Career

The AI-era career question#

The recurring anxiety-and-opportunity thread: what survives when agents write the code.

• “Vibe coding won’t save your career” — the framing you saved with System Design 101: whoever wants to control AI must understand engineering.
• Simon Willison: hoard things you know how to do — career advice that doubles as agentic-engineering advice.
• GitHub: hard and soft skills for developers coding in the age of AI — AI tools need a pilot in control.
• Are AI tools stopping early-career devs from learning — or accelerating them? — the honest “data supports both” paper.
• DORA: how developers ascribe value to their work, and how AI amplifies it.
• “AI took my friend’s job — but tripled his salary 6 months later” — the optimistic case, clickbait wrapper included.
• Stratechery’s interview with Google Cloud’s CEO on the agentic moment and Eric Schmidt on mapping AI’s rapid advance — the view from the top of the industry you’re architecting for.

The AI/ML interview track#

Where the tag has gone since 2025 — prep material for the role you’re moving into, not the one you’re leaving.

• Alisa’s book of LLMs and her math notes — “She’s joining OpenAI and made her interview prep notes complete free. Absolute legend.”
• The AI/ML interview study booklet — from someone fresh out of the gauntlet; connects fundamentals to PPO and constrained inference.
• The AI Engineer’s System Design Interview Guide and the AI Harness Engineering interview handbook — the two PDFs to actually work through.
• 100+ LLM interview questions · 30+ LLM interview questions, answered · the 50 most popular deep-learning interview questions.
• Sierra’s AI-native engineering interview — how a frontier company now interviews when coding agents are the default; know this format before you sit in it.

The engineering interview canon#

The evergreen shelf — still relevant because architect interviews still start with design rounds.

• the Tech Interview Handbook and coding-interview-university — the two big classics.
• awesome-system-design-resources · awesome-low-level-design · LLD interview prep notes — the design-round trio.
• tech-interview topics and techniques, with known company questions.
• Your DevOps hedge: the free DevOps/SRE interview Q&A hub and container networking from scratch, interactively — worth keeping sharp; it’s your differentiator in AI-infrastructure conversations.
• Satnam Singh re-reading his own whiteboard-interview post before interview #2 — even veterans prep.

AI as your interview coach#

A whole sub-genre of your saves: the machine on both sides of the table.

• Interview Coach on Microsoft Agent Framework — upload résumé + JD, practice behavioral and technical rounds; doubly useful for you as an agent-architecture reference on Azure.
• Papercode mock interviews · Thita’s AI mock interview · Educative’s AI mock interviewer — the practice-loop tools.
• GenAI Career Assistant — multi-agent (LangGraph) job search, cover letters, company research; the pattern is as interesting as the product.

Roadmaps for the transition#

• “There and back again: an AI career journey” — “you’re never too old to chase your childhood dreams”; mentors, continuous learning, honest self-assessment.
• the 8-week ML, MLOps & Career Accelerator — “most ML courses stop at the notebook; this one doesn’t.” Squarely your gap.
• how much Python is enough to start with AI and Google’s Intro to Generative AI path — the on-ramps.
• the SRE roadmap 2026 and the state of Kubernetes jobs — the market you’re leaving, quantified: platform engineering up, SRE down, ML-on-Kubernetes up 180%. The data says your direction is right.
• prompt engineer: skills, roadmap, salary — a 2024 time capsule of a role that got absorbed into everything else.
• Jason Haley on pivoting an Azure career toward GenAI — someone walking your exact path, one podcast episode at a time.

Résumé, brand & visibility#

• Harvard’s free résumé and cover-letter templates and HBR: how to write a résumé that stands out — skip the skills section at the end; convince them earlier.
• itsfolio — résumé to portfolio site in under a minute and an agentic workflow that generates structured CVs, line by line.
• the career game you didn’t know you were playing — “thinking visibility” (showing how you approach problems) is the rarest and most valuable kind. This is the argument for your public writing.
• careers are about collecting and connecting dots.

Evergreen wisdom & the senior track#

The advice that doesn’t expire — and increasingly, the altitude you’re interviewing at.

• Kasia Trapszo: technical excellence alone isn’t enough — the senior-IC toolkit: influence without authority. The architect-track talk in this collection.
• when, why, and how to stop coding as your day job and Dropbox’s engineering career framework — what the next levels actually expect.
• Marc Andreessen: “the first rule of career planning: do not plan your career” and Andrew Chen: the next next job — decide two moves ahead, but stay opportunistic.
• Terry Tao: work hard and “does one have to be a genius?” — “so many gold advice there,” per your own note.
• The HBR shelf: a five-step framework for career decisions · is your career heading in the right direction? · how to keep learning when you feel fried · 38 smart questions to ask in a job interview.
• painful mistakes are the key to career success — but fail safely.

All links on this topic#