Alex Chiou LinkedIn Posts

A career death trap I've seen so many engineers fall into is that they care too much about looking "strong" instead of actually

One of the easiest ways to have your app die a fiery death is to have no data backups and then suffer an

One of the classic indicators of an incompetent engineering organization is that this can happen.

Data is the lifeblood of any software product. If

There's a big problem in the industry where people see leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and think that in order to

Years of experience is such a silly metric to measure engineer skill. Software is a field where the relationship between time spent and

I get tons of messages asking me for a job at Taro, and I instantly delete 99% of them for a very basic

While Big Tech is largely treating employees worse to drive up their stock price, there is 1 company that isn't following this trend:

As an introvert, it (initially) really hurt as I came to realize that success in the tech industry is less about your technical

Too many engineers mess up when choosing between the following 2 jobs:

Job 1 - Pays $200k and you can meet expectations comfortably working

I'm going to be honest: I'm not nearly talented enough to succeed in a tech world that's entirely remote. 😅

My career was built

The tragic thing about "agile" development is that with 90% of tech companies, it ironically means "We move really slowly with a ton

A lot of engineers weirdly believe that if they grind their way to 1,000 LeetCode problems, a Google hiring manager magically shows up

In-person work is actually awesome. You would just never think it because the tech executives forcing RTO across the industry are some of

Expectation: Let's go. Simple bug fix. In and out. 20 minute adventure.

Reality: 1 month refactor to get the sprawling legacy codebase into a

A classic low-performer engineer trait is they will close a bug after they can't reproduce it, assuming that it doesn't affect a substantial

The classic sign of a weak software engineer is that they need to be told exactly what to work on.

A big reason why

One of the most common ways I have seen software engineers struggle is that they have no idea what to do when they

95%+ of engineers hit a wall going from senior to staff, and a big reason is because they're stuck with the following mentality:

Over my 10 years in Silicon Valley, I have unfortunately seen hundreds of talented engineers get crushed by bad teams.

It doesn't matter how

A classic sign of a mediocre software engineer is they only care about shipping features and completely ignore the performance of their code.

It