1411
Stop Being the Hero
Why best products and leaders are not heroes; they solve 3 layers of every problem
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Green Lumber Fallacy in Software Engineering
Distinguishing the trees from the forest in software engineering and how not to conduct interviews.
1413
Cost of Attrition
How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?
1414
Teaching how to code is broken
Typically: * Chapter 1: Types * Chapter 2: Variables * Chapter 3: Operators/Math * Chapter 4: Control structures * Chapter 5: Arrays * Chapter 6: Functions * Chapter 7: Structs * Chapter 8: Classes and Objects * Chapter 9: Methods * Chapter 10: Inheritance and Polymorphism * Chapter 11: Some advanced thing X * Chapter…
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I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
and i think you do too - but i'll tell you anyway
1416
The burden of an Open Source maintainer
Or: Why can't you just merge my ten-line PR already? I maintain over 200 open source projects. Apparently (this is news to me) I am ranked in the top 200 GitHub users by followers, and there are 18,000 forks and 42,000 stars across my repos. On an average day, I see between 50-100 emails across my repositories for…
1417
How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)
Start your freelance business on the right foot by avoiding common mistakes that you will hold you back from victory.
1418
Completing a part-time Master's in computer science while working
“I’m going to be 29 anyways, so I might as well be 29 with a Master’s.” — me 5 years ago debating whether I should take classes On June 5, 2017, I started taking classes at Tufts University while working full time. On January 4, 2022, I submitted the final draft of my Master’s thesis. Much like my past self had hoped…
1419
Explaining to my parents what I do
My parents don't understand what I do as a quant, so I wrote this to help explain to them. This post goes into the basics of power pricing and the electricity market.
1420
T-Shaped People and Academia
Being on the lookout for recruiting new students for my new research group , I wanted to distil some of my observations into textual form. This post deals with my impression that academia is doing a disservice to ‘T-shaped persons,’ i.e. persons combining deep expertise in one or more fields with an ability to…
1421
My Experience as a SWE Intern at Goldman Sachs
Disclaimer: I did have to sign a NDA, so I can't go too in depth on certain things. But I'll do my best to capture the essence of it and my…
1422
Look How Big Is My Team
I'm used to getting asked how many employees work at my startup. For most people, it's a quick way to assess a startup's success. Supposedly, the bigger, the better. But does it really reflect success?
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Washed Up
Even if every technology jockeying for a spot under the 'web3' banner evolves beyond proof-of-work blockchains, these systems will still not be part of the web because they designed not to be. 'web3' ain't the web, and VCs talking their own book don't get the last word, no matter how much dirty money they throw at it.
1425
You Don't Need a Mentor–Find a Nemesis Instead
In which the author expostulates on his odd notions about sports, music, and life
1426
I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
Reflections on working at Amazon, the interview process, the organizational structure, and why it was not an ideal fit for me (but might be for you).
1427
Know how your org works, or how to become a more effective engineer
A few months ago, exhausted by a constant stream of people perennially disappointed about reward structures at companies, I made what…
1428
How to mentor software engineers
Mentors should operate at three levels: goals, situations, and skills.
1429
An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)
Over the past few years, I’ve interviewed with a dozen or so companies and have completed ~50 or so individual algorithm problems. I’m frequently given feedback that I did a great job at the algorithms problem. In this post, I’m going to share how exactly I approach algorithm problems. Thought Process A guiding…
1430
Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
2021 was not too kind to me. I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me where I just couldn’t let something go because it was wrong or incorrect and it bothered me, now you know why. I have, for better or worse, extremely high standards for…
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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
1433
The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…
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Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech
A few months ago, I left SeatGeek without much of a plan of what to do next. My green card was finally issued in 2021, which means that I didn’t have to scramble to find a new job in forty days. Fo...
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My Path to Financial Independence as a Software Engineer
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
1439
Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects
Programs are more complicated than projects which are more complicated than milestones. Instead of projects, focus on milestonesMost engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. You can get better results by focusing on milestones instead.
1440
Building Remote Teams for Startups
Most of the companies in the last year had to try out remote work in one way or the other. These are my highly notes on #remote #teams.