Dao L.

If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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You can feel the anxiety in the tech hiring market, but it's a useful reminder that big offers are still being landed daily. A Hello Interview user just landed a $1M TC offer from Stripe 🤯 They were kind enough to share tons of great lessons and advice to other candidates here: https://lnkd.in/g4uMJKme

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Trump Orders 100x H-1B Fee Hike This morning, Trump signed an executive order raising the cost of an H-1B visa from $1,000 to $100,000. The scale of impact is massive - in FY2024, ~400k H-1B petitions were approved, and 71% were for India-born professionals. The largest impact will be felt in tech, where ~66% of workers are foreign-born. If this order survives its legal tests, foreign nationals entering the job market - and many due for renewals - will be forced to consider a shift back to India. This could create one of the most acute talent shortages in recent U.S. tech history and for many companies, an India office would become the logical next step.

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H-1B Visa Charges: Protecting Jobs or Killing Competitiveness? The recent hike in H-1B filing costs has thrown both corporate recruitment teams and staff augmentation firms into uncharted waters. While some hail it as a win for local talent, others warn it could cripple industries like semiconductors, AI, and advanced software that already face severe skill shortages. For corporate TA teams, the dilemma is clear: 🔸Do you absorb the higher costs to secure critical skills? 🔸Or risk delaying projects while trying to fill gaps locally? For staffing firms, the challenge bites harder: 🔸Bill rate pressures are real - how do you sell higher costs to clients? 🔸Do you double-down on nearshore/offshore delivery? 🔸Or retreat from niche, high-skill areas where local pipelines simply don’t exist? The bigger question: ❓Are we safeguarding local talent - or pushing innovation and global competitiveness further away from US soil by making access to top global talent more expensive? is this really our loss or the US's in long run? Recruitment leaders & staffing partners - what’s your take? Will this shift really fuel local hiring and upskilling, or is it just a short-term patch that risks long-term damage? #H1B #Trump #TrumpCard #Recruitment #Staffing

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✂️ Amazon's 16K layoffs is hitting mostly technical roles 👀 -- from software developers and product managers to directors and data engineers. Here’s the jobs that Amazon is cutting as part of its 16,000 corporate workforce reduction: https://lnkd.in/g4ifq7Hs

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Hot take: Startups want Big Tech candidates... but only AFTER another startup has "de-risked" them first 🙃 I'm seeing this pattern more and more and believe it's short sided. Start-ups LOVE when a candidate starts their career at Google/Meta/Amazon/Netflix - it's a strong signal of excellence. But they don't want to be the ones to bet on them making the jump to startup land. Instead, they want someone who did FAANG → startup for 2-3 years → NOW they're interested. Translation: "We love the credibility, but we want another start-up to test them first." Meanwhile, the best startups with strong hiring processes? They're scooping up these FAANG candidates directly, like some of our clients 🙂. Recruiters/founders - are you seeing this too? Has anyone been on the receiving end of this?

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A lot of posts recently talking about the shift away from the physical act of writing code/syntax going around so I’ll weigh in with my personal experience. 2025 was a watershed moment for LLMs. With Claude Code it was finally “smart” enough for mass adoption. It now writes code better than most “programmers”. But here’s the important distinction. Engineering and Programming are not the same. As engineering leadership I see it every day. People who think writing code is their job, not requirment gathering, planning, designing and architecting systems, validating correctness, problem solving. People who have these skills, can make effective use of Claude. These are the successful early adopters and 10x engineers right now. Now here’s what that means for me personally. After a long time, I am enjoying being a software engineer again. There was a time I was deeply married to writing code (it was kind of the therapeutic part of software development for me). But the shift into people management, becoming a father, and other life commitments has slowly erroded any time I have to take on projects that require hours or continuous focus. Writing code became the moat around me inventing. That is no longer the case. LLMs have enabled me to enjoy software development again. I can work in more bite sized chunks that fit into my day. I can engineer solutions in idle time. I can invest in custom tooling quickly that would have been month long side quests before. I can dip into other development domains (backend, browser extensions, languages) that previously would have take months of learning to become effective. This is what it has meant to me, do you have any similar experiences?

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