Scott Hanselman Programmer, teacher and speaker who works as VP and member of technical staff at Microsoft and GitHub, focused on developer productivity, .NET, Azure, open sour...

“A senior engineer's job is to ship, but a preceptor's job is to ship seniors.”

Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

Hanselman explains the core idea of the preceptorship program meant to keep the early-career engineering pipeline alive as companies lean on AI. A preceptor is a senior person whose assigned job is developing newer engineers, as with nurse preceptors.

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Transcript

Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman Around 34:26 into the episode

Scott Hanselman

Very cool. So Julia, as an awesome person, I'm curious, are you positive? Are you excited? Are you having fun working at Microsoft? And are you optimistic for the future?

Julia Gao

…a lot from him, just the experience as well as how they approach, right? Now that I realize like their time is more important than everything else. Because given the code that you have, it's really seeing their viewpoint and their experiences that helped me like grow as a engineer at Microsoft.

Scott Hanselman

That makes me happy because when Mark and I wrote the paper, the fundamental conceit of the idea is that a senior engineer's job is to ship, but a preceptor's job is to ship seniors. And that makes me happy that you feel like you've got someone who is focused on your success. And then downstream of that, the product and the code, the code will get written, but will you stick around? Will you be a happy and healthy and smarter employee because you had people who were willing to invest in you? So we're really glad that you are here. And thanks so much for chatting with us on…

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