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Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
Mike Murray, a surprisingly hapless HR manager at Microsoft, made a number of goofs, but the doozie was introducing a “Ship It” award shortly after he started the job. The idea was that…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 648 posts.
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Don't be a meat proxy
Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:
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Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles,' published March 28, 2022. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
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How to Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
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TypeScripting the technical interview
An homage to Aphyr's Typing the technical interview
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John Resig: Redefining the Introduction to Computer Science at Khan Academy
I’m incredibly excited to take this opportunity to announce a new project that I’ve been leading here at Khan Academy: Khan Academy Computer Science .
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Winding down my Debian involvement
This post is hard to write, both in the emotional sense but also in the “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time” sense. Hence, please assume the best of intentions when reading it—it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad about their contributions, but rather to provide some insight…
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People can read their manager's mind (2015)
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.
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Compensation as a Reflection of Values
Our thoughts on compensation, and how they reflect Oxide's values.
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Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity (2007)
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
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Doing a Job – The Management Philosophy of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover
Excerpt from a speech Adm. Hyman Rickover (1900-1986) gave at Columbia University in 1982 outlining his leadership style.
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We are changing our developer productivity experiment design
Our second developer productivity study faces selection effects from wider AI adoption, prompting us to redesign our approach.
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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Google SRE - Defining slo: service level objective meaning
SRE SLO book to understand service level objective meaning and the various service level terminilogy including sla slo sli to improve service reliability.
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Google SRE - Blameless Postmortem for System Resilience
Blameless postmortems in SRE culture. Incident study that focus on root cause analysis and preventive actions, for culture of continuous improvement.
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Commitment vs. Forecast: A Subtle But Important Change to Scrum
One of the most controversial updates to the 2011 Scrum Guide has been the removal of the term “commit” in favor of “forecast” in regards to the work selected for a Sprint. We used to say that the Development Team commits to which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint. Scrum now encourages the…
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Five Worlds
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
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Advice for Computer Science College Students
Despite the fact that it was only a year or two ago that I was blubbering about how rich Windows GUI clients were the wave of the future, college students nonetheless do occasionally email me askin…
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Painless Functional Specifications
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
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Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
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Commandos, Infantry, and Police
As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it’s getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the personalities
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OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Chief technology officer Mira Murati appointed interim CEO to lead OpenAI; Sam Altman departs the company.