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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership
Intuition works from the shadows. Look at it directly and you get rationalization, not explanation—the verbal brain fills the gaps with a plausible story.
The lazy way to being outstanding: go after hard things
Doing the hard things is both the best thing for the company, for you and counterintuitively – your lifestyle.
Who's at the Helm?
Or, how to deploy 25+ CVEs to prod in one command!
Great Programmers (2004)
I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…
How to ace a YC interview
Spring has sprung, and the smell of fresh YC applications is in the air. It’s that special time that happens twice a year where thousands…
Ridiculously Transparent
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
The value of an engineering degree
Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told […]
The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
Anti Mediocracy Manifesto for Software Development
XOScript is a simple server-side scripting language.
Things the most successful people I know struggle with to be happy
“You wouldn’t want to be me.” is the line Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan about his life. Many of us see the successes and the outward experiences people produce and think up. Yet, few of us get to see what it’s like on the inside of that person’s body or day to day life. It […]
The hero's journey of getting laid off
Culture, technology, & travel once or twice a week. Click to read Back to Humanity, a Substack publication.
Development slowness in big and legacy applications
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
Work Somewhere Dysfunctional
The rewards are great if you can survive…
Should you work fixed hours, even if you have a flexible schedule?
The beauty of having a flexible schedule, when you are a freelancer, remote worker, or consultant, is being able to work whenever you like. When traveling, you can spend the whole day touring and working at night. Or maybe working in the morning and night, and enjoying the evenings. Whatever you want, it’s your call…
Pros and cons of solo development
I created and maintain Luxury Yacht, a desktop app for managing Kubernetes clusters. Think Headlamp, Lens, and k9s. It's that kind of app. Luxury Yacht is a ...
Microsoft Teams is a red flag
Teams looks free because it comes in the bundle. The people paying for that choice are the ones stuck using it every day.
Eastern European Guide to Writing Reference Letters
Excruciating. One phrase I often use to describe what it's like to read reference letters for Eastern European applicants to PhD and Master's programs in Cambridge. Even objectively outstanding students often receive dull, short, factual, almost negative-sounding reference letters. This is a result of (A)...
Of Booze and Brogrammers
There's been a little bit of noise about the culture of "hard partying" at programmer conferences. Ryan complains about binge drinking , a...
Things that have a bigger impact than coding assistants
Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, gra…
$26,679 in 24 hours: Stats from my latest book launch
Do you work on web applications? Then you’d probably learn a lot from my new book, Designing Web Applications. A few years ago I had no idea a day like last Wednesday was even possible. After all, everyone I knew worked jobs that paid a modest yearly salary. My wealthier friends made closer to $250/day […]
Programmer Migration Patterns
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...