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We cancelled standups and let the team build
When is the last time you experimented with process? Here's a fun example
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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How to take meeting notes
Sep 10, Thu, 2020
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Is revenue model more important than culture?
HN Discussion Here: I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and a…
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We need young programmers; We need old programmers
The software industry loves young people, but old-timers serve an important purpose, too.
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Build Personal Moats
My favorite career advice
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Laid Off, Now What?
As an immigrant on an H1B, you have exactly 60 days to find a new job when you are laid-off. This is a very short window of time to explore and land any job, let alone a job that matches your skills and interests. I found myself in this situation along with many others when Uber announced layoffs earlier this year…
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Meeting everyone on a new team
Strategic technology leader
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All the jobs I failed to get
A few years ago, Johannes Haushofer published a CV of failures. In it, he lists all the grants he wasn't awarded, positions he didn't get, papers rejected. I think that people need to be more open about failure. None of us are perfect - despite what our social media presence says - and all of us suffer rejection. But…
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To All the Jobs I Had Before
Notes that I mostly write for myself, but you can read if you want.
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Diversity-Related Training Meta-analysis
It seems that diversity training programs generally fail at their stated goals, and often produce unfortunate and unintended consequences.
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What happened to all the non-programmers? (2015)
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
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How I learned to charge my customers
After I completed my first programming class, I went straight to Craigslist. I advertised my programming services. I called myself an experienced programmer who could code anything. I posted a link to
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How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
Follow these steps to start an LLC in California
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Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews
I recently did 60+ technical interviews in 30 days. Here are some red flags I observed among the companies I spoke to.
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How to Be Helpful Online
Helping people online is difficult. We expect technical questions and discussions, but everyone involved are just people, so it doesn’t always go smoothly.
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Why do so many people want us back in the office?
After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work – the office fightback has well and truly begun.
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Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
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I don’t have time for coding challenges
It tends to be standard recruitment practice in the tech industry to require candidates to complete some sort of coding test or challenge. Sometimes this takes the form of the much-feared whiteboard interview – where candidates are expected to work through a problem on the aforementioned whiteboard, in front of an…
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'Ugh fields', or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
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If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
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Let employees sell their equity
Sometimes people choose to work for one company over another for reasons related to the work environment, for example what the company does, and whether the other employees create a place that's pleasant to work at. But a major factor is compensation. If Company A and Company B are largely comparable, but Company A…
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How I operated as a staff engineer at Heroku
I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I’m honestly completely uncle...
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Optimize Onboarding
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
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Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer
Everything I learned to become a senior software engineer. From good skills to have, to dealing with difficult engineering problems.
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The Art of Debating for Software Developers
The keys to debate effectively as a software developer and therefore bringing value to yourself and your company.
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Google taught me to turn Impostor Syndrome into an Advantage
My heart was racing. My palms sweating. I was going to be fired.\nPerformance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?