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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.

Any year
3844

Interviewing candidates

A quick note: I’m going to be traveling for much of the rest of June and I haven’t got articles queued up, so the blog will go dark for a bit; see you in July! In the last two episodes …

3846

How Slack Harms Projects

Presently, real-time communication tools such as Slack are very popular in business environments. However, use of these tools creates a culture that harms projects. It negatively impacts planning a...

3849

Beyond Remote

On Monday, Twitter and Square announced they were going remote-first as a company. Three days later Facebook and Shopify had similar announcements. Since then, Twitter and every one of my group chats have been lit up with discussions on what the implications of these changes will be on the future of work. I've been…

3850

When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break

When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve…

3851

Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’

We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…

3853

Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO

News is going around that Yahoo! is looking for a new CEO . I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is, I would like to announce that I’m ready, willing, and insane enough to go long and go big with Yahoo! as your new CEO. Yahoo! showed glimmers of hope when it bought Flickr and Delicious. It’s been a bastion…

3859

Your company culture is a meaningless platitude

In this envelope, I have your Company Culture. We work hard, but value work/life balance. We’re a team culture and we believe in individual empowerment. We give back to the community, and have strong ethics. We hire only the best people, support diversity, and promote growth and leadership in our employee ranks. And…

3861

The cult of busy

When I was young I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise, why would they be so busy? I had busy parents and busy bosses, and I assumed they must always have importan…

3868

“That Won't Work”

Imagine the scene: Several people are discussing a problem that needs an urgent solution. Everyone is deep in thought, and one person proposes a solution. “We could…” and everyone listens intently. As soon as the person is done talking, or perhaps even before, somebody speaks up. “That won’t work!” he says. The…

3870

T-Shaped People and Academia

Being on the lookout for recruiting new students for my new research group , I wanted to distil some of my observations into textual form. This post deals with my impression that academia is doing a disservice to ‘T-shaped persons,’ i.e. persons combining deep expertise in one or more fields with an ability to…