iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

According to job loss trackers, more than 800 tech jobs are lost everyday. The recruiting process might be broken but this is the physics.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I was on the podcast today and I only realized this afterwards. People need a lot of support. It’s an uncertain time. Everyone carries a story of a career or a life they want to have, and when they have to accept the pivot, they grieve. They grieve the identity, the craft, the camaraderie.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I don’t remember what they were but it didn’t matter because we can see the changes happening. Behavior is a language.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A few jobs ago, when I was Dir of Product, leadership was trying to sell new values & direction. So they had this town hall that would be broadcasted. Only VPs attended. I was only a Dir, but somehow I was invited. I played along but gave notice right before the event.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A few jobs ago I was a Dir of Product, and the company went through an acquisition. Several people met w/me to seek my POV about the changing values & ops. They even showed me letters they wrote to HR. I was honest and I told them my predictions. But what I realize later was that they felt safe w/me

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Writing for business is far different than writing fiction or memoirs. The latter is a lot about discovering and building scenes, and in a scene, there is setting, atmosphere, dialog, character development, etc. It takes time for you to inhabit the scene.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I have these relationships with people that started online and at one point or another they reach out and ask me for advice or talk shop, and I think now that I’m retired, I’ll never hear from them again. But what is surprising is people check in with me and talk life. And I pause and think, “Huh…”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I’m waiting for Tswift to come out and say “Surprise! My latest album was written by AI! I’m so behind the curve that I’m ahead of it.”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Unfortunately yes. It was a dinner conversation between my son and I.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Great 2 min animated short of the rat race, “The Illusion of Happiness.” youtu.be/H324cMrOBoE?...

youtu.be

The illusion of happiness | Short Film | Steve Cutts

YouTube video by Certified Dad Joke

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My eyes rolled to the back of my head with that one.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

In regards to the latest controversy regarding a GenZ candidate who walked into in-person interviews with a beverage. It’s a kind of vibe check here. As long as the drink is not some desert drink w/whipped cream & caramel where a lot of slurping is required, it should be fine.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

When you go slower there is thinking that happens. Just because you can create 100 prototypes overnight doesn’t mean you have distilled the right questions to ask, so you end up dealing with a lot of noise. Teams naively underestimate the work it takes to scale these non deterministic experiences.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Silo’d empire building helps no one and will kill culture, and the decline in culture is the canary in the coal mine.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Good lord. You’re speaking for all of us. I have given resignations as a manager twice now where my leader asked me to write the team’s evaluation before I leave and I have done it to support the team. I do take a lot of care when I write them for people under me but it’s pure bureaucracy.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We’re approaching Oct and that means AOP and performance evals. First year where I don’t have to worry about that. Even if we offload it to AI, it’s still a pain in the ass. They were my most hated tasks.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The pay for contract work is equal to what it was 15 years ago.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Something I experienced time and time again was that the hill Design leaders will always die on is branding & Design Systems. It doesn’t matter if the company is in need of strategic direction. If they do put forth a direction, it’s always theater without the distillation of a core hypothesis.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A VP I used to work with said, “Even if you wanted to stay longer, you can’t.” I was hired at Mural as a Dir of Design for Personalization. I quit after only 5 months. Their growth and retention stats were plateauing and I didn’t believe in the strategy. The company went into decline soon after.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Something I realize years before I retired was that I wanted to live other lives, pursue other things that had nothing to do with technology. It feels like a lot of so what. It’s a process to take that hat off. I don’t miss it at all but my brain is still wired that way.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

For me, these are the signals: - Empowering/rewarding wrong leader, indicating they value the wrong things - Strategic drift - More performative work & navigating politics - Brain drain - Reality distortion (toxic positivity & gaslighting) - No one can answer why but protects their turf/turd

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Culture is the canary in the coal mine. A company that had good culture then squandered it by poor leadership will decline. There is of course, the case where a company is too big to fail like Facebook. But who the hell wants to work for that shit hole? Culture is an indicator of clarity & purpose.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

After a change, and morale is really low, I can’t stand it when leadership try to spin it. I’ve seen it a thousand times. I can pretty much predict what they’ll say. I’d much rather them tell us the truth — that they don’t know either; and then of course the culture turns into self preservation.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

My resume has a pattern of 3-4 year tenureship. I’ve never been laid off but I sense when things go sour so I walk. I always feel like I’m being gaslit when I stay.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Strong engineering orgs build capabilities. They don’t just execute. Capabilities become the IP and flywheel of the business. Eng should have some foresight to build capabilities to skate to the puck, while delivering near term deliveries. It’s the same short term near term balance.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Why is it that every job goes bad after about 3 years? Companies either get bought, get new leadership, or something happens and the culture changes.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It makes you appreciate the value of a dollar earned and you meet all kinds of people. Also something about working with your hands feels real.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I’ve always written with em dashes. You can find essays of mine written 10, 20 years ago with em dashes. I recalled being irritated when an editor from a magazine removed my sentence with an em dash and restructure it. Writing w/em dashes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s written by AI.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Was telling my husband that from the time I was 15 to 21, I’d already had 10+ jobs. This is not counting babysitting jobs I had as a teenager. I did everything from working in arcades, office work to building gallery walls to painting murals at the Children’s Museum. I’ve been working a long time.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A colleague messaged me this morning. She wanted to hang out since she’s attending an event for San Diego Design Week. Apparently, it’s super close to my house at the Cedros Design District. So I recommend a coffee shop that I occasionally go to write. It weird when different worlds collide.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

When I was a PM I’d hide projects that we as a team want to do, or things that I predict might be coming and run interference so engineers can work on it. It’s our way of “skating to the puck.”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

When I was a PM, if some leader proposed a feature I didn’t like I’d say, “I’ll put it in the backlog.” In reality there is no backlog.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Not only is curiosity is essential for problem solving but it is necessary for self awareness and empathy. If you can’t continue looking for positions & methods outside of your own, you can’t see where you may be wrong; you can’t decenter yourself and deconstruct your position.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If you all haven’t seen it, I’d recommend watching the Naudet Brothers 9/11 documentary on YouTube. It’s incredible. They had set out to do a documentary on the Fire Dept, and so they were just following them around. Then came 9/11.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

In my years of working, I’ve always been able to reconcile that software overall was a net positive to society. But after AI, I couldn’t see the integrity in that vision. What kind of future are we creating for our children? What kinds of trade offs are we making and for what?

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Yes. I wouldn’t want to start my life and have kids with the way the world is today that’s for sure. You never stop worrying about their safety and their happiness.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

“What I don't have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don't have in integrity, you could never make up for with experience.” Zohran Mamdani

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Feeling heavy on this 9/11. I remembered my husband woke me up on that day and said, “Wake up, the world is falling apart! Some plane crashed into the World Trade Center!” I had the opportunity to visit the Sept 11 Memorial in NY and it was so haunting. I never forgot it.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

All is ok. They suspected something to be cancerous but looks to be benign.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

They gave me a full PET scan yesterday from the thigh up. It’s a scan that detects metabolic activity in cells. They inject a kind of sugar into you and if there’s cancer, cancer cells are hungry for sugar. Something like that. I feel like this should be something everyone gets every few years.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I think the hardest thing in life is having kids. It’s the only thing that gives you worry and fear. It puts you in a position of need. You need to make a certain amount of money. You need to stay healthy. You need to give your children x, y, z. I don’t think I’d try neatly as hard otherwise.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I had a health scare recently where doctor discovered a small nodule in my right lung lobe. I said, “But I only have 4 lobes left doctor.” Scan indicates that it is not cancerous. But we will continue to monitor.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I found a journal entry about how tired I was with tech. Different problems, different actors but same movie. I thought it was this year but the date says March 2024. This was before my dad passed when I thought I still really liked what I do.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Taste as a driver for desirability came from Industrial Design. You apply it to a physical object that you buy. I think there is value in UX and Usability but I’ve often wondered how much the average users really care about software branding and app visual styles.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

One reason I’ll never work again is that I can’t see myself caring enough to put together a fucking portfolio. Believe it or not, I’ve never had a formal portfolio web site. I’ve had several case study decks that I send to recruiters and then somehow that gets me to the next step.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

When your family history intersects w/political history, it can be a compelling research project. It’s like I had to build the setting in my head before I attempt to shape whose eyes I chose to see through. But there are moments of complete blindness, bc I wasn’t there, so that’s the challenge.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Something I see over and over again at every job is that there are some leaders who are very good at managing up, but they have zero ingenuity; they got shit for strategy. Yet they keep falling up.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I saw an interview where JD Vance was asked on a scale of 1-10 how confident he was of going to heaven, and he said 6-7. If I was the interviewer, I’d ask “What would make that higher?” (Behavioral driver). Then how confident that he’d go to hell and why (Doubt falsifier).

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