Ep 4: LinkedIn, Minus the Cringe feat. Dan Johnson

The Unfiltered Engineer · Sep 3, 2026 · 37m · transcript

In episode four, I sit down with Dan Johnson, whose career started in a small mountain town in Vermont, where instead of doing homework, he built websites to post ski pictures. That curiosity took him all the way to building software at Netflix, with stops as a Director of Engineering, a Principal Engineer, and the first engineering hire at an early-stage startup. Along the way he moved from Director back down to an individual contributor role, not a common move, and he tells us why. These days he writes about tech careers, with the occasional farm post mixed in from where he lives in…