Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 357 posts.

Career & Management
2012
138

One hiring filter that works

In a fairly popular blog post, Raganwald advocates against using various heuristics while filtering out resumes. For the most part, I agree with him. Since it's hard to find good programmers, false negatives are very costly compared to the cost of a false positive (a wasted interview). But I have …

142

The Bozo Event Horizon

I’m on a Harvard mailing list for some folks interested in startups and innovation. A recent thread of discussion was around hiring, and in a posting to the group I talked about making sure that you did your hiring so that you avoided the bozo effect. I was asked by a number of people what I meant by that, which led…

147

Why I'm done with Scrum

My first foray into Agile was with a product team back in 2004-2005. It was my first “real” job out of college, and my first experience with a death march. During the death march, I was struck on how bad the idea of death marching was. Working weekends, long hours etc. were a sign of failure not on the development…