Joseph Cho

I CAN’T HIRE SR. DEVS!! If you keep publicly repeating that an intern with an AI tool is equivalent to a senior engineer, do not act surprised when your recruiting pipeline for senior talent collapses. Senior engineers are not applying for a coding job. They are applying for judgment, ownership, and the burden of making hard calls under ambiguity. Your public posture is a signal. It broadcasts how you price experience, how you assign accountability when things break, and how you will treat the people who carry the risk. And it hints at the decisions you will make during interviews, leveling, compensation calibration, and, later, incident reviews when the easy demos fail under real constraints. It is important to remember that hackathons are not real engineering, they are time-boxed improvisations that optimize for a demo, not correctness, maintainability, observability, or long-term operational risk. #AI #Engineering

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💡 AI doesn’t just change how code is written – it changes expectations and outcomes. In the final section of Jellyfish’s AI Adoption Guide, we explore how expectations for engineering leaders are evolving as AI becomes embedded across the SDLC. Because the organizations pulling ahead are treating AI as a transformation, not a tooling upgrade. Inside, you’ll explore: - Why AI adoption is quickly becoming a leadership mandate, not an option - How to balance ambitious goals with realistic expectations - What cultural investments are required to sustain long-term gains - How data can be used to align executives and engineering teams The teams that win in the AI era won’t just have better tools – they’ll have leaders who know how to guide change. Download today: https://lnkd.in/dut_6WpQ

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Unreal requirements are getting out of hand. Just saw a job posting asking for: 5+ years experience Expert-level certifications Established client relationships Proven track record of results For an "entry-level" position. Make it make sense. Dear companies: How does someone get 5 years of experience without getting their first opportunity? You're asking for unicorns and wondering why you can't fill positions. Meanwhile, you're missing out on: The hungry recent grad who'll outwork everyone. The career changer with transferable skills. The coachable candidate who'll become your top performer. Here's what entry-level should actually mean: Willingness to learn Strong work ethic Good communication skills Professional attitude That's it. Stop creating impossible barriers. Every skill you listed can be taught in 90 days. Character and drive can't be taught at all. Hire for potential. Train for performance.

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An unexpected repercussion of vibe coding that I've noticed: it really magnifies the quality of your developer experience. A lot of folks have compared coding AIs to something like an over-eager intern: energetic and prolific, though frequently lacking in experience and judgment. If you want to get the most out of it, ask yourself: how good is the day-1 experience of interns on your codebase? Because vibe coding forces you to replay that day-1 experience over and over. The quality of a coding agent's output improves dramatically if you give it a good fitness function to optimize for. It's one thing to ask, "just spit out code for this." It's quite another to say, "fix this bug, add tests to this file, make sure lint passes and the code compiles and all the tests pass before you talk to me again." It's vastly more successful with the guard rails of typecheckers and compilers and tests telling it whether it's achieved a minimum acceptable quality bar. If your typical testing flow is "fire up a local server and click around a few pages," then suddenly your high-velocity intern is going to struggle. Most agents won't even be able to *do* that; if they can, there's no clear pass/fail signal, so it has to exercise judgment in deciding whether its code works or not, and recall that this particular intern has terrible judgment. Maybe your tests are flaky or don't run locally. That's gonna ruin your intern's day. Maybe you sometimes need to start a docker container before you run your tests. That's an extra step your intern needs to figure out and will sometimes forget. If you want to be able to leverage background agents, then you need to have a simple and fast path to bring a blank new machine into a state where it can run your tests. If any of the steps involve "just figure it out," your agent will definitely fail. And of course, absolutely none of this is new. This has been true of carbon-based interns before silicon-based ones. These matters of codebase quality have always had an impact on your company's productivity. If you don't invest in the developer experience, you just pay a perpetual tax on the labor of your high-value employees. Predictability breeds velocity. And always has.

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I’ve been a SWE for the last 6+ years of my life. If I had to start all over again, I wouldn’t really invest in a course or resources without exploring by myself first. Here are 33 free roadmaps you can use today to start in any field in software engineering & crush it! 1. Backend Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/backend & Frontend Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dfk4-pa9 2. Full Stack Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dRjCeDde 3. JavaScript Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dA4ucqzz 4. TypeScript Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dYdd4te4 5. React Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/react 6. React Native Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dBG72tqu 7. Vue Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/vue 8. Angular Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/angular 9. Node.js Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/nodejs 10. CS Fundamentals Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/d7iDtkm6 11. GraphQL Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/graphql 12. Rust Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/rust 13. Go Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/golang 14. C++ Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/cpp 15. Java Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/java 16. Spring Boot Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dYRPibvp 17. ASP.NET Core Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dfFXSAgZ 18. Software Architect Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dDtNN-ch 19. Software Design and Architecture Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dUHYkH95 20. System Design Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/d3S79YVJ 21. PostgreSQL Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/d8aTRkBD 22. SQL Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/sql 23. MongoDB Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/mongodb 24. AI and Data Scientist Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dv7Tj4ft 25. Python Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/python 26. Prompt Engineering Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/diZ2U4dG 27. DevOps Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/devops 28. Docker Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/docker 29. Kubernetes Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dVGxcMKQ 30. Android Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/android 31. Flutter Roadmap: https://roadmap.sh/flutter 32. UX Design Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dWXzZgqu 33. Design System Roadmap: https://lnkd.in/dasuSJfZ

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There’s a new term making waves in development circles: Vibe Coding. Coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, vibe coding is a new approach to software development that has emerged alongside the rapid rise of AI coding assistants—particularly LLMs. At its core, vibe coding describes a workflow where the developer interacts with an AI agent, often through conversational prompts, and focuses less on the underlying code—and more on articulating the features, behavior, and outcomes they want to achieve. It’s less about syntax, more about intent. And that shift is profound! For Tech Professionals, it means your ability to communicate clearly, think abstractly, and iterate rapidly is becoming just as valuable as your ability to write code line-by-line. For Recruiters, it means we need to rethink what technical fluency looks like. Are we evaluating for adaptability, creative problem-solving, and prompt engineering? Because those are the skills emerging at the center of AI-powered workflows. At Tier4 Group, we’re paying close attention. Because whether you’re building products or building teams, the signal is clear: The future of software development is as much about VIBE as it is about CODE!!! #VibeCoding #AIinTech #FutureOfWork #TechRecruiting  

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Last week, I used Claude to implement error tracking in our codebase. The code worked perfectly. There was just one problem—I had no idea why. As the senior engineer, I couldn't present code to my team that I didn't understand. That's not leadership. That's gambling. So I spent hours reverse-engineering the AI's solution, line by line. What I found: Working code hiding serious flaws. Race conditions. Unnecessary complexity. Solutions that worked on paper but ignored our system's quirks. The irony? By the time I understood Claude's code well enough to fix it, I knew that part of our codebase better than if I'd written it from scratch. Here's what hit me: AI doesn't care about understanding. It pattern-matches until tests pass. But engineers? We debug at 3am. We explain decisions in code review. We own what we ship. The AI saved me from writing boilerplate. But it couldn't save me from the real work—understanding why code works, not just that it works. Now our error tracking is bulletproof. More importantly, I can explain every single line. AI doesn't replace engineering. It just moves the hard part from writing to understanding. And honestly? That might make us better engineers.

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Not passing your first coding interview isn't the end of your career. It's just feedback that helps you prepare better for the next one. This NeetCode Pro member just accepted their SWE offer from SoFi (A large Fintech company). Your interview preparation actually begins way before you get your first Online Assessment. That's why it's so important to get started as early as possible. When you do, here are some tips that will save you hours of frustration 👇 ✅ Just because you don't pass your first interview, does not mean you won't ever pass an interview. It's a matter of reps, and preparing for them the best you can. ✅ Don't get discouraged if you can't solve a problem. Look at the solution, understand it, and come back to the problem later. ✅ Just start, don't overthink it. Start with a beginner-friendly list like NeetCode 250 (link at the end of the post). ✅ Consider learning Python as your programming language <- you can learn the basics in a couple of hours. ✅ Get familiar with the essential data structures. Actually implement them in a blank editor from scratch (available on neetcode.io). ✅ Understand you will never feel "ready". Remember, you only need one "yes". --- Preparing for coding interviews? Check out NeetCode Pro -> neetcode.io/pro

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New audio programming tutorial! In this episode, you’ll learn how to easily connect your plugin’s parameters to your UI controls using everyone's favorite JUCE class -the AudioProcessorValueTreeState. This ensures your knobs and sliders stay perfectly in sync with your DSP code so your plugin works correctly inside your DAW. We will: ✅ Explore and create plugin parameters ✅ Create sliders and knobs and connect them to the plugin parameters ✅ Test our plugin to ensure everything is working properly This episode is perfect if you want to understand how APVTS keeps your audio plugin’s interface and processing code connected and responsive. Dive in here: https://lnkd.in/eWf9nCUp

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“Developers are a resource. They don’t talk to product people.” I overheard that on Seattle’s light rail, and it stuck with me. I make it a point to talk directly with the people who use the software — delivery drivers, paralegals, and others doing the real work. Every conversation saves me hours of coding the wrong thing. When developers are treated as “resources,” they’re cut off from the feedback that makes their work valuable. Talking to users isn’t a luxury — it’s how you build the right thing faster. You don’t need a big product team or AI tools for that. Just curiosity and a conversation.

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The fastest growing state for software engineer salary submissions is Florida with a median income of $125k. (Levels.fyi, EOY report). I wouldn’t have guessed Florida. I'm always a little surprised when I come across a profile or resume that has FL in the address. But having spent a lot of time there, here’s why it makes sense: - There's no state income tax, which for high earners can be a big deal - You can drive from rural farming towns to the beach in just a couple hours - There's no snow - The gulf seafood is hard to beat What’s interesting isn’t that it's Florida, it’s the bigger picture trend. More and more people don't want to live in tech hubs, they're optimizing for lifestyle + income + flexibility. Remote work didn’t just change where people work. It changed what they’re willing to tolerate to keep working. If you could keep your current salary and pick any state to live in, where would you choose?

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Hey everyone! Super excited to share something brand new and really valuable for anyone prepping for tech interviews. I just dropped Part 1 of my first-ever System Design mock interview! 🚀 In this video, we dive into designing Yelp's Review System, focusing on the core Functional Requirements. You'll get a candid look at how a candidate tackles a challenging interview round and the thought process involved. If you're looking for real-world prep and insights into what to expect, this one's definitely for you! Check it out here: [https://lnkd.in/d-47j3PP] #systemdesign #mockinterview #softwareengineering #interviewprep #faang #techcareers #careerdevelopment #beyondcodewithibiniyi #newvideo #learnwithme

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Coming off of the NYC AI Hackathon we have some incredible projects that can change the way our gov agencies work. One of my favorites was the NYC OTI team (Central IT overarching 50+ agencies) building an agent that interfaces with NYC OpenData to help users find and interact with data that they're looking for from thousands of datasets.   We now have an out of the box way to build exactly that for any customers that can leverage Microsoft Fabric with the new Fabric MCP. It can be THAT layer to expose data to agents (Frontier or Copilot) to enable our customers.    Think of MCP like a USB‑C port for AI — an open, standardized interface that replaces fragmented connectors with a single protocol. https://lnkd.in/eSHEfKJW

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