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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding…
Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses. ... HTML, CSS and our vanishing…
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…
I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
I was tricked into thinking I had tons of grit as a student. I worked hard in school. I put in long hours. I stayed up all night reading and preparing for debate topics, doing homework, writing essays. It was easy for me to burn the midnight oil. I enjoy
Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep.
Why are there so few girls in tech? Okay, there are a lot of female project managers and girls doing creative stuff like design or UX, though the geekier it gets the less girls are involved.
Communications in distributed teams: a write-up of my talk from FrOSCon 2020, Cloud Edition.
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…
Sam Julien is the Director of Product at CopilotKit, building open-source infrastructure for AI agents and generative UI. He writes about product strategy, developer experience, and the practical microskills that help you grow as a builder and leader.
Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It…
One of the watershed moments of my life was as a 20 year old intern attending a workplace presentation about personal finance. Over the course of one hour, I learnt about the power of buy-and-hold …
Breakneck is the ultimate SaaS Starter Kit for .net developers. Lettings you focus on your business instead of boilerplate code.
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that…
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
A letter from a disgusted teacher: I QUIT Kris L. Nielsen Monroe, NC 28110 Union County Public Schools Human Resources Department 400 North Church Street Monroe, NC 28112 October 25, 2012 To All it…
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…
