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Help me ask why you didn't just
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
I had to confront a lot of my fears about myself, sometimes every day. I had to learn to show someone else all the things I didn’t know, my limitations as a human and a software engineer.
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Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career
This post is not meant to be prescriptive. It’s also not intended to be another “Quitting Google to pursue my passion for X” article because, well, I haven’t been able to pass the interview there yet. This is a telling of my story that I hope will inspire those who are thinking about quitting to take the leap.
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Getting things “done” in large tech companies
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
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Important Coding Habits
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
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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...
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Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
Choosing to cultivate a path as a technical leader.
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Own your work
One of the easiest ways to start sharing your work in the form of writing, designs, or photographs is by using the latest trendy platform in that space, especially when everyone else seems to be using it. How many Blogspot sites are you checking these days? They still work, but Google has killed one or two services…
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Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't
Coding agents as normal technology
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Will Work for Food and Lodging
In the past, the various professions were organized as guilds. If you wanted to become a cabinet maker you’d enter into an apprenticeship arrangement with a ‘master’ cabinetmaker and you’d be taught the tricks of the trade over a several year period. As your final examination you would be required to make a…
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How To Make a Quick Buck
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
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Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
I once thought I had traveled a unique career path. Graduating from college with a degree in computer engineering and electrical engineering I was on fire to be a manager. My dad had worked for the same electrical contractor for 30-something years and I knew everyone from the Chairman of the Board d
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Trying new programming languages helped me grow as a software engineer
Use new programming languages knowledge to level up your Software Engineer career!
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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…
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Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...
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Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake
I bought the iPad Pro M1 chip in hopes of a lightweight, fast, multi-purpose device that I could also code on.
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Surviving Burnout (2015)
The first thing I know about burnout is this: burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes. I first learned this while reading about social workers, but the problem is abdundant in tech. I’ve seen it play out in every…
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Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer
I'm a full-time creator. With remote work becoming more common in tech, I get more messages from people asking: how can they do what I do?
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The benefits of learning in public
Learning in public helps me grow as an engineer and seems to benefit others too. Here's why I should do more.
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Letter to Myself in Late 2008
[I originally wrote and distributed this post to Y Combinator founders and have been encouraged to share it publicly, so here it is.]
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No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
Sharing a reluctant, "node & postgres" approach to engineering management for early-stage startups