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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 1,339 posts.
Saying "NO"
I saw this cartoon in a tweet today. It’s the story of how a boss corrupts the work of a professional. It’s a funny cartoon, and a sad story that happens all too often in our profession. But who, exactly, was at fault?...
The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
A lot of groups that don't get invited to interviews would like to know why. This is a reasonable thing to want. If there's something wrong with your project, you want to know what.
We are changing our developer productivity experiment design
Our second developer productivity study faces selection effects from wider AI adoption, prompting us to redesign our approach.
Remote: the new book by 37signals, coming fall 2013
On top of making Basecamp, we write books about what we’ve learned running our own business. They’re filled with practical advice you won’t find anywhere else.
You can not buy ideas or talent
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
How to hire a programmer when you're not a programmer
How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for… 1. How opinionated are they? Ask them about a juicy programming topic (e.g. Ruby or Python?). The tone and reasoning of the answer will reveal a lot. In our recent podcast on programming, Jeff said, &#…
Optimize for now!
One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. Th…
Quit your job
Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some…
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…
Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared
Lately I’ve been seeing more speakers hop up on stage at a conference and say “I didn’t prepare anything so I’m just gonna wing it.” Or they’ll let you know that they’re “Sorry about the quality of the slides – I put them together quickly on the…
Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment
Many game developers are starting to find that games with illusory challenges sell better than those with real challenge. They believe that…
Google To Cut 200 Jobs
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Standing versus Sitting
Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it…