Your career is more than just a way to earn a living—it's a foundation for leading the kind of life you want. Shawn joins Mark and Adam to talk about navigating the non-linear course of a career; whether to correct weaknesses vs investing in strengths; salary negotiation; brag documents; and how to create luck. Plus: the Spinal Tap scale for rating software engineers.

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Show notes

Shawn Wang @swyx
Temporal
VBA, Haskell
Fullstack Academy
Two Sigma, Netlify
rough notes on what’s missing in serverless
Build in public, Personal brand
Learn In Public
zero-sum
Elasticsearch, Typesense
cron job
Descript
The Coding Career Handbook
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward”
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Never Split The Difference
a leak in your poker game
brag documents, Julia Evans
recency bias
Adam’s pitch to Berlin startups in 2014
How to Create Luck
luck surface area
closed-form solution
indie games, Braid
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
lifestyle design
Kevin Kwok, P/E ratio, gravitas as a P/E ratio
10x developer
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their coding productivity
“these go to eleven”

Tariff chaos on American shelves, Ukraine minerals deal and Lake Eyre in flood