4711
The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth : Bruce F. Webster
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
4712
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
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…
4713
Five Worlds
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
4714
Fog Creek Compensation
At Fog Creek Software, the way we make sure that people are paid fairly and rewarded for excellent work is based on a professional ladder. Historically, our ladder is based on Microsoft’s pro…
4715
Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
4716
FAA Biographical Assessment
could you pass the FAA's Air Traffic Controller (ATC) biographical assessment?
4717
Simplicity
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacke…
4718
The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, processes, and other people. These people have opinions, and they share them all
4719
Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
4720
Back to Basics
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
4721
Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
4722
Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
4723
The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
4724
steve yegge - five-essential-phone-screen-questions
The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ I've been on a lot of SDE interview loops lately where the candidate failed miserably: not-inclined votes all around, even from the phone screeners who brought the person in initially. It's usually pretty obvious when the
4725
Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
4726
How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
4727
Advice for Computer Science College Students
Despite the fact that it was only a year or two ago that I was blubbering about how rich Windows GUI clients were the wave of the future, college students nonetheless do occasionally email me askin…
4728
A Field Guide to Developers
Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna …
4729
Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
4730
Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
4731
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
4732
Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering
Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low res…
4733
Painless Functional Specifications
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
4734
Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
4735
Welcome to Rands Leadership Slack
For a role as crucial as leadership, there is a shocking lack of required training on the topic. Combined with a tremendous collection of impenetrable literatur
4736
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
The current version of this article is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, Version 3.0.
4737
Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists
Did you invest in 10 years of medical school and training? What if you'd bought bitcoin and sat on the beach instead?
4738
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
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…
4739
Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&…
4740
Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work
Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees…