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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
Bending over: How to sell to large companies
Selling to big companies can be lucrative, and small bootstrapped startups absolutely have the power to sell to the big boys. But it's a very different world than you're used to. Here's what you can expect and how to deal with it.
Escaping surprise bills and over-engineered messes: Why I left AWS
Frustrated with AWS's complexity and cost risks, I switched to NearlyFreeSpeech for its prepaid model, ensuring financial control while keeping hosting simple and flexible.
AI is destroying my CS degree
I am a computer science student. I got a scholarship to study computer science and AI last year and I love it! It's something that I wanted to do since I was...
Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association
I knew the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Statistical Association, and the National Academy of Sciences had problems. It turns out the American Sociological Association does some bad things too.
Quitting your job to pursue your passion is a privilege
The privileges of the self-employed, inspiring, brave, courageous entrepreneurial class that pursues their passion.
The Mediocre Programmer
The Mediocre Programmer is a book about the journey of becoming a better programmer. But before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers. Mediocre doesn't mean a bad programmer --- far from it. It means lacking skill. As beginners we start our journey full of fresh ideas of…
Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)
Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora. EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io. I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as […]
Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window (2016)
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
How to market to developers on Twitter: Learnings from 4 months of Supabase feed
Sep 01, 2026 - Learnings from going over 4 months of Supabase Twitter feed. Social media marketing tips for dev-focused companies.
Want to write some code? Get away from your computer
I’ve recently realised something. The best place to write code isn’t in front of your computer, with your compiler, IDE and tools. The best place to write code is far, far away from any of these tools – somewhere where you can think properly. For a language with which you are fairly familiar, the mechanics of…
A Path to Full-time Open Source
Two years ago today I released Sidekiq Pro, my commercial extension to Sidekiq, as an experiment to see if I could make OSS development financially viable for individual developers. I had no idea if anyone would trust me and buy it. Can you think of anyone else selling a Rubygem?
What A CEO Does
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
Carta's 83b Oversight: A Tax Trap for Married Startup Employees (2023)
There's a blind spot in Carta's 83(b) election feature you need to know about if you're married and living in California.
A Distributed Meeting Primer
As a leader who primarily values team health, I place great value on the weekly 1:1 because it’s where I assess health. It’s my highest bandwidth meeting, and h
Some lessons learned
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers
The end of 10+ years of 0% interest rates is set to change the tech industry. What do higher rates mean for software engineering jobs, developers, and careers; and how can you prepare for this shift?
Lessons learned since posting my salary history publicly
What I've learned in the year since posting my salary history publicly.