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No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons
Part 3 of my 12-year journey—what my first rocky job taught me about boundaries and value.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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The best programmers I know
I have met a lot of developers in my life. Late…
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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this.
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Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
I just got off one of the most surreal video calls of my life - a live video call with a candidate who was interviewing to become an L3 software engineer at Kapwing, our online video editing startup. The interview started extremely well - the candidate seemed like a clear
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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
How time-tested software engineering practices amplify the effectiveness of AI coding assistants.
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Breaking computers taught me to build them
My 12-year journey in software: how breaking computers taught me to build them.
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The reality of working in tech: We're not hired to write code (2023)
"So, is everyone losing their minds yet?" My ex-coworker asked me over yahoo messenger. He quit after getting enraged by new work policies that specifically targeted him. I looked up from my screen,
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Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?
A Bed Assembly Drama
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Take this on-call rotation and shove it
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.
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Sell yourself, sell your work
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
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How I Choose What to Work On (2023)
A reader, "Moo", asked me to write about my process for entrepreneurship and how I choose what to write on. Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at...
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Coding Isn't Programming
Join us for a captivating closing keynote with the legendary Leslie Lamport, Turing Award winner and pioneer in the field of distributed computing. We'll discuss computing history, open source and distributed systems.
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An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.
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The Software Engineering Identity Crisis
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re…
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Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
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The Frontend Treadmill
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend…
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How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon
i <3 firebase
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Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
Read how Google is using System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to analyze pure software systems and discover risks.
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Stamina Is a Quiet Advantage
Stamina is one of the most universally useful traits you can develop. It's a more broadly applicable advantage than things that are situationally useful.
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Breaking Up with On-Call
This article is about why on-call in it's current state in big-tech is flawed, or how to properly develop software.
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Career Advice in 2025
Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of…
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The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
Don't try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you'll start complaining about the publishing...
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A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer