Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 36 posts.
There's a meme that's been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more technically interesting. Paul Graham says that the best way to make money is to "start or join a startup", which has been "a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years", and that you…
The developer job interview doesn't work: it measures a basket of skills uncorrelated with job performance. Work-sample tests, warm-ups, and how to grade your own hiring process.
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Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley on Evolution, Technology, Economics and Business
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
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
We’re sharing a new version of Buffer's transparent salary formula, and a web app that anyone can use to find out what you might make on the team at Buffer.
Edit: Peter Thiel is no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. I’m delighted to announce Peter Thiel is joining YC as one of the (now 10!) part-time partners. In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies…
Even before I got tenure, folks have told me they’re “looking forward to an academic advice post on tenure.”
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
For many years I was whole hog into the open-source movement and at the time I rarely wrote a stitch of code in my free time that didn’t find itself in a public Sourceforge/GCode/Github repo. 1 However, over time I came to learn that the burden that came with publicly offering code to the universe, to put it mildly…
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument , the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us.
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job. Or another job at all. Ever.
Why do teachers quit? As I make the tough decision to leave the classroom, I highlight some of the issues that force quality teachers to leave public education.
