what bree hall has learned about building a career in tech.
Bree Hall spent about six and a half years as a front-end engineer before she found the work she loves most: building, teaching and making tech feel personal. Now a senior developer content lead at Sanity, she joined Randstad's She Ships series to talk about the choices that shaped her eight-year career, including the ones that didn't look like a step up at the time.
Her biggest move went against the usual career ladder. As a senior software engineer at HubSpot, she took an associate developer advocate role, a junior position, after her skip-level manager championed her for an opening on the team. She calls it the best decision of her career, and about two and a half years later she's leading developer content. Her advice for anyone eyeing advocacy is practical: "You kind of have to do the job before you get the job."
Start making content now, so in six months you have a portfolio to show. Hall was also candid about imposter syndrome. Her packed conference season last fall started as a way to face it head on and do it anyway. She isn't afraid of being seen. What scares her is being ignored. Her answer is to keep publishing, because you never know who is silently watching.
That visibility matters more as developer content changes. With AI writing more code, Hall says people want fewer line-by-line tutorials and more real stories about the problem, the trade-offs and the person who solved it. That's a strong case for showing up as yourself, video games, purple and all. Watch the full conversation to hear how Hall learned recursion through roguelike games and why she believes there's no single right path into tech.
This article was developed from a transcript of a Randstad virtual event.
