Hiring Only Senior Engineers Is Killing Companies  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Hiring Only Senior Engineers Is Killing Companies - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3962aa30-33a9-44b5-afca-a8afcb0469b8 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Practical Steps To Hire And Grow Juniors** - Filter for mindset and use home assignments and AI/no-AI tests when hiring juniors. - After hiring, invest in mentoring, be patient, and measure progress the right way. Transcript: Jerod Santo Hiring only senior engineers is killing companies. In the last three months, Andrew Churchill interviewed 134 engineers. His main takeaway? There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers that most companies won't even consider. In this post, Andrew outlines why he loves working with juniors, fresh energy, unshackled by prior experience, loyalty, and more. How to hire the right juniors, filter for mindset, home assignments, test with and without AI, etc. And how to make it work after the hire, invest in mentoring, be patient, measure right, etc. His call to action, quote, investing your time in passionate junior developers will pay off in the long run. ([Time 0:00:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57f83e91-0f88-4241-9675-eee4a905cf01)) - **DevTools MCP Bridges AI And Real Browsers** - Chrome DevTools MCP connects AI agents to a real browser for autonomous debugging and automation. - Models can now run pages, interact with the DOM/CSS, capture metrics, and fix issues based on real feedback. Transcript: Jerod Santo Introducing Chrome DevTools MCP. Now in public preview, Chrome's DevTools now connects AI agents like Cursor, CloudCode, and Gemini CLI to its automation and debugging capabilities. The end result? Quote, your AI helper can not only write code, but actually run it in a real browser, inspect what's happening, and even fix issues based on real feedback from the page. End quote. Chrome DevTools MCP acts as a bridge between an AI model and a real Chrome browser instance, which means that your model can now open pages, click buttons, read the DOM slash CSS, capture Performance metrics, read console logs, and much more. All autonomously as if a human developer were using Chrome DevTools. ([Time 0:01:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d5fc13d-d037-49ec-a1f6-56939bc15531)) - **GitHub's Roadmap To Secure NPM** - GitHub plans to change NPM auth and publishing to prevent token abuse and malware spread. - Proposed measures include local publishing with 2FA, short-lived granular tokens, and trusted publishing. Transcript: Jerod Santo GitHub's plan for a more secure NPM supply chain. NPM has been getting hammered by attackers recently, so much so that I've struggled to track and contextualize all the events, so we're having our friend Farasa Bukadijay from Socket Security on the show Friday to help make sense of it all. GitHub, as the owners and hosts of NPM, are at the center of the platform. Here's what they're doing about it. Quote, to address token abuse and self-replicating malware, we will be changing authentication and publishing options in the near future to only include one, local publishing with Required two-factor auth, two, granular tokens, which will have a limited lifetime of seven days, and three, trusted publishing. Links to the details of all three of those things are in the show notes. In addition to these changes, GitHub provides a list of actions that NPM maintainers can take today to strengthen their package security. ([Time 0:02:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/968a5a46-c7a0-46a2-b546-8802e705ded1)) - **Dayflow: A Private Timeline From Your Screen** - Jerry Liu built Dayflow to record the screen and generate an AI-analyzed timeline of activities. - He open-sourced it under MIT and emphasized privacy and user control. Transcript: Jerod Santo Generate a timeline of your day automatically. Quote, Dayflow is a native macOS app that records your screen at one frame per second, analyzes it every 15 minutes with AI, and generates a timeline of your activities with summaries. End quote. Dayflow's creator, Jerry Liu, built it because he realized that his calendar isn't the source of truth of how he actually spends his time. His screen is, quote, I wanted a calm, trustworthy timeline that let me see my workday without turning into yet another dashboard I had to maintain, end quote. Thankfully, Jerry had privacy and data ownership in mind from the very start, so it gives you total control. Quote, it's MIT licensed and fully open source because anything that watches your screen all day should be completely transparent about what it does with that info. ([Time 0:03:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e3551295-6b96-4e21-b0bd-6a30648520cf)) - **Taste Means Appropriate Engineering Values** - Taste in software is adopting engineering values that fit the current project rather than personal preference. - Taste differs from scale and reflects which problems bother you enough to think about them off-work. Transcript: Jerod Santo What is good taste in software engineering? I've written often about taste as a large differentiator between man and machine, but because of its subjective nature, taste isn't the easiest thing to nail down. That is especially true in the context of software engineering, Sean Godecki gave it a try. Quote, Here are some indicators of software taste. One, what kind of code looks good to you? What kind of code looks ugly? Two, which design decisions you feel really good about and which ones are just okay? Three, which software problems really bother you to the point where you're worrying about them outside of work? Which problems can you just brush off? I think taste is the ability to adopt the set of engineering values that fit your current project, end quote. Sean goes on to explain why taste is different from scale, what engineering taste actually is, and why it's too easy, especially for immature engineers, to know what you like, but to Mistake that for a principled engineering position. ([Time 0:04:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af426318-058f-44f1-bfd0-c8e38663d0eb))