Visit yosefk.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2010 – Sep 2026
Software Engineering 14Systems & Performance 9Career & Management 7Tech Industry & Business 6Programming Languages 5Hardware & Electronics 4
What constitutes managerial competence? As a vague starting point for an answer, we could say that competent management sets achievable objectives and then achieves them, by organizing and incentivizing the necessary work.
My writing has recently prompted an anonymous commenter to declare that people like me are what's wrong with the world. Oh joy! – finally, after all these years of doing evil, some recognition! Excited, I decided to share one of my battle-tested evil tips, which never ever failed evil me.
Well, I didn't really want to be doing this when I was 20. I'm in it for the money. As long as there's money in programming, I'll stay for the money, in all likelihood.
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.