I recently joined Anthropic as a Member of Technical Staff, building software to support Anthropic’s network. It sparked a flurry of people asking if they could join, too. Whether you’re considering a job change or specifically curious about Anthropic, I’ll share how I got the job, then walk through what I weighed: income, uncertainty, values, and the allure of hype.

This month, I announced I have resigned my position as a Principal Software Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and accepted a new role as a Member of Technical Staff with Anthropic. After announcing my transition out, 34 people at AWS scheduled office hours for 1:1 interviews with me, and I got asked a lot of questions. I’m sharing some of the common questions and answers here. Whether my thoughts are actually worth sharing is a question I try not to think about too hard. (Plus, two people specifically asked if I could blog more after I leave. I’m choosing to believe they weren’t being sarcastic.)

I love to code. I code a lot. And I think I’m good at it - I started coding in 2002 and have written many, many applications in the last 20+ years. AI has been changing the way I code, and I wanted to share my learnings (so far).

Early in my software engineering career, a senior engineer at Microsoft told me “the best solution is one that requires no new code.” At the time, I thought this was nonsense. Is not my role as a software engineer to write code? Why would writing less or no code be better? More code means more bug fixes, more features, more services, and more tools. So why is more not always better?