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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
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Visit jacobian.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – Jun 2025
Career & Management 17Tech Industry & Business 13Software Engineering 11Tools & Productivity 6Society, Policy & Culture 4Programming Languages 4
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That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
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Exit interviews are a trap
It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
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Tech compensation in 2021
Salaries in tech are going up, and many people are looking for new jobs or reevaluating the ones they have. However, many tech workers have no idea what their labor is worth on the open market. There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries, but workers don’t. In…
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Software estimation is hard – do it anyway
It’s well established that estimating software projects is hard. This is true, but you should learn how anyway.
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My Python Development Environment, 2020 Edition
<p>For years I’ve noodled around with various setups for a Python development environment. A couple of years ago <a href="https://jacobian.org/2018/feb/21/python-environment-2018/">I wrote about a setup I finally liked</a>; this is an update to that post.</p> <p>Bad news: this stuff still isn’t stable, and…
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Paying people to work on open source is good
If you have a problem with maintainers getting paid then you have a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
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Incompetent but Nice
A question I’ve never been able to answer to my satisfaction: how do you manage people who are nice but can’t do the work?
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Breaking down tasks
Something missing from this series on estimation, until now, has been a discussion of how to “break down” a project into a well-defined task list. I’d not previously written about this because, to me, it’s largely intuitive. But it isn’t for everyone, so this post fills the gap, and explains in detail how I break down…
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Is my advice too mercenary?
A criticism of some of my writing is that it’s too mercenary. Some see my advice as coldly calculating, too focused on individual outcomes over collective ones, and implicitly distrustful of others. I think this is fair criticism! It’s not exactly what I’m going for, but it’s a fair reading. However, there’s more to…
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Simple product management tricks
Three simple tricks product I’ve picked up that help me be more than completely useless when I need to wear a Product hat.
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Writing great documentation
A series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.
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When is short tenure a red flag?
A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when…
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A reading list for new engineering managers
<p>Like many engineers, I got thrown into management without any real guidance. I thought management was just telling people what to do. I thought there wasn’t any real science to it; you just needed to feel your way through it. I was wrong: there’s a whole field of study here, and you can learn a lot by…
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Designing Engineering Organizations
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
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Probably Are Gonna Need It: Application Security Edition
My list of “Probably Are Gonna Need It” security features for your web app – things that you should build up-front, not wait until you need them (when it’s already too late).
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Changing Directions
<p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of…
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Unpacking Interview Questions
A series sharing some of the questions I use when I interview for technical roles. I’ll unpack the question, when to ask it, and how to evaluate answers.
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