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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 190 posts.

2014
92

There are no B players

“Only hire A players! Fire the B players!” “If you hire B players, then they will hire C players!” “Over time, the A players will get frustrated with the B players and will leave to go to other companies and you’ll be left only with B and C players,

93

Leaving Google

As of March 17th I’ll be an ex-employee. It’s an amicable separation in the face of irreconcilable differences: I wouldn’t move to California and Google wouldn’t open a Vancouver office. I haven’t decided what to do next.

101

409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered

Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…

110

Be Nice Or Leave

We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For […]

112

The Wolf

You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics:

116

Code review without your glasses

You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?

118

Board Members

Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...