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Risk management is not project management
Why shifting full accountability for high-risk tasks to third parties increases rather than decreases project risk.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
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Harmful Gotos, Premature Optimizations, and Programming Myths
Let's revisit some programming myths and see how harmful they have been to our industry.
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Taste vs. Skills
A simple mental model that can help you navigate your career.
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The things first time founders do…
Last week @robfitz asked me on short notice to join a panel at #foundersexchange about what first time founders shouldn’t do. I qu...
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Optimize Onboarding
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
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Why lack of confidence can make you a better programmer
What if you’re not a superstar programmer? What if other people work longer than you, or harder than you, or have built better projects than you? Can you succeed without self-confidence? I believe you can, and moreover I feel that lack of confidence can actually make you a better programmer.
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Stop trying to make hard work easy
How to cope even when work is hard.
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Documentation – Your Secret Weapon
When you work on a software project, someone will eventually ask a variation of this dreaded question - "Do you know where I can find documentation for this feature?" or "Do you know why we implemented pattern x over pattern y?" or my personal favourite "What the heck does this piece of code even do?".
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We don't do that here (2017)
If no one has told you yet, as your career in tech progresses you will eventually become a custodian of culture. If you run a meetup or a team, if you lead an open source project, or if you organize an event people will be looking to you to know what is and isn’t okay in that space. You get this responsibility whether…
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What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)
What women in technology really think (150 of them, at least)
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Academics, we need to talk
Although I made the move to industry a bit more than five years ago, I still serve on program committees and review articles for journals a...
3314
My Amazon interview experience
It all started back when I was still working at SAP . A few colleagues mentioned Amazon was opening up another office in Yaletown . I believe it was in January 2013 or so. I wasn’t very interested at first, but after hearing about it a couple times, I gave it some more thought and decided it wouldn’t hurt. I was going…
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Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used. Most forms of direct…
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Hopefully fair performance reviews for software developers
Note: if you're just looking for performance review templates and examples, head to the templates page [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/templates-as-inspiration-for-software-engineers/] to download them. I've had about a dozen performance reviews during my decade-long software engineering career. Some of them were…
3319
Lessons Learned from Two Years as a Data Scientist
I finally escaped from (grad) school in 2019, spent two months interning as an assistant trader at FTX, and have since spent the last two years working as a data scientist, with the bulk of that time at Microsoft and the last two months at Anthropic. Not gonna lie — my time as a data scientist has been pretty awesome…
3320
Finding Your Swagger
This is a story about a time I lost my swagger.
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Software Friction
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which…
3322
New responsibilities
As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email , my management chain has made the decision to stop a...
3323
On Being a Junior Developer
Junior developer (for purposes of this post)is a developer with < 2 years experience programming in industry who have an interest in sharpening their technical skills. I recently graduated from Stanford with a degree in Computer Science. I’ve been programming for 4 years and feel comfortable claiming ~1.5 years…
3324
Measuring an engineering organization
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I…
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Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off
Some people believe that carrying out a large software project is like building a bridge. You look at your past projects and use the data to estimate the time and resources needed. This view has been debunked decades ago; this analogy was frequently seen as an aspiration for the future when I did my Master in Software…
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We need your beginner’s mind
We need your experiments and your questions and your feedback. Your lack of understanding is a valuable attribute that goes away as you gain experience.