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Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
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Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Paul Graham's recent essay Great Hackers . His sermon is well-written, and I assume it played very well when he preached it to the choir at OSCON .
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All the remedial classes in one place
A look at the “serious” courses in college today. By Professor Doom I’ve seen plenty of articles bemoaning ridiculous col...
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Business Requirements are Bullshit
How do you go about gathering business requirements, so you know what to deliver to the customer?
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Types of Engineers
A plethora of books, articles, and research papers have been written about software engineering quality measurement. Over the course of the last half-century, different methods of measurement have been developed, adopted, abused, and discarded for newer methods that aim to solve the problems of the previous methods.
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Top Surprises When Starting Out as a Software Developer
Even though more than 20 years have passed, I still remember wondering what it would be like to finish university and start working. Up until that point, I had pretty much spent my whole life in sc…
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How to charge clients: flat fee vs. hourly rate?
credit Having been back in the freelance world for a while now, I once again have to deal with quoting my clients an hourly rate for long-term contract work on an ongoing basis. I've been able to...
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From engineer to manager: A practical guide to your first months in leadership
A practical and thoughtful guide for new engineering managers. Learn how to build agreements, avoid micromanagement, run effective 1:1s, and navigate your first months with clarity.
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Criminal Overengineering
A vast proportion of software at work today is horribly over-engineered for its task. And I’m not talking about the interfaces, about having too many controls or options for the users. These …
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Now that you have turned 22 can I please give you some advice...
I come across a lot of advice daily, but there was one piece of advice that stuck out to me recently. This is what not to do in life.
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Assistant to the Regional Manager
The problem with utopia
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Interview like an asset, not a beggar
You're not asking for a job, you're selling a service. The true question behind every interview is "How can you help us?"
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“Write Every Day” Is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects
A Flawed Axiom Write every day. If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On ... Read more
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The Risks of Staying Put
Friends! Pals! Treasured work associates! Last month Mandy Brown wrote about how she struggled to quit her job and this bit hit me like a sledgehammer: “I...
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Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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Coding Like a Girl
(this was originally given as a talk at AlterConf in Oakland)
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New junior developers can’t code
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re…
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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
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Best Practices – Why I Hate Them
I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.
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My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
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What’s the point of tech conferences?
It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight’s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not …
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You can't git clone a team
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
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“Technical” Skills
If you've ever said "soft skills" and felt weird about it, this essay is for you