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Getting to know the right people (2022)
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2022/06/getting-to-know-the-right-people/ .
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
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Things your manager might not know (2021)
Things your manager might not know
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Winning a hackathon, losing my sanity
A few weeks ago, my friend Ben and I won JumboHack , a hackathon at Tufts University. Our entry generates a Spotify Wrapped-like summary of students’ dining habits by scraping Tufts’ meal plan portal. Through some clever promotion on Ben’s part, we managed to get hundreds of students to use it in just a couple of…
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Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep (2011)
Starting in mid-2004 and until the end of 2006, I worked at a small DNS and DHCP software company called Nominum . These days Nominum offer...
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Why to Not Write a Book
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
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My Emotions as a CEO
I stepped down as CEO in October 2020 after nine years at CircleUp. I will be a CEO again. There were parts of the role I loved and it was the best job I ever had. During my transition, I’ve had ti…
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How to join a team and learn a codebase (2020)
I have switched teams more often than I have had to implement an AVL tree, and you can guess which one of those two was taught in school. I wish someone had taught me how to join a new team! While learning a new codebase can be daunting, I've found a few things that work for me.
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Stories from 25 Years of Software Development
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my…
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How to conduct a good programming interview
Any software engineer who has ever looked for a job has had the interview experience: being locked in a small room for an hour, asked to write code to solve some arbitrary programming task, while being grilled by one or two interviewers whether or why the code they've written is correct.
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My first industry job: lies, deceptions, and layoffs
My first job was both a blessing and a nightmare. It taught me more about the world than about software development, but those lessons were invaluable.
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Being good at coding competitions correlates negatively with job performance
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…
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Small Teams
Patrick Collison has a great list of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things. Inspired by that, I created a page of impressive things accomplished by small teams.
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On a great interview question
Between 2010 and 2019 I interviewed dozens of Software Engineer candidates at Google. Almost always I asked the same interview question…
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You will never “fix it later”
Recently I approved a pull request from a colleague, that had the following description: “That’s a hacky way of doing this, but I don’t have time today to come up with a better im…
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Take pride or fuck it
The blank, unblemished untitled.txt shimmering in your code editor can mean only one thing. It’s new feature time.
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A useful productivity measure?
In my new role as VP of Engineering , there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?”
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