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Business Insider
24-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
CTO says companies are missing out by not writing internal documents that AI can easily read
Your company's database of screen-recorded webinars could be on its way out. Laura Tacho, CTO of developer productivity platform DX, says companies should at least consider rewriting their documents to make them more legible for AI. Corporate documentation is often a messy haze of memos, slide decks, and video trainings. In the age of AI, Tacho told Business Insider that training materials should be in text form, so that they may easily be read by a large language model. Text-based procedures are even more important for developers, who can immediately feed their documentation to an AI code editor like Cursor. Tacho said she thinks that documents can benefit both humans and LLMs. Speaking about the topic on the "Pragmatic Engineer" podcast, she said that "AI-first" companies were overhauling their internal documentation for LLM consumption. "That's been the biggest way that I've seen companies think about or already start trying to change the way that they architect their services," Tacho told podcast host Gergely Orosz. In a follow-up interview with BI, Tacho elaborated on her policy for documentation. Well-organized, text-based procedures don't just help an LLM or a human worker, she said. The "venn diagram is a circle," she said. "Documentation is a huge point of friction for nearly every organization," Tacho told BI. "There's a lot of efficiency gain to be had when documentation is more fit for purpose. This is an area where what's good for the human is also good for the LLM." Human-first documentation often relies on "visual cues" and screenshots, which the AI can find incomprehensible, Tacho said. She recommended that all photos have text descriptions alongside them. Social media sites often have alternative texts and captioning to make their services less exclusively visual. Tacho said that corporate document-makers can "take a note from the world of web accessibility." "It is so important for people who are not using their eyes to access the screen," she said. She said other tasks, like centralizing documents, help an LLM's ease of access and also make the human worker's life easier. Tacho used the developer term, saying that companies should "defrag" their policies. "Documentation is made piecemeal, a little here, a little there," she said. "You have to hop between different pages in order to put together the complete instruction of what you're supposed to do." Tacho also listed some technical elements of documentation, like making sure the HTML markup is semantic, which can help ensure LLM readability. Some companies have already begun the change. In May, Vercel's former VP of Developer Experience Lee Robinson posted about the company's documentation on X. "We're starting to add cURL commands to Vercel's documentation wherever we previously said 'click,'" Robinson wrote. "In the future, maybe computer using agents could log in and perform actions for you, but this feels like a nice incremental step for the LLMs." Tacho expects that more companies will join Vercel in making their documents easily legible to AI. She found that engineers were wasting over 30 minutes a week looking for information they couldn't find in documentation. AI code editors should automate those problems — if the LLM can read the documents properly. "When you think about how much time is being wasted due to poor documentation, it becomes actually a very critical business problem," she said.
Business Insider
13-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Former Amazon principal engineer says he spent '1-4 hours' reading daily — and it's part of the company's 'secret sauce'
When Steve Huynh was a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings began with a "study hall." Amazon had a "reading culture" even among engineers, Huynh recently told the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, speaking of his time at the tech giant. Employees frequently drafted six-page memos, he said, which they shared with the company to update progress and demonstrate new projects. "I spent on the order of like 1-4 hours every day reading while I was a principal engineer," Huynh said. "What an amazing culture that I think that almost every other company should replicate if they could." Huynh, who said the company's embrace of writing and reading the 6-page memos was part of its "secret sauce," said Amazon employees' writing was often constrained to the format during his tenure at the company, whether it was a business strategy, system design, or press release. Huynh started at Amazon in 2006, only a few years after the company turned its first profit and while Jeff Bezos was at the helm. Bezos famously instilled this culture of memo-writing from the top down. Bezos insisted on dense, direct memos in 10-point font. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote that "we don't do PowerPoint," instead opting for these six-pagers. "Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely," he wrote. Before meetings, Amazon employees read these memos together. On the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, Bezos explained why he didn't ask employees to read the memos in advance. "The problem is people don't have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo, or maybe not read it at all," Bezos said. "They're also bluffing like they're in college, having pretended to do the reading." Andy Jassy, Bezos' successor and Amazon's current CEO, has worked at the company since 1997. When first pitching what would become Amazon Web Services, Jassy described writing his own memo. "I remember this six-page narrative, we called it a vision doc. We asked for 57 people, which felt so ballsy at the time. I was so nervous, I wrote 30 drafts of this paper, and Jeff didn't blink," Jassy said in a 2017 talk to the University of Washington. Jassy has continued the culture of memo-writing under his own leadership. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, Jassy wrote that a mere six-page allotment made the memos "much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right 'why' questions." "I got really really good at just reading these documents to get up to speed," Huynh said on the podcast, explaining that reading enough six-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format. Huynh no longer works at Amazon. He left to pursue YouTube content creation full-time, as he told BI in 2024. But Huynh still reveres the company's reading culture — even if he acknowledges it may not be easily reproducible. "The difficulty would be, you actually have to be disciplined and principled," Huynh said. His interviewer, Gergely Orosz, argued it could only be done from the top down. Huynh agreed.
Business Insider
23-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
GitHub's CEO on why it's important for companies to keep hiring junior engineers
In the age of AI coding, GitHub's CEO says he's still a believer that junior engineers are of great value to tech companies. Just don't be surprised if you're asked to showcase your prompt-engineering skills in a job interview. Thomas Dohmke, who has been CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub since 2021, talked in a recent interview with " The Pragmatic Engineer" about what early-career software developers bring to the table. "It's lovely to see that those folks that bring fresh ideas, a great amount of energy, the latest learnings from college and university, and often a different, diverse background into the company," Dohmke said. The GitHub CEO has talked before about how the job of the software engineer is evolving as AI tools become more prolific in the workplace, as well as the limits of "vibe-coding." Dohmke said that GitHub intends to have "a nice balance" of early-career and senior engineers, thanks to the combination of fresh perspectives and tested experience that an age-diverse staff can afford. "The folks that are younger in career bring a new perspective to the team and say, here, 'Why don't we try this?' or, 'I want to incubate this idea,'" he said. "And so we are excited about having this kind of like both junior and senior population in the company." The CEO said that some of the skills the company is looking to cultivate now include a working knowledge of AI. "Of course, we take people to an interview loop, and I think increasingly we're thinking about how do we leverage AI within the interview loop," he said. "There's nothing wrong about that from my perspective. In fact, I would say if you want to get a job in a tech company very soon, you're going to be asked to show your prompting skills, your co-pilot skills, if you will." Younger programmers in particular, he added, more readily adopt the technology. "I think, actually, folks that go to high school now, or to college, or even kids earlier in their education, they get to use AI much faster, Dohmke said. "They get it because they are taking this with an open mind. They don't have the, 'This is how we've always done it.'" Dohmke said he expects AI to continue to be part of the larger engineering toolkit, as ultimately what matters is that the job gets done, instead of how it gets done. "Because the goal of the future engineer is no longer to run it all from scratch," he said. "And the goal is to combine their prompting skills and agent, open source libraries, into getting that problem solved much faster than they could have two or three years ago." Even in a world where AI agents do become more "autonomous," that doesn't mean engineering jobs will disappear in their entirety, the GitHub CEO said. The overarching skills that make up the occupation have more to do with modes of thinking, he added, rather than knowledge of specific languages. "You've got to have engineering skills. You've got to have developed craft," he said. "You need senior people that know how to build large-scale systems. You need people that take large complex problems, break them down into smaller problems." Engineers will continue to need to be familiar with coding, he said, though actually producing it may not always make up the brunt of the job. "That's what engineering is all about," Dohmke said. "The coding skill will be part of that engineering skill set, but ultimately engineering means — I can build a really large complex system and then evolve that into even larger system next week, in today's world."
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A software engineer's success often depends on their relationship with their manager, says ex-Amazon technical director
An engineer's success is often largely determined by their manager, Dave Anderson said. The former Amazon engineering director said relationships with teammates and supervisors are crucial. On the "Pragmatic Engineer" podcast, he said underestimating a supervisor's influence is a mistake. A large part of an engineer's success is often tied to how they navigate their relationship with their manager, a former Amazon engineering director, Dave Anderson, said. "I would actually say, as a manager, even, like 50% of that performance, frequently, is your relationship with your manager and your team. How will you fit in with the team, with your peers, with your manager?" he said on a recent episode of "The Pragmatic Engineer," a podcast. Underestimating your supervisor's influence can be particularly dangerous at a company like Amazon, he added. As can be the case at other companies, a manager's decisions can shape the future of their direct report, from determining how much they're compensated to how far up the career ladder they climb. The influence a manager can have over an engineer's trajectory isn't something to shrug off, Anderson said. "I think the mistake that people will sometimes make is like, 'My manager doesn't influence my job that much because I can work independently,' or, you know, 'I don't need to figure this out with my manager because I can, you know, work with my peers, or I have this great engineer on my team I can work with,'" Anderson said. But if your manager doesn't like you, he added, you're "never ever" going to be able to snag a promotion. It's also important to remember that managers are often asked to point out a number of team members "who are not doing great," Anderson said. If you are, when compared with other members of your team, the "least effective," he added, you could be on the chopping block. "If you look around the room and you're thinking, 'Yep, I'm the worst one here' — that's not a great situation to ever be in. It's just never safe," Anderson said. "And at Amazon, it's definitely not safe. Some other companies where they just might do layoffs once every four years, you might be safe for quite a while. But Amazon has this sort of regular cycle." In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, said Anderson's experiences were his alone. "These claims reflect the opinion of one individual who worked at Amazon years ago. They're not based in fact, and aren't indicative of what it was like to work here then or what it's like today," Callahan said. "We're proud to be one of the most sought-after employers in the world and to have ranked in the top three in LinkedIn's Top Companies for eight years running." Anderson said that if an engineer's relationship with their manager isn't good, there can be an escape hatch of sorts: moving teams before being managed out. "So many times I've had someone who was either doing amazing on one team, they moved to the next team, and they're, like, actually not doing well at all, or someone who was not doing well escapes to another team before they get fired — and they do well," he said. If you start to hear rumblings from further up the chain of command, Anderson thinks it could be in your best interest to make a change, and swiftly. "This is, like, my sneaky recommendation for anyone is like — if you start to hear performance feedback whatsoever from your management chain, if you have any opportunity at all, get off your team fast as possible," he said. In a follow-up email, Anderson told BI that in a "great number of situations," he'd seen success prove itself to be at least partially dependent on team fit. "I've seen poor performers turn into great performers, and great performers turn into poor performers — and the only factor was them switching teams," he said. "In particular, switching teams to a place where they didn't know their manager. I don't think people fundamentally changed — so the only reasonable conclusion is that team fit (in particular, their relationship with their manager) is the deciding factor." Anderson doesn't suggest disavowing any negative feedback you receive and bailing out into a different section of the company on a whim. It depends, he said, on the relationship you've formed with your supervisor and whether you have faith in their advice. "Now, if you trust your manager, they might be actually just giving you honest feedback, which you'd like to be able to receive," he said. "But for the most part, if you've been working for someone for three years and suddenly they start giving you performance feedback, that's a really bad sign." Anderson added: "If you run for the hills fast enough, it's possible you'll get away before they flag you in the system as non-transferable." Read the original article on Business Insider
