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Our SQL interview questions
The exact SQL questions we ask developer candidates during interviews, with the schema and the answers. Steal them for your own hiring.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,087 posts.
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Tech salaries are risk premiums
This blog post was supposed to come out two years ago in response to, I think, this article. Better late than never? After literally years of people
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Career advice for young system programmers
For some of us, the backend vs frontend discussion just doesn’t cut it. What do do, then?
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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…
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A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
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We created a fake delivery company to get a job
/imagine one day randomly finding yourself in a foreign country thousands of kilometres away from home. Your own country is suddenly at war, and all you have is a backpack hanging off your back. That’s a weird situation to be in. But you have to figure something out. So starting a fake delivery company sounds like the…
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A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter (2018)
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
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I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing
After 5 years in DevOps, I moved into Solutions Engineering. Here’s what I was missing, what changed, and who this path might be for.
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The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
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409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered
Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…
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Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – Aka RFCs
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
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My 25-year adventure in AI and ML
This is the 25-year story of how I fell into the field of AI.
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Developer on Call
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
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Sucks to be an old engineer
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
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Vesper, Adieu
If I could do it all over again, here is what I would do differently.
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What I Learned at Stripe
In February 2022, I left my job at Splunk to take some time first to relax then to focus on finding a fantastic next job . I managed to do both during my three months of funemployment, landing a job at Stripe in the Atlas team in May. I was laid off in November 2022, along with most people who were hired during this…
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How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack
Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which…
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You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: "If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the dat
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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So you want to be a consultant?
Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
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