Topics /

Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 370 posts.

2022
61

I am not a supplier

For the past few years, we have seen a lot of discussions around the concept of the Software Supply Chain. These discussions started around the time of LeftPad and escalated with multiple incidents in the past few years. The problem of all the work in this domain is that it forgets a fundamental point.

64

All companies are fucked up

Belts in Karate are ordered from white to black. This is of course a new invention. Originally, new colored belts were not given upon arbitrary levels of attainment, a white belt was given at the beginning of one's training and you just never washed it. Over the years...

65

I’m taking some time away from Comma

I’m taking some time away from comma. In some ways, I feel like it’s all planned out, it only remains to see if it works or not. I rewatched my first Lex Fridman and realized I hadn’t said much new on the self driving front for the past couple years. My two part blog post from 2019 remains a true description of the…

69

Don’t point out something wrong immediately

This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…

74

Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against populations than people. In the case of…

76

Hard to work with

Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled…

81

Wait vs. Interrupt Culture

At this past weekend's CFAR Workshop (about which, by the way, I plan to have another post soon with less whining and more serious discussion), someone mentioned that they were uncomfortable with pauses in conversation, and that got me thinking about different conversational styles.