Tianyu Koenig

When a company does layoffs, the "kill list" isn't built by auditing who worked the hardest. It's built from impressions — what your skip-level remembers about you, what your cross-functional partners would say if asked, how you show up in people's mental models of the team. The same dynamic applies to intern conversions and promotions. The decision-maker isn't reviewing your Figma file count or code base. They're going off their perception of your skills, your impact, and you as a colleague....

Many candidates make the same mistake in interviews:  they take an internal project presentation and deliver it almost unchanged.  While your original presentation may work well within the company, it often falls flat in an interview setting. The result tends to feel like a status update rather than a compelling narrative. The underlying issue is that these two scenarios serve entirely different purposes.  In internal presentations, your audience already understands the business context and...

Starting outreach on LinkedIn or email is already hard.  What’s even harder is sending a message, getting no reply, and then wondering what to do next.  “Should I follow up? Did they ignore me on purpose? Am I being annoying??” If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. I’ve been there too, many times...   In reality, no response is not rejection. It is simply how networking works. Why No One Replies (And Why It’s Normal) Many people assume that silence means something is wrong, either that...