1
How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole
This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust.
Charity Majors
cofounder and CTO of honeycomb.io; pioneered modern observability. co-author of O'Reilly books "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering", now wrapping up the 2nd ed. loves free software, free speech, and peaty single malts. Click to read Charity Majors, a Substack with thousands of subscribers.
- Popular posts
- 9
- Total points
- 2,003
- HN comments
- 1,309
- Rank
- #838 personal
Visit charity.wtf → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2016 – Jun 2025
2
How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not
Every job makes a strong first impression within days. At great jobs, the anxiety is "I hope I can measure up to these amazing people." At bad jobs, it's "oh god I hope this isn't what every day will be like."
3
How to Survive an Acquisition
Last week Facebook announced that they will be shutting down Parse.
4
Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.
5
If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
6
In praise of “normal” engineers
The best engineering orgs in the world are not the ones with the most (self-pronounced) "10x engineers", they are the ones where normal engineers can show up every day, do good work, and move the business materially forward. Oh yeah -- this is also the best way to build world-class engineers.
7
How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside?
8
"My boss says we don't need any engineering managers"
"I'm a VP Engineering at a 40-person startup. My CEO (former engineer) won't let me hire engineering managers. He says we can't afford such luxuries, all hands should write code. How do I make the case for managers?"
9
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).