How to Own Your Career 🦝 — with Jean Hsu and Cate Huston

How to Own Your Career 🦝 — with Jean Hsu and Cate Huston

From Refactoring Podcast by Luca Rossi

May 1, 2026 · 57 min · Episode 62

About this episode

Luca Rossi discusses career ownership and the impact of AI with engineering leaders Jean Hsu and Cate Huston.

Today's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston .They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these complicated times, to say the least. So with Jean and Cate, we talked about exploring what you want from your career, how to be intentional about it, how to use feedback to assess how you're doing, and how AI is changing and not changing the picture.(01:51) Introduction(03:39) Dealing with adverse conditions(09:45) Sponsor break(10:42) DRI your career and coaching(13:07) Career's approach(18:52) Figuring out your goal: Luca's example(30:48) Coaching for EMs vs coaching for ICs(32:23) Moving forward in your daily job(36:06) Feedbacks and culture of appreciation(41:32) Does AI change how do you think about your career?(45:42) AI pressure and AI passion — Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as…

People in this episode

Host: Luca Rossi

Guests: Jean Hsu, Cate Huston

Topics covered

  • career ownership
  • engineering leadership
  • coaching
  • feedback
  • AI impact

Keywords

  • career
  • engineering
  • leadership
  • coaching
  • feedback
  • AI

Sponsors

Intent

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Duck.co, Automattic, Medium

Products: Intent by Augment

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