Week 8, 2025 - Exponential Potential

Writing proper, longer articles on this blog took a bit of a backseat recently, but yesterday I finished an article summarizing my experience with the Session App, putting the Pomodoro technique in a bigger context.

On the “small sister” newsletter of this blog, I published my approach to skip-level manager meetings, and a new Engineering Manager challenge, this time about the refactoring ideas of an eagerly ambitious new hire. Check out here if you missed it.

📋 What I learned this week

The company reaching $100MM ARR fastest, ever? Not Zoom or Figma. Not even OpenAI. Cursor. Mind-blowing. I thought about what could account for this spectacular result, and these were the lessons for me:

• In the current AI hype, they bet on empowering developers instead of grandiose promises to replace them. As the numbers show, this approach is great for fast market adoption, companies are more likely to adapt their way of working than radically change that.
• This is a huge win for open source. The fact that you can take an established product like Visual Studio Code and create a new business upon it is great for competition, therefore the end user, therefore the companies serving those users. And it’s good for Microsoft too: monitoring these forks, they get to see what works and what fails, not having to do risky experiments and product pivots themselves.
• Instead of developing something from scratch, they took two things that worked well (LLMs and VS Code) and “simply” glued them together.
• The hard part comes now, as others move to this space slower than Cursor. Some interesting analysis here on how sustainable this can be for them.

🤔 Articles that made me think

DEI is an Imperfect Vehicle for Deeply Meaningful Ideas

Enthusiastic defense of diversity and inclusion as the essentials for a genuinely meritocratic environment, where everyone gets a chance to strive, regardless of biases. I especially liked the aspect of inclusive hiring, focusing on building a team that has the best chance to succeed in the future — instead of selecting candidates for their past accomplishments, putting them together, and hoping for the best.

Diversity is not only a moral obligation but also a strategic advantage in building a successful and ethical business, as diverse teams can enhance creativity, problem-solving, and overall company performance. This is not new, but there’s another advantage in the current era: if you can credibly display your true values by having diverse teams, it gives you an advantage in hiring smart people from organizations where DEI was just a trendy employer branding tool.

Ways to stay Tech-Savvy while adding Value as an Engineering Manager

Superpractical advice on what kinds of activities EMs can pursue to stay relevant technically, without being an obstacle to development (both personal development of members of their team, and also the execution of their projects). I still believe EMs have a much bigger potential impact focusing on team execution, support of individuals’ development, and building a high-performing team; but these activities nicely complement that. And I don’t want to ignore the elephant in the room: in the current era where companies more and more require engineering management to be hands-on, following some of this advice is an investment in the future.

This Weird and Frustrating Remote Tech Hiring Landscape

Two LinkedIn posts about tech recruitment, this time from the companies’ point of view. What job-seekers see as a challenge to get recognized in the sea of applicants, is a hiring manager’s nightmare of an impossible amount of candidates to filter. Furthermore, AI use is rampant, and according to Herval’s post, it’s “rendering most conventional interview processes essentially useless.”

I have two takes on this.

First, in this climate, hiring remote can be a huge comparative edge against your competitors. If you have a fully distributed team and can assess the candidates’ abilities and experiences to work in this setup, you have a never-seen chance to recruit the best team to succeed because people who choose to work remotely are pushed out from more and more companies.

Second, interviewing was always a hit-and-miss exercise. Some people have more charisma while others struggle opening up. While this can widely influence how they perform in interviews, depending on the position, these traits can have little correlation with actual job performance. So, instead of arbitrary tests and leetcode, try to simulate the work environment, pair the candidate with someone on your team, and have them work together on a concrete, actual task you have at hand. You will have magnitudes better return on your efforts than trying to rule out AI use during a coding exercise.

Just like Charity Majors said above: hire for the future.

⚛ Something cool: Majorana-1 Announcement

You probably read about the quantum computing breakthrough after 17 years of research at Microsoft. I liked how they approached the announcement itself, considering the difficulty of the topic.

• They chose an amazing analogy: the transistor. This is easy to understand and paints the vision they wanted to portray: a technological boom of exponential advancement starting with a single component.
• They showed something concrete. The “quantum computing in the palm of a human” image is, again, easy to understand, and moves nicely away from the many abstract, theoretical, or otherwise challenging concepts in quantum computing.

So, cool announcement, great PR, well done, Microsoft. You made it all seem like we can soon buy a quantum processor with next-day delivery, skillfully dodging facts like it still needs to be cooled down to near absolute zero to function, and that the device being held in hand on the press kit photo is connected to a machine that we could only get a glimpse of in the explainer video.

That’s it for today, dream big this weekend,

Péter