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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 242 posts.
Firing People
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
A Survival Guide to a PhD
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
10-Year Exercise Periods Make Sense
Scott Kupor at Andreessen Horowitz has a post today on some potential downsides of 10-year exercise periods for startup employees’ stock options. I’d recommend reading the whole thing for context here, but to summarize: * He argues that allowing employees who leave a company to keep their optio...
Develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris
In computing, “laziness” is a broad term, generally referring to not doing any work unless you need it. Whereas its opposite is “eagerness,” doing as much work as possible in case you need it later.
Heisenberg Developers (2014)
TL:DR You can not observe a developer without altering their behavior. First a story. Several years ago I worked on a largish project...
CEO
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope…
Why does software development take so long?
Nageru 1.4.0 is out (and on its way through the Debian upload process right now), so now you can do live video mixing with multichannel audio to your heart's content. I've already blogged about most of the interesting new features, so instead, I'm trying to answer a question: What took so long?
Tech job listings are down 40% on several job boards
I run a job board that caters to tech jobs, primarily web professionals. This year has been pretty bonkers compared to previous years.
Why I close pull requests
I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs. A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are…
One year later
A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.
Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management
I first started managing people seven years ago, three years after I graduated and got my first design job. At the time, I was woefully…
How to Survive an Acquisition
Last week Facebook announced that they will be shutting down Parse.
Coding without Google
Back in 2016, an intriguing article appeared on Reddit: “Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently?”. The author discussed if expert programmers use google more often than novice coders. He mentioned that using google is a good thing. It helps to find the best solutions, validate ideas, speed the development…
My Passion Was My Weak Spot
For many years in the beginning of my career I’d been more than happy to work for free or even at a loss as long as the work was interesting. I was so totally in love with computer programming and the feeling I got from making something work and then seeing that creation be used by other people that I completely lost…
Software Developers: how to get a raise without changing jobs
Here’s how to boost your lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars by getting periodic raises without changing jobs.
Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software
For the first time since Fog Creek Software was founded more than sixteen years ago, we have a new CEO, Anil Dash.
Hackathon Be Gone
Last weekend I attended the MHacks: Refactor hackathon on behalf of my company. I acted as a representative of my company as well as a mentor for the hackers...
People suck at technical interviews (2014)
Most technical interviews test the wrong things: memorized syntax, whiteboard coding, brand-name employers. Instead, hire for learning ability, intellectual honesty, clear communication, and basic decency. "Team fit" is bias in disguise. Homogeneity means you're hiring wrong. Good hiring is hard and slow, but worth it.
Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines
I've had this blog post in one form or another of draft for several years now. I hesitated to complete it, in part because at the best of times cultural observations can easily be misinterpreted and also in part because of the role I had in working with many
Leaving Mozilla
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.