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Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
Non-obvious advice that I wish I learned sooner.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 217 posts.
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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
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Someone behind the software
I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.
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How I estimate work
There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software projects will take is very…
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How to ask for help from people who don't know you
Pradyumna's site
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Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
I’ll be attending Babashka Conf on May 8 and Dutch Clojure Days on May 9. If you’re attending either (or just visiting Amsterdam), drop me a line!
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I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why.
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Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
A systems analysis of how AI-assisted development creates a gap between output speed and understanding, and why organizations cannot see it happening.
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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers
We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.
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The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
An update to Brooks's Law in the age of AI.
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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task…
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Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
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Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
AI definitely helps with productivity, but only when you have the right culture in place first!
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I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation
Appaji, a Computer Science graduate from IIT Patna and former intern at Arista Networks, is a Software Engineer at Infinite Reality. Passionate about building innovative web experiences, with a strong interest in sustainable and customer-focused startups.
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Leaving Google has actively improved my life
In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.^1] This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consum...
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The peril of laziness lost
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:
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Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
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I don't want the details
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
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Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world: And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because: 1. people aren't talking to people 2. people aren't listening So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to
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I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
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I quit. The clankers won
The one where I pack up my bags.
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What to learn to be a graphics programmer
I get asked fairly often what people need to know to be hireable as a graphics programmer. I figured it was time to make a page to link instead of re-typing it each time. We are in a strange time w…
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The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind
A breakdown of what software development teams actually cost, what they need to generate to be financially viable, and why most organizations have no visibility into either number.
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Bug Blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work , but most people I talk to don't see anything like this . For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that…
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GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.
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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
Writing code is easier than ever. Being a software engineer is harder than ever. The paradox nobody talks about, and what engineers and leaders should do.
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Mythical Man Month
a bliki entry for Mythical Man Month
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Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
I'm creating a simple developer utility to make managing Claude Code profiles (e.g. running it with DeepSeek, or some OpenRouter models) a little bit easier.