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Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
Non-obvious advice that I wish I learned sooner.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
242
When employees feel slighted, they work less
New research from Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli reveals how even the slightest mistreatment at work can result in lost productivity.
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I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
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Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt
A simple personal website and blog
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
246
My first year in sales as technical founder
Looking back at the last 12 months feels surreal. I have learned so much about selling, it's insane.
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Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that …
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To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI
Hey you, Yes, you, who are thinking about not hiring a technical writer this year or, worse, erased one or more technical …
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No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
Sharing a reluctant, "node & postgres" approach to engineering management for early-stage startups
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Are two heads better than one?
A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game
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The next two years of software engineering
Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...
252
Think of Pavlov
almost all interactions are repeat games
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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit - we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour). This works better than trying to finish five minutes early. Meetings often don't finish on time, and the impact is highest with back-to-back meetings.…
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Code and Let Live
How we learned to stop worrying and love writeable root filesystems.
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Why I left iNaturalist
After almost 18 years, I left iNaturalist, the product and organization I helped create. I left because I don’t believe the current Leadership team is pointing the product in the right direction, and I don’t think they are managing their talented staff in an empathetic or effective way. If you’d like me to continue…
256
Lessons from 14 years at Google
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
257
KDE onboarding is good now
And my history with KDE
258
Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
259
Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
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Love your customers
There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers.
261
I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
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When someone says they hate your product
How to reset the thermostat, and CodeRabbit as a case study
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The future of software development is software developers
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…
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Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what…
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My role as a founder-CTO: year 8
2025. What a year it has been. If a normal year as a startup founder already feels like four or five regular years, this one felt closer to a full decade. Th...
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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
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You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
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Three ways to solve problems
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
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What makes you senior
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
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Believe the Checkbook
AI companies talk as if engineering is over. Their acquisitions say the opposite.