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Software engineering careers newsletters: Hyped Up and Underdogs

Written by Glorp's AI writer · Published October 10, 2026 by Tineessa Nelson

Written by AI. Glorp's AI writer (built on Claude, by Anthropic) researched and wrote this article, and it was published automatically without a person reviewing it first. It can contain mistakes, so check anything important against the sources listed at the end. How this blog works.

Software engineering career newsletters cover the parts of the job that no compiler checks: getting hired, getting promoted, telling your story in an interview, deciding between a stable job and a startup, and working out what your role becomes now that AI writes more of the code. They are read by new graduates and career changers, mid-level engineers aiming for senior, senior engineers weighing the staff or manager path, and the managers who coach them. Some of these writers reach tens of thousands of engineers every week, and some write for a few thousand readers who reply and ask follow-up questions. Glorp features big and small newsletters side by side, for free, because useful career advice comes in every size. Here are five worth a place in your inbox.

The Hyped Up

Established newsletters with big audiences, and the reasons they earned them.

The Peterman Post (The Developing Dev)

Long-form career interviews with senior engineers and leaders, plus Ryan Peterman's own advice on growing from early career to staff · Substack

Metric	As published
Subscribers	Over 103,000 subscribers (source)
Audience	Actionable advice for early-to-mid level software engineers, to fill mentorship gaps (source)

What they do well

Each episode post is a complete package: the October 5 conversation with Neetcode comes with show notes, timestamped chapters, key takeaways, links to YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and a full transcript you can skim.
The guests talk plainly about their own choices, as when Neetcode explains why he left Amazon after about two months, calls quitting without a backup plan a mistake, and describes leaving Google to make algorithms content full time.
The interviews ask practical questions readers care about, such as how much of coding-interview prep is memorization and roughly how many medium problems you need to solve to have a fair chance.
The September 7 episode with Thariq Shihipar of Anthropic's Claude Code team covers how harnesses change as models improve, recurring self-prompting workflows, keeping AI-written code maintainable, and whether people should still learn to code.

Who should read it: Engineers at any level who learn best from hearing how experienced people actually made their career decisions.

Read The Peterman Post (The Developing Dev) →

#career growth#promotions#interviews#podcast#big tech

Big Tech Careers

Behavioral interview preparation and the communication and leadership skills that help engineers get hired and promoted at large tech companies · Substack

Metric	As published
Subscribers	Join 34,000+ subscribers; 35,000+ subscribers elsewhere in the same post (the page gives both) (source)
Publishing schedule	Weekly issues in the archive, including September 3, 10, 17 and 24 and October 1 and 8, 2026 (source)

What they do well

The October 8 issue lays out a five-step cycle for interview prep in which AI surfaces raw material from your resume, a person picks and shapes the strongest stories, and a final human review checks whether they land.
It gives readers a concrete structure to work from, such as a story bank across eight behavioral themes, from customer focus and failure to conflict and time management, with the honest note that most people only have strong material for three or four.
Prasad Rao writes openly about his own work, as in the August 27 issue on two goals he missed that month, which uses his own setbacks to make a point about how social feeds hide everyone else's.
The archive reads like a course, with weekly issues on topics such as why a good interview can still end in rejection and the consistency interviewers look for across your answers.

Who should read it: Engineers and other tech professionals preparing for big tech interviews or a promotion case who want a clear, repeatable way to tell their stories.

Read Big Tech Careers →

#behavioral interviews#big tech#promotions#communication

Strategize Your Career

Productivity systems and career growth for software engineers, with a strong recent focus on working well with AI tools · Substack

Metric	As published
Subscribers	21K (source)
Open rate	30% (source)
Price per placement	Primary sponsored ad €500; secondary slot ad €200; monthly sponsor (5-6 articles) €2,100 (source)
Publishing schedule	Each Sunday (source)

What they do well

The October 4 issue maps 19 everyday workflows to open-source options, from coding agents such as OpenCode and Aider to n8n for automation and Zulip or Mattermost for team chat, and is honest that paying for a hosted service can still be worth it.
The August 23 issue on AI-assisted engineering takes a real worry seriously: Fran Soto describes how high pull request throughput with AI made his own grasp of the work feel opaque, then shows how to work at both the goal level and the detail level.
Advice comes as routines you can adopt, such as building AI workflows one small agent at a time, reading the logs when an agent gets stuck and folding the fix back into its instructions.
It treats thinking skills as something to protect on purpose, suggesting a regular reading habit, defining problems fully before involving AI, and periodic audits of your AI workflows.

Who should read it: Software engineers who like practical systems and want to stay sharp, and keep growing, as AI changes how the work gets done.

Read Strategize Your Career →

#productivity#career growth#ai tools#big tech

The Underdogs

Smaller newsletters doing great work. Good writing matters more than list size, and these deserve more readers.

Dev Leader Weekly

A weekly letter from a principal engineering manager on software careers, management and building with AI, with C# and .NET examples · Substack · @devleaderca

Metric	As published
Subscribers	Over 9,000 subscribers on the newsletter page; ~9400 on the sponsorship page (the pages give both) (source)
Open rate	~24% (source)
Price per placement	Shared sponsorship $200; exclusive sponsorship $300; sponsored content $1000 (source)
Audience	Aspiring, junior and senior software engineers, engineering managers, mobile and web developers, and tech content creators (source)
Publishing schedule	Every Saturday morning (source)

What they do well

Issue 158 on whether to leave a stable job for an AI startup goes past the salary bump to the questions that matter, such as share count, strike price, vesting, exercise window and expected dilution, and asks readers to estimate the downside first.
Issue 155 on missed deadlines brings a manager's view to a tense moment, arguing that a slipping project is not automatically anyone's failure and that the useful question is who owns the next step.
Issue 154 offers a simple exercise for the AI era: track for a week which work energizes you and which drains you, then delegate carefully while staying responsible for the outcome.
Issue 159 reports on a real side project, a game built largely with AI, and draws out lessons about giving agents scoped, reviewable slices of work with experienced checkpoints along the way.

Who should read it: Developers and new managers who want grounded, weekly career thinking from someone who manages engineers and still builds things himself.

Read Dev Leader Weekly →

#career decisions#engineering management#ai#dotnet

Hayk Simonyan

System design lessons and interview walk-throughs for engineers working toward their first tech job or a senior role · Substack

Metric	As published
Subscribers	Over 5,000 subscribers (source)
Audience	Software engineers looking to secure their first tech job and advance to senior roles (source)
Publishing schedule	Several issues a month in the archive, including August 29 and September 2, 8, 10, 16 and 23, 2026 (source)

What they do well

The September 8 issue designs a coding agent like Claude Code the way you would in an interview, moving from requirements to architecture, scaling the cloud sandbox and handling failures, so readers learn both the system and how to structure an answer.
It explains why the model should never be the final security boundary, with specific guardrails such as iteration caps, detection of repeated tool calls, command timeouts and snapshots before file changes.
The August 29 issue on designing Google Docs compares optimistic locking, Operational Transformation and CRDTs side by side, so the trade-offs between them are easy to follow.
Issues mix classic interview questions, such as designing Spotify, with fundamentals like SQL transactions, load balancing and proxies, which suits readers building a full foundation.

Who should read it: Engineers preparing for system design interviews, or mid-level developers who want to think about systems the way senior engineers do.

Read Hayk Simonyan →

#system design#interviews#senior engineer#backend

Career advice works best when it comes from more than one direction: a podcast host who asks senior engineers and leaders what they would do differently, an interview coach with a story bank, a systems thinker, a manager who still ships side projects, and a teacher who draws the architecture for you. Each of these five newsletters is free to start reading. Subscribe to all of them and see which voices help you most with the next step in your own career.

Run a newsletter? Glorp features newsletters for free, big and small. It also finds and books sponsors for newsletters about AI, tech and B2B software, and keeps 20% only when a deal books. Scan your newsletter free. Glorp is our own product, and we mention it because we run it.

Sources

No newsletter paid to be featured. Subscriber counts, open rates and prices are as each newsletter published them on its own pages when this post was written; Glorp has not verified them. If you run a featured newsletter and want something corrected or removed, reply to @tineessanelson on X and it will be fixed.