Develop Yourself

Most engineers have read a lot about AI and built almost nothing with it. That is not a character flaw. It is the default.

Stanford's AI Index puts numbers on the gap: a tiny fraction of households actually pay for AI tools, while nearly every company claims to be using it. Somebody is lying, and it is not the people quietly getting on with their jobs.

This episode is about closing that gap. Two levels of leverage, both available to you without permission from anyone.

Level one is team strategy. Skills, plugins, and shared config so your team stops solving the same problem fifteen different ways.

Level two is connecting these tools to things that actually matter at your company. Your data, your documentation, your internal systems, with a human still in the loop where it counts.

Plus why running a hackathon is the fastest way to find the problem worth solving, and what happened when I did it.

Want to build this stuff instead of reading about it? Parsity's AI engineering program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

Want to actually build agents and RAG systems like the ones I mention in this episode? That's exactly what we do inside Parsity's AI engineering program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

I've been coding for nearly 12 years, I own and operate a coding bootcamp, and I've done over 1,000 free phone calls with people trying to break into tech. So this is the harsh advice I'd give you if you were my own kid. The stuff I can't really say on LinkedIn without getting flamed by people who've never worked a day in tech.

The market for juniors is rough right now. That part is true. But most people trying to break in are doing the exact same thing as everyone else: building the same to-do app, obsessing over green dots on their GitHub, slapping "passionate junior developer" on their resume, and smashing LinkedIn easy-apply 1,000 times. That's your competition. And it's beatable.

In this episode:

• Why "look junior, act passionate, wait for someone to take a chance on you" is a losing strategy
• How to build real, verifiable experience when you have none (start an LLC, get actual users, stop building toy apps)
• The one skill that actually matters now, and why "I use Claude" is table stakes, not a differentiator
• Why agents and RAG are still wide open. Even senior and staff engineers mostly aren't doing this yet
• Where the jobs actually are (small businesses and startups are hiring, big tech is slashing) and how to find them off LinkedIn
• The LinkedIn search-ranking trick most people ignore
• Why your timeline might take 2, 3, even 4 years, and why the ROI math still makes it worth it
• Stop outsourcing your brain to ChatGPT before you've even built the skill

Take it all with a grain of salt. It's one opinion. But I'll never tell you to do something I haven't done myself or seen work firsthand.

Free resources I mention:

Parsity AI Engineering Program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

• Free 5-Day AI Advisory Board course (build agents + RAG hands-on): https://www.parsity.io/5-day-ai-advisory-board
• Free RAG project (better than most paid ones): https://www.parsity.io/ai-with-rag
• The agent project I mention: https://www.parsity.io/ai-agent
• Gusto Small Business Jobs Report (hundreds of thousands of net new small-business jobs this year): https://gusto.com/resources/gusto-insights/smb-jobs-report-june-2026
• My video on the entry-level hiring collapse, "Entry-level jobs didn't disappear. They moved.

Got a question or something you want me to cover? Drop it in the comments. I get tons on YouTube but almost none on Spotify, and this is where the hardcore Develop Yourself crew lives. Comment away, it genuinely helps the show get found.

Learn to build AI systems that companies actually pay for: RAG, agents, production LLM apps. Not YouTube tutorial toys. Real projects with a dedicated mentor who's shipped this stuff at scale. Spots are capped at 10 per cohort: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

Who should software engineers marry? Not another software engineer, apparently.

Samir Ranjan is the CTO and Director of Data Science at Catenate, where he built a patented platform that measures soft skills and personality to predict career outcomes. Translation: he has receipts on what actually gets engineers hired, promoted, and passed over.

We get into:

• The 2 traits that separate good engineers from average ones (spoiler: it's not knowing every tool)
• Why "learning ability" beats technical knowledge in the AI era
• The age group struggling most with AI adoption (it's not who you think)
• What the data really says about junior devs getting replaced
• The new job roles coming by 2027: AI orchestrators and agent managers
• Why engineers should learn an art form (seriously)
• His weirdly practical advice for introverts: dress up and go to Target
• Who software engineers should actually marry

Samir went from mining engineering a thousand feet underground to building AI career tools. If you're trying to make sense of a chaotic job market, this one's full of stuff you can actually use.

Connect with Samir on LinkedIn and check out Catenate.

Connect with me:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjenney
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brianjenney

Ready to build production AI skills? Check out the Parsity AI Engineering program: https://parsity.io/parsityhome

Too many people think getting to senior engineer means grinding LeetCode and memorizing every design pattern known to man.

Wrong.

I went from bootcamp grad in my thirties to senior engineer to engineering manager, and the thing that got me promoted had almost nothing to do with writing better code.

In this episode I break down what senior engineers actually do differently: how they think about problems, why they say no more than they say yes, and the uncomfortable truth that your communication skills matter more than your ability to reverse a linked list.

If you've been stuck at mid-level wondering what the secret handshake is, this one's for you. Spoiler: there's no handshake. Just a mindset shift most developers never make.

What you'll hear:

• Why "better coder" is the wrong goal entirely
• The skill that actually separates seniors from everyone else
• How to get senior-level trust before you have the title
• What I screwed up on my own path (so you don't have to)

Connect with me:

• Parsity AI Engineering: https://parsity.io/ai-dev
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brianjenney

Want to become an AI engineer? Learn the exact skills companies are hiring for at Parsity: parsity.io/ai-dev

Everyone's screaming that AI is coming for frontend developers. Mauro Accorinti thinks most of them are missing the point.

In this episode I sit down with Mauro, the writer behind Exceptional Frontend, to talk about why "frontend" is way more defensible than the doomers want you to believe.

Spoiler: it was never just about centering a div.

We get into:

Why "irreplaceable" is a skill, not a job title. AI can spit out components all day. It still can't translate messy business problems into something a real human wants to use. That gap is where your value lives.

The business-impact thing nobody teaches you. Mauro's whole thing is helping devs connect their technical work to outcomes the company actually cares about. Turns out "I shipped a feature" and "I moved the number that pays everyone's salary" are very different sentences.

Is frontend actually dying, or is mediocre frontend dying? (Hint.)

How to think about your career when the AI overlord keeps moving the goalposts. Practical stuff, not vibes.

If you write code for a living and you've felt that low-grade panic every time a new model drops, this one's for you.

Check out Mauro's newsletter: exceptionalfrontend.substack.com

Build AI systems at Parsity.

I joined a fast-paced AI startup in early 2025 where the non-technical CEOs pushed an “AI-first” mandate—“twice as much in half the time with less people” and it turned into vibe-coding chaos.

I'm still using AI to write 90% of my code with a very different approach on my new team.

If you're feeling the pressure to "move faster" with AI, then this one's for you.

Build AI systems. Build leverage in your career. Apply for Parsity's AI Engineer Cohort

Stability is a myth, and chasing it might be the riskiest thing you do in your whole career. Here's how to use risk on purpose instead.

Everyone says find a stable job and hold on tight. That's the worst advice in tech, and I've got the receipts.

The "safe" path is a trap. Here's how taking the right risks (job hopping, betting on AI early, volunteering for stuff you can't do yet) actually builds real security.

Connect with Salil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salil-monga/

If you're trying to make the jump into AI engineering, join Parsity: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

Salil Monga had a 4.0 GPA, applied to over 1,000 jobs, and landed three interviews. Not one of the jobs he actually got came from those applications.

I sat down with Salil, now CTO of Cupe Connect, to dig into how you actually get hired in a difficult market: warm connections over cold applications, fundamentals over chasing the "golden stack," and why he walked into an interview thinking JavaScript was Java and still walked out with the offer.

What we get into:

- The 1,000-applications, 3-interviews reality, and why the applications were the wrong game to begin with

- How every job he landed came from a professor or a peer, not a job board

- Getting emotionally wrecked by applications, and the strategic mindset that fixes it

- Using AI to actually learn instead of copy-pasting answers, and how he taught students to do the same

- Why there's no golden stack, and how he shipped an iOS app having never built one before

- Why fundamentals and problem-solving beat the framework of the month

- How LeetCode quietly came back as a hiring filter, and how to treat it like one instead of hating it

- Treating interviews as a game of chance you can tilt in your favor with rapport

- Cube Connect: his no-algorithm, 50-meter-radius iOS app built to get people talking in real life again

Salil is one of the more generous guests I've had on. He literally offered to review resumes and talk shop with anyone who reaches out, so go take him up on it.

A few spots left for Parsity's AI Engineer Cohort. Apply here

I told candidates they could use Claude, Cursor, anything they wanted in their AI engineering interview. Half of them still cheated. Badly.

I break down what cheating looked like and why you should re-consider it if you're thinking about it... even if you don't have any moral qualms against it 😅

Build AI engineering skills at Parsity. Spots filling fast.

It's been a rough week.

Meta just laid off 8,000 people, and then the CEO of ClickUp — a company most people have never heard of — went online to brag about cutting 20-something percent of his staff even though they're profitable. No financial pressure. Just vibes. Just "AI made our engineers 100X more capable" so we don't need these people anymore. Then he had the nerve to talk about million-dollar salary bands for the survivors while publicly dunking on the people he just fired.

I'm not here to cover the Meta layoffs.

There are a hundred channels doing that. I'm here to talk about the people nobody covers: the developer at the 50-person company who gets two weeks and a Slack message.

The person who doesn't have a FAANG brand on their resume to fall back on. That's who I was when I got laid off in 2023.

In this episode I get into what actually happened when I got canned - the Zoom call with the person you've never seen before, the access revocation, the immediate panic. What I did right after (not much). What I did wrong (a lot). The psychological damage that nobody talks about, and the things I wish somebody had told me before I spent weeks spiraling.

This isn't a "5 tips to be layoff-proof" episode. I don't think layoff-proof exists. This is what it actually feels like, what actually helps, and what I'd do differently if it happened again tomorrow. Because it might. Your company doesn't have any loyalty to you, no matter how good things seem right now.

If you're going through it, you're not alone.