Episodes
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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 eraThe age group struggling most with AI adoption (it's not who you think)What the data really says about junior devs getting replacedThe new job roles coming by 2027: AI orchestrators and agent managersWhy engineers should learn an art form (seriously)His weirdly practical advice for introverts: dress up and go to TargetWho software engineers should actually marrySamir 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/brianjenneyYouTube: 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 entirelyThe skill that actually separates seniors from everyone elseHow to get senior-level trust before you have the titleWhat I screwed up on my own path (so you don't have to)Connect with me:
Parsity AI Engineering: https://parsity.io/ai-devYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brianjenney -
Missing episodes?
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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
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Build AI systems at Parsity.
I joined a fast-paced AI startup in early 2025 where the non-technical CEOs pushed an âAI-firstâ mandateââtwice as much in half the time with less peopleâ 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 đ
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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 â a company most people have never heard of â 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.
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8 spots left in the AI engineer cohort. Join here: https://parsity.io/ai-developer
Ever get that feeling you're the worst developer on your team? And worse - that it's not in your head, you actually are the weakest link in the room?
I've been on both ends. I've been the best developer on the team, and I've been objectively the worst
And here's the thing nobody tells you: they're each worse than you'd expect, just in different ways.
In this episode I get into what being the best actually cost me, why being the worst is psychologically brutal but might be the best thing for your career, and the one reframe that turned it around for me.
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Free interview prep guide: â https://www.parsity.io/interview-prepâ
Free career roadmap for developers: â https://www.parsity.io/career-roadmapâ
Carter Nadain spent four years trying to break into software development. He started with a bootcamp in 2022, got his CS degree, worked at Amazon delivering packages, sent out thousands of applications, and went through every kind of setback you can imagine â including having to move back in with his mom at 25 and completely restart his life.
In this episode, Carter shares what actually worked: the interview tip that landed his current job, why recording yourself talking through problems is the most underrated prep strategy, and how he stayed consistent for four years when most people quit after three months.
We also get into imposter syndrome, what it's really like walking into your first dev job, and why this career rewards people who refuse to stop.
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Join the free weekly live session: parsity.io/ai
Hope I don't regret this.
I'm giving away the exact AI engineering curriculum I teach at Parsity. The same stuff that helped change my own career trajectory and has recruiters sliding all in my DMs.
How LLMs actually work (and why knowing this helps you push back on the hype)RAG from scratch â embeddings, vector databases, chunking strategiesBuilding with Pinecone, Weaviate, or QdrantStructured outputs with Zod + OpenAI/Anthropic SDKsObservability with LangSmithLLM-as-Judge evals so your agents don't silently degradeThere's a free project linked below where you build a LinkedIn writing clone using my actual posts and articles as training data.
No fluff, no theory. Just build the thing.
đ Free RAG project: https://www.parsity.io/ai-with-rag
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Register for my live event on how you can build practical AI skills to give you an unfair advantage in the job market: parsity.io/ai
I am so sick of the doom and gloom narrative. Things are tough, but not impossible.
If you're treating the job market like it's 2019, you're setting yourself up for failure.
Let's go over LinkedIn (so cringe, I know), interviews, networking without being weird and the side project you need to build.
You can grab my FREE interview prep material here: https://parsity.io/interview-prep
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A few years ago, my advice to developers would've been simple: learn the fundamentals, get good at system design, master your language of choice. And honestly? That advice still feels good to give. But it doesn't feel right anymore.
Knowing how to code is table stakes now. It's not enough to get you hired.
In this episode, I break down the three levels of AI skills I'd be investing in right now if I was a new grad, a bootcamp grad, or even a senior engineer looking to transition â and why the bar for "hireable" has shifted dramatically in the last few years.
Level 1: Actually getting good at the tools. Not being a prompt monkey â having opinions on Claude, Cursor, git worktrees, and knowing why you accept or push back on what the agent gives you.
Level 2: Building on top of AI. MCP servers, RAG pipelines, agents. This is where the biggest career opportunity is right now, and it's where the smallest pool of people actually know what they're doing.
Level 3: The deep end: data engineering, pipelines, model hosting, fine-tuning. Less sexy, fewer positions, but massively defensible if you get in early.
If you're trying to figure out where to put your time right now, this one's for you.
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"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses."
JavaScript gets a lot of hateâbut itâs still everywhere for a reason.
In this episode, I break down three underrated features: web workers, generator functions, and web components and how to use them in a practical way.
Shameless plugs:
Apply for our AI Engineer Cohort: https://parsity.io/ai-dev
Apply for our software engineering program: https://parsity.io
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I wrote a triple nested for loop that took down a grocery chain's ordering system. I broke buttons across multiple sites as a senior engineering manager at Clorox. And I've sat in rooms feeling like the dumbest engineer there â more than once.
In this episode, I break down the three uncomfortable milestones every developer hits: wanting to stop being "the junior guy," shipping code that breaks production in spectacular fashion, and being the weakest engineer in the room. No fluff, no motivational poster garbage â just honest stories from 12+ years in the industry.
AI won't save you from any of these. You just have to go through them.
If you're in one of those moments right now, this one's for you.
Want to level up? đ
Coding bootcamp for career switchers
Learned Javascript the right way
Break into AI engineering
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Follow along with the project by going here: https://www.parsity.io/5-day-ai-advisory-board
In this episode, I walk you through a side project that, if you actually build it, will put you ahead of roughly 90â95% of software developers right now.
Most developers are using AI tools. Very few are actually building with them.
So instead of talking about it, we build something real.
The project is an AI advisory board â a system where you can ask questions like:
What would Theo Browne say about Node?
What would ThePrimeagen say about Vim?
What would Alex Hormozi say about sales?
What would I say about testing?
And instead of generic AI responses, you get answers grounded in real transcripts and real opinions.
We go step-by-step through:
Calling an LLM programmatically (Gemini API)
Setting up a backend route to handle requests
Adding system prompts and guardrails
Building a simple knowledge base
Pulling in real YouTube transcripts
Injecting data into the model at the right time (naive RAG)
This is the kind of project that forces you out of âAI userâ mode and into actually building AI-powered products.
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Resources mentioned đ
parsity.io/ai-with-ragThe Router Pattern â A Smarter WayI mentioned that I got a lot more requests for interviews. Here's the proof: Da Proof
3 Ways We Work with Software Developers (and noobs) đ
AI Dev Program â parsity.io/ai-devApply for our full stack software engineering programLearn JavaScript in 30 days... the hard way -
I created a free project for developers who want to learn AI the hard way: https://parsity.io/ai-with-rag
I don't envy new coders. AI is being jammed down your throat and at the same time, you're being told you must understand the code it generates.
It's a confusing time.
Using AI too early comes with a cost. More importantly, we'll look at some proven ways to make sure you are learning deeply and can work efficiently with your little code bot.
You can read the study from Anthropic here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
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If you're curious about Bryan's strategy, you can apply to work with him here: đ Application form.
The tech job market is brutal right now. Everyone knows it.
People are sending hundreds of applications, getting ghosted, and wondering what the hell is actually going on behind the scenes of hiring.
So in this episode I sat down with Bryan, someone I met on LinkedIn and later met up with in Reno, and he shared something that honestly blew my mind.
Last year he did what most people do:
Around 250 applications over 8 months⊠and almost no interviews.
This year he completely changed his approach.
Instead of blasting applications everywhere, he used a targeted strategy and applied to only 58 roles.
That turned into 16 interviews across 9 companies and multiple final rounds.
Yeah⊠that got my attention.
In this conversation we talk about what heâs seeing on the front lines of the hiring market, including:
Why most resumes never get seen
What hiring managers are actually filtering for
The mistake developers make in behavioral interviews
Why STAR stories matter way more than people think
The reality of DSA interviews and why speed matters
Why applying to the âright levelâ can dramatically increase your chances
And why job searching is really a game of probability
If youâve been applying to jobs and feel like everything is disappearing into a black hole, this episode should help you understand how the hiring game actually works right now.
And honestly, Brianâs story proves something important:
You donât need hundreds of companies to say yes.
You just need one
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In 2026, you canât âavoid LinkedInâ and expect to get hired BUT you can't use it like 2023.
In this episode, I break down the exact LinkedIn + resume strategy Iâd use today to maximize recruiter inbound, increase your surface area for luck, and stop making the most common mistakes that quietly kill your chances.
We cover:
Why âAspiring Junior Developerâ and âOpen to Workâ often backfire
How to make your first visible experience look software-related (even if youâre career-switching)
The keyword/tech-stack problem that makes you invisible in recruiter search
A simple formula to improve your resume
Why âlearn in publicâ is optional nowâand what to do instead
The fastest way to hit 500+ connections (without cringe networking)
The 80/20 application approach: when to âEasy Applyâ vs when to go aggressive
Messaging tactics that stand out in a world of AI-generated slop
A realistic volume target (and what to change if youâre getting zero responses)
If you want a practical plan to start getting interviews againâthis is it.
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