Dustin Taylor

Husband, Father, Latter-day Saint (Mormon), Head of Technology -

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Announcing: The second annual tech worker sentiment survey

With an audience of over 1 million subscribers globally, we've got a unique opportunity to tap into how the tech world is thinking and feeling right now.

My inaugural tech workers’ sentiment survey in 2025 collected over 8,000 responses (the largest survey of its kind) and uncovered that mid-career workers were struggling the most, small-company employees were the happiest, and while almost half of you were experiencing significant burnout, the majority were still generally optimistic about your careers.

Today, we’re kicking off round two, and we'd love to hear from you: https://t.co/hqzCftSjw0

The survey will take less than 5 minutes to complete. If you complete the survey in full, we’ll share the anonymized raw data with you so you can perform your own analysis—plus an early look at the results before we share them publicly.

This is an important moment for the industry, and I'd love to get your perspective.

Take the survey: https://t.co/hqzCftSjw0 (it'll take <5 mins)

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Over-criticizing people is a vicious spiral.

You start criticizing people for their actions a lot, then they stop being proactive about anything.

Then you’re upset they aren’t proactive. Then they just start throwing bad ideas at you because you’re going to ask for whatever you want anyway.

Relationships and employees get destroyed in this cycle. Then people go onto new opportunities and thrive and people have no idea how things could be so different.

Because they forget that it all started from one person being overly critical.

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

https://t.co/E7iG4Db7vW

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

At some point, you have to stop trying to do more "discovery" and just build.

When? At minimum, when you stop being surprised, because that means you stopped learning.

Even better: hard time-box on discovery, to prevent analysis paralysis.

How else can you know?

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

@GavinNewsom You keep using that word. I don’t think you know what it means.

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

What children see at home shapes them more than anything they’re told.

For boys especially, one of the strongest predictors of future success is watching their father love their mother. Not hearing about values, but seeing them lived out.

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

@jaredadairbell Her response is that we can't do that because we will still worship Jesus, but Jesus will still worship God the Father. With her logic, I’d Jesus not a God then as He worships and prays to the Father?

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

Your phone is a quiet addiction running your life.

Feeling the urge to check your device every few minutes is normal. It's your brain doing exactly what it was built to do—except it's doing it for the wrong thing.

Your dopamine system evolved to keep you alive. That's a good thing. But now, it's being hijacked—trained, every day, to chase the easiest rewards possible. That's not a good thing.

Easy pleasures have a ceiling. The reward fades. What once felt good soon becomes tolerable. So you escalate: More scrolling. More easy pleasures. Less satisfaction. And less meaning.

The more you chase easy pleasure, the less capable you become of enjoying anything deeply.

But the answer isn't to abandon technology. It's to govern it.

Start by setting boundaries:
- No phones at meals.
- No phones in the bedroom.
- No screens after 9pm.

Every boundary you set is attention returned to something that actually matters.

Then, add friction:
- Turn the screen to grayscale.
- Put the phone in another room.
- Delete the most addictive apps.

Stop treating every idle moment as something to fill.

You don't become fully human by indulging every impulse—you do it by mastering them. That's where meaning—and happiness—actually live.

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

Awesome reminder to not create a culture of emergencies and urgencies when everything is presented as urgent. https://t.co/WUScUJYAJR

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

wise words from the best systems engineer I've worked with:

"two things that make code actually maintainable:

1. reduce the layers a reader has to trace
2. reduce the state a reader has to hold in their head"

applies to every codebase. always.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

A pattern I've noticed in stuck people:

They're always busy. They never stop moving. They have 47 tabs open and a notebook-sized to-do list. But if you ask them what they accomplished this week that actually matters, their mind goes blank.

Busyness isn't a badge of honor.

[Evan LaPointe @evanlapointe]

The problem with a bias to action isn't when you start.

It's when you stop.

Everyone with a bias to action stops learning the second it starts working, or appearing to work.

They have no idea what greatness looks like. It's why they create so much trash and frustration.

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

@ToddLlewellyn Used the tool. Suggested tankless which sounds great. Should I wait until my water heaters die to replace? If I have two water heaters now do I need two tankless to replace? And does this help with how long it takes hot water to reach some parts of the house like our master bath

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

@ToddLlewellyn What does tankless water heater cost? Does it provide instant hot water to faucets and showers? Many of ours tend to need 20-30 seconds to get the hot water flowing.

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

There used to be this great phrase:

The job of a software developer isn't to tell the computer what to do; it's to tell other people what you're telling the computer to do.

I wonder how this should morph in the age of AI?

[Adam Wathan @adamwathan]

I don’t think AI is lowering the barrier to entry as much as it is giving the very smartest people an even more enormous advantage.

[Dustin Taylor @DustinGTaylor]

@Mubarak_mubious Coffee and it’s no contest

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

Counterintuitive career truth: When your boss gives you direct feedback, that's a positive. They are investing their attention in helping you perform better. You should worry most when they stop having anything to say at all. Silence isn’t praise. It’s indifference.

[Evan LaPointe @evanlapointe]

Instead of getting great at "productive conflict" next year, maybe try not being assholes.

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

Major life cheat code: Taking radical ownership of your outcomes. High performers don't blame secret forces, unclear direction, or market conditions. They create their reality through relentless action. Stop inventing reasons you can't and you'll start finding ways that you can.