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I Write Letters to CEOs
I write letters to CEOs and many of them write me back. Here are some of the responses that I’ve received and the lessons that I’ve learned.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,747 posts.
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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.
603
Developer hiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
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Maybe you’re not trying
On selective agency in capable people
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What happens when you stop relying on resumes
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve come to rely quite heavily on data. I’ve counted typos on resumes, I’ve sifted through a corpus of engineering offers, and I’ve skimmed thousands of recruiting messages to tag them by personalization level. This post, however, is going to be a bit of […]
606
Finishing a side project
I've struggled with some side projects and had success with others. In this post, I'll focus on the actions and adjustments that have worked for me.
607
Most technical problems are people problems
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
608
Is TDD Dead? (2014)
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
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Why Scrum is stressing you out
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
610
Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that individual productivity…
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Amazon's Silent Sacking
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
612
Do the math on your stock options
Things you should know about stock options before negotiating an offer
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Always Be Coding – How to Land an Engineering Job
How to Land an Engineering Job.
614
95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
615
Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
616
That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
617
Your statement is correct but misses the point
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
618
Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational
A surprisingly long cycle has just closed for me and I think it’s a good time to share some lessons learned. I have been collecting these points in the last six months, but none of them poppe…
619
Care Doesn't Scale
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
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What I Learned Selling a Software Business
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.
623
Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world: And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because: 1. people aren't talking to people 2. people aren't listening So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to
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Root for your friends
Heads‑up: The concept of this post might seem trivial, but it can improve your career, happiness, and the people you care about. Proceed without caution. It only takes about 10 minutes to read.
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Habits of High-Functioning Teams
I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these…
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A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure
. Not the kind of log I meant.