The last technical interview

The last technical interview
23 minutes by Steve Yegge

Technical interviews have been broken for decades. Interviewers barely agree with each other, and performance in interviews rarely predicts job performance. The best hiring signal comes from actually working with someone on real tasks, not simulating it through whiteboard puzzles. A promising new approach lets candidates do real work for a few days, then walk away with a portable record of that work whether or not they get the job.

How to Get Your Team Back to Building Instead of Fixing Tests
sponsored by BrowserStack

Ask any QA leader where the week goes and it's the same answer: fixing broken tests, not building. AI agents are changing that, fixing failing tests on their own and running only the suites that matter, so engineers get the hours back to build. Worth an hour to see how, with Sireesha Machiraju, a QA director at KPMG Global Services, and Arjun Narayanan, who builds these agents at BrowserStack. Save your spot!

Domain expertise has always been the real moat
4 minutes by Aaron Brethorst

Writing software was never really about writing code. The hard part was building a deep understanding of the domain first. AI agents have broken that link, letting anyone produce software without ever gaining that understanding. This shifts the key question from "Can you build it?" to "Can you tell if it's right?" — and only someone with real domain knowledge can answer that.

The planes aren't coming
7 minutes by Roman Nikolaev

Copying Agile rituals without fixing culture is like building a wooden airplane and waiting for cargo. Real agility needs two things working together: staying close to users and running tight feedback loops inside the team. When those connect, teams stop shipping features into a vacuum and start solving real problems. Process should grow from how your team actually works, not from a borrowed framework.

Make it memorable
5 minutes by Molly Graham

Complex strategies fail not because they're wrong, but because people can't remember them. If goals and values don't fit in someone's head, they won't shape daily decisions. Three goals or values beat fourteen every time. Simplicity isn't dumbing things down — it's what makes ideas actually usable.

How to improve your first principles thinking skills
8 minutes by Phil McKinney

Most decisions rest on assumptions no one has tested. First principles thinking means stripping a problem down to what is actually true, then building solutions from there rather than from habit or convention. A simple process helps: find inherited constraints, separate them from real limits, and reason forward from what remains. One unchecked assumption can quietly drain an entire strategy over years, not just a single quarter.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• The secret to skip-level one-on-ones