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Career & Management

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

Any year
4685

Dave Shen: What I've Learned in Angel Investing

Paul Graham of YCombinator ran a great afternoon conference called Angelconf where he brought together a great afternoon of Silicon Valley angels to talk about how to become an angel. He then wrote a great blog post about it . I managed to watch a lot of it, although I was in NYC at the time and it was tough to watch…

4686

Back to Basics (2001)

We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…

4691

Yahoo loses key mysql developer

It seems that word has started to leak out, so I might as well remove any speculation or ambiguity. In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo! as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge. After 8.5 years of service and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time…

4695

Your People

In your career as a geek, there's a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddenin

4696

Staff archetypes

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…

4697

The Magpie Developer

I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer

4699

Quantity Always Trumps Quality

Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered

4701

The Perils of JavaSchools

Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…

4702

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that

4703

Evidence Based Scheduling

Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce t…

4704

Fire And Motion

Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E…

4707

Finding Great Developers

Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …

4708

Five Worlds

Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…

4710

Women in Science

Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest…