The no excuses culture
Getting ready for our next semester’s class, I asked my Teaching Assistant why I hadn’t seen the posters for our new class around campus. Hearing the litany of excuses that followed –“It was raini…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
Getting ready for our next semester’s class, I asked my Teaching Assistant why I hadn’t seen the posters for our new class around campus. Hearing the litany of excuses that followed –“It was raini…
The following is my response to Ewan Valentine’s blog post “How to never complete anything” that I discovered on Hacker News. Once again, I ask for people’s indulgence for posting a reply on my own blog rather than in the Hacker News comments. I find writing on my own blog a bit easier than wading […]
👉 The decision was close, but the team has decided to keep looking for someone who might have more direct neural net experience.\n👉 Honestly, I think the way you communicated your thought process and results was confusing for some people in the room.\n👉 He’s needing someone with an image analysis background for data…
Most employees at startups get some of their pay in stock options. This is often framed to the employee as “you get x percentage of equity in the company.” Unfortunately, stock options are a lot more complex than true equity.
A retrospective on the technical interview process based on three months of searching for a job.
Before I learnt to read I made sense of the world by conjuring up images in my mind, particularly for abstract concepts. I could count before I could read and had an image for each number. Many of …
My last days at Uber in San Francisco were filled with disrespect, condescending managers, and sexism.
I was talking the other day with a former student at UW, Sarah Rich, who’s done degrees in both math and CS and then went off to Twitter. I asked her: so what would you say to a math Ph.D. …
Update 2019: This article got 183 comments on Reddit, and 237 comments on Hacker News. Many commenters said it couldn’t be done — they…
Thanks to a recruiting process that left a bad taste in my mouth, I refuse to accept any further interviews from large tech companies unless they are on my terms.
A little less than a year ago I had the “pleasure” to interview at Uber. I didn’t know much about the company at the time, other than that they were big. I was looking for work already and Uber’s…
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in
Suppose you’re doing technology, and like doing technology, and your career’s going well, and you find yourself wondering what you’re going to be doing in twenty years. I’ve been down several of the roads you might decide to take, and it occurs to me that talking them over might amuse and inform.
A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and…
There are many ways to evaluate a developer. Should we use quantitative metrics or stick to qualitative ones?
With all the craziness in the world going on at the moment, founders and start-up enthusiasts are looking which place is worth moving to. Some people are suggesting to consider Berlin. Sadly, Berlin is located in Germany, which means that bureaucracy is a thing you need to familiarize with. Papers need to be filled…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
This is the write-up of my talk at LCA 2017 inHobart. It’s not exactlythe same, because this is a blog and not a talk, but the same contents. Theslides for t...
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…