 2021 of now 2-3 million per year into a population of 40 million – far above the long term average of 250k annually.

Or while accusing the Liberals of being soft on crime and touting mandatory minimum sentences, the Conservatives fall short of actually offering any protection by giving Canadians the right to use firearms for self-defence in their own homes, leaving them the Sophie’s choice options of being ravaged by criminals for 40 minutes until the police finally show up, or use their licensed firearms in self-defence but then risk bankruptcy on lawyer fees and jail time if the criminal is justly injured, maimed, or killed.

The Conservative campaign has seemed intent on refusing to actually grant any policy concession which might persuade a marginal cohort of swing voters to join their side.

The low hanging fruit remains plentiful, ripe, and unpicked by Pierre the apple eater.

Canadians vote on rule by China, or rule by India

While this election isn’t a formal referendum on Canada’s re-colonization, more reporting has revealed that foreign influence in Canada is rampant across recent decades of governments & current leadership of the major parties.

The Liberals have long been suspected of being under strong influence from China, with one candidate being forced to resign after announcing a bounty on his Conservative opponent's head if he's delivered to the Chinese consulate, initially defended by PM Carney before days later accepting his resignation.

Meanwhile, it's now been reported that during Poilevre's 2022 Conservative leadership campaign, there was significant funding and influence applied by Indian government affiliated groups. Campaign stops at temples, ethnic media, and diploma mill community colleges have confirmed the suspicions of many that Poilevre has no plans to address the over-representation of immigration from India or reverse Trudeau’s mass migration since 2021.

The Liberals themselves have by their policy shown to be under major Indian influence as well since they removed per country caps and expanded immigration from 250k per year to now 2-3 million across all immigration programs, with India dominating the per country charts.

Though notably, the Indian immigration ushered in by the Liberals has not been uniformly distributed across all 36 states and territories of India. Instead, since 2021 it has been dominated with Sikh immigration from the northern Punjab region, with significant numbers of supporters of the Khalistan separatist movement, now actively agitating in Canada for their cause, their flags now frequently found flying across Toronto and Vancouver suburbs. Khalistan parades and protests, as recently as April 19 in Surrey, British Columbia, have drawn over 600k Sikhs to the streets, and clashes with Hindus and other groups have continued to increase.

The Canadian & Indian government has threatened multiple times as recently as October 2024 to mutually sever diplomatic relations given the Canadian accusations of Indian government agents orchestrating assassinations of Sikh leaders on Canadian soil.

The last stretch of the horse race

Support has consolidated behind the Liberals and Conservatives, with all other parties reduced to single digits.

The Liberals in their fully costed plan released last week admit no timeline to balance the budget and incredibly a $130 billion increase in spending – which Carney has rebranded as "investments" – from the already nauseating Trudeau baseline high deficits which saw the national debt double in under a decade.

The Conservatives continue to say nearly nothing new. And like the Liberals, have a myriad of near identical, completely infeasible campaign promises like immediately doubling the rate of housing starts from the multi-decade long term average of 250k/year up to ~500k/year, and sustaining that rate for a full 5 years to build 2.3m (Conservatives) or 2.5m (Liberals) new housing units.

Beyond the two major parties, the further left New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh, is also deep in the Indian influence controversy, himself a Punjabi Sikh who has been accused his entire career for sympathies for Khalistan separatists including refusing to condemn the Sikh terrorists who executed the Air India bombing of a flight from Canada in 1985 that killed over 300 on board. Since January, NDP support has collapsed to single digits as left wing protest votes unhappy with Trudeau have happily returned to the Liberals now under Carney, unimpressed with Singh's leadership seen increasingly out of touch and ineffective, especially with the traditional blue collar labor NDP voters.

Given the speed at which demographic replacement has happened in Canada, even the right wing People's Party of Canada (PPC) hasn't gone further than advocating an immigration moratorium – or a freeze on new immigration, falling far short of the mass deportations and cancelling permanent residency for millions which would be required to fix the well-documented and fatal imbalances in real estate and labor markets, collapse of education and healthcare systems, rise in crime, and loss of national cohesion.

The PPC has continued to poll in the single digits – still unlikely to even win one seat despite having the policy platform which would have the best shot at solving voters' top problems. Alas, citizens being coerced to vote against their own interests would not be a shock, but simply be inline with the results of the democratic experiment in most countries.

The Green Party (leftists with an environmentalist bent), Bloc Quebecois (Quebec separatists), and other fringe parties have continued to hemorrhage support and remain inconsequential in the single digits.

What happens after Election Day

Given the nature of Canada's parliamentary constitutional monarchy, the winning party may only have a third of the popular vote yet still win the most seats, which is a bit shocking compared to countries like the US where the winning party routinely has almost 50% or much higher support.

This exact outcome happened in the 2021 election where the Liberals under Trudeau lost the popular vote with 32.6% to the Conservatives 33.7% support, yet won the most seats and managed to form an informal coalition with the NDP which let them govern aggressively like a majority government for 4 years.

Consider just how far the Conservatives have collapsed from their previous 99% odds in January. Analysts now have the odds of the Liberals winning the most seats at 90%, with a full 68% likelihood of a Liberal majority government.

At this point a 4th Liberal term is not only in the cards, but looks nearly guaranteed.

As outlined in January, even if the Conservatives pull out an unlikely win, the proposed changes are likely to be "too little, too late" for a country already a decade into accelerated decline. "Progressives driving the speed limit" is an apt description of current Conservative platform ambitions and leadership team.

A Carney victory would extend the Liberals decade-long reign for another 4 years, and the status quo rate of accelerating decline will likely continue in every category that matters from real estate, to the broader economy, to education, healthcare, crime, the Canadian dollar, and more.

With a week left, a lot could still change. But, whether Liberals or Conservatives win, it appears little will be done to pull Canada out of its current national nose dive.

Of course, there is one party with much bolder policy differences that would set Canada on a different trajectory, but they have no current hope of ever being elected by the easily propagandized "elbows up" Canadian electorate.

Read more