Matthew Rothenberg

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

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I’ve been doing a lot more recruiting and one trend I’ve noticed is a tendency to talk about using a framework when really describing a process. There are two key differences: Frameworks are structured but open ended and are not prescriptive. Processes are prescriptive sequential steps. It’s important to identify when you want to use one or the other: - Coaching an engineer: Framework - Planning: Probably framework with a tiny bit of process for scheduling - Recovery of a data center: Process A more engineering centric / systems view would be to look at frameworks as the interfaces in engineering and process as the implementation behind the interface. Too often we’re focused on the implementation of the process before we’ve established what the framework is we want to use.

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

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

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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

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The best thing about Learning Loop is that I can share a consequential thought process with other tech CEOs, before it's a fully coherent and ready-to-make decision. It's a place where tech CEOs (and a few CTOs) have each other's attention, and trade each other's attention and resources and mental models to make 10-100x better decisions. There is no other place on the internet than LL right now that I go to when I have a super consequential decision to make for which my conviction is low to medium. If you're a tech CEO, sign up. Link in comments

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

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

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I cancelled our team's subscriptions to Github Copilot & ChatGPT after 10 days with Cursor 🌟 What Sets Cursor Apart Seamless Onboarding: The transition was remarkably smooth, reminiscent of Chrome's early days. Cursor's team clearly understands that muscle memory can be a significant barrier to adoption, and they've crafted an onboarding experience that makes the switch a delight. LLM Flexibility: The ability to switch between different Large Language Models, bring your own, or use the default Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a game-changer. This flexibility proves to be a massive advantage, freeing users from being tied to a single AI model. Multi-file Editing with Composer: This highly anticipated feature delivers 80% of the time, and when it works, it's phenomenal. It explains code changes, shows inline diffs, and allows for selective application of changes. My favorite one - https://lnkd.in/g4aYJbJQ. Contextual Awareness: The ability to @mention files, folders, and invoke web searches has transformed how I approach parallel feature development. It's like having a hyper-aware coding companion. Intelligent Auto-complete The tab auto-complete function is surprisingly powerful, working seamlessly across lines and files. It often feels like it's reading my mind, significantly speeding up coding sessions. Smart Inline Editing Cursor's understanding of the existing codebase shines in its inline code editing capabilities. It's prevented me from creating redundant utility functions by suggesting existing, similar functions—a huge time-saver. 💡 Pro Tip: Embrace smaller, more frequent code iterations. Commit changes often; you never know when you might need to start over on a change set. 🔧 Areas for Improvement Composer occasionally has UI glitches, taking over the entire window or hiding its title bar. Familiarizing yourself with keyboard shortcuts can help navigate these issues. Sometimes there's a disconnect between Composer's suggestions and what it displays. 🤔 Is Cursor Worth the Hype? For me and my team, it's a resounding yes. We're transitioning to Cursor as our primary development environment. I've noticed a significant reduction in my use of standalone AI consoles like Claude or ChatGPT, as Cursor integrates these capabilities seamlessly into the coding workflow. 🔮 Looking Ahead This shift to Cursor is part of our broader strategy to embrace AI-native development practices. I'm excited to share more insights in future posts about how we're leveraging AI to enhance our development processes. I'm curious to hear from other developers: What are your favorite Cursor features or hacks? How has it impacted your workflow? #DeveloperProductivity

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Today we're launching our newest candidate quality-of-life feature on Ropes - IDE themes. There's a universal dislike for the rigid IDEs that assessment co's force on candidates. These code editors are slow, clunky, and missing the styes/shortcuts that developers enjoy. Developers are unique, and we work in unique ways. Ropes offers two new options to let candidates keep their style: (1) First, many employers on Ropes allow candidates to work in their own IDEs entirely. We've developed a way to gather insights like you were in the room, while allowing developers to use their daily environments. (2) For cases that need a browser-based IDE - we're giving the ability for candidates to choose their style/editor setup before the assessment starts - so they're comfortable when it begins. --- My bet is that if we build a great experience for candidates, we'll be building a great platform for evaluators, too. I hope you'll follow along as we pursue that mission - and we need help! We're hiring founding engineers in NYC - if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you.

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When engineers say "no," it reveals flaws in your pitch or opportunity, helping refine your approach Here are a few common mistakes 👉 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 - 1. Not including basics things like work location, comp range, and tech stack 2. Not highlighting what makes the role/company relevant for them 3. Targeting the wrong (or not enough) people 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 4. Jumping right into technical questions before creating buy-in 5. Not pitching your company's vision 6. Not understanding why the candidate is interviewing and what they're looking for in their next role 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀 - 7. Assuming candidates are interested, without understanding their decision framework 8. Not debriefing and addressing concerns after every interview 9. Extending offers without pre-closing Good recruitment involves a lot more than just finding top talent Have a great weekend!

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

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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I had a super hard time finding the right Lead Engineer/technical counterpart for me at my SaaS company. After going down the "hire a technical Co-Founder path" in the very early days of Because and having it not work out (having a co-founder is like a marriage and man it's not easy!)... After hiring older more seasoned technical leaders and having that also not work out... I finally hired the gem that is our Lead Engineer today, Marlin Jayasekera 🙏 He's in his late twenties and he's a better fit for our team than all the older more "seasoned" talent I had hired historically. That doesn't mean our entire team is Gen Z btw (we aren't ageist!) but I learned so many good lessons here I thought were worth sharing for anyone building out their team. In my opinion... 👨‍💻 Your first technical leader (or any early hire for that matter) should be someone who GSD (gets shit done 💩) rather than someone who dreams all day or just wants to "direct resources." 👵 Age doesn't define you. As a 27 year old CEO, I of course embody this value but it's been so cool to see other young leadership at Because quickly earning the respect and love from older peers around them. 🤝It's so important to make sure your early leadership team sees eye to eye with you. The relationship Marlin and I have built is healthy, respectful, and supportive. We know when to challenge each other but we almost always see eye to eye. That's way easier said than done! ✨ I completely trust him to make decisions. We come together once a week for sprint planning (1 week sprints) to set goals together and then I let him and the team go off and execute on those goals. The trust between us is key to let him and the engineering team be successful on their own. What wrong hires have you made that ultimately led you to the right one? ❤️👇

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

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This resonates so much. No, you can't do it all, especially not at a startup. Since COVID I see so many people try to balance unaided parenting with full-time careers, and no, I don't see anyone doing it well. My kids are now 17, 13 and 10 and just now, when they trek to most of their activities on their own, and do their HW on their own, and cook their own meal or snack, we have finally let go of the outside help ( and this is with both parents working from home for last 5 years, outside of peak COVID lockdown, we had always relied on a designated childminder outside of school hours). Yes, working remotely does mean that I have more time and flexibility in my life, it means I can walk my kids to school sometimes, or have breakfast with them instead of rushing to the office, it means I can go and see their midweek concert at school, or be there to grab them from school on a sick day in 10 mins. But it also means that on EVERY day basis we all need clear boundaries, work hours, dedicated spaces that are not continuously invaded by children, or feelings of guilt that our children are unattended. One thing that a lot of the arrangments lack is transparency, being explicit with ourselves, our partners, our managers and colleagues on when we are making trade-offs. What helps is verbalising our plans, putting explicit blocks on calendars for pickups, doctor's appointments and school activities, letting others know when you will have periods of diminished focus due to a school holiday or a sick kid at home, and ruthlessly prioritising. Very few of us can claim to be at Julius Ceasar level of multi-tasking. Flexibility of remote work ≠ combining full time work with full time parenting

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We like writing engineering content Our engineers are at the center of what we build and our accountants experience. We're defining what AI-native looks like for accounting. We like writing engineering content because we want engineers who join us to know how we think about problems. This week, our very own Matthew Duong wrote a piece on Single Sign-On (SSO), breaking down the essentials and actionable tips (link in the comments) For founders, improving the login process and making it easier to access your platform means a simpler experience. For enterprises, it means reducing the number of passwords users need to remember, reducing the risk of security breaches. Shout out to Amer Taleb who joined us recently and took our content game to a new level. We have a lot more coming soon: new product features, employee spotlights, and our view of the AI Accounting space. Happy Friday from everyone at Truewind!

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