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AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
A response to Rich Hickey's "'AI' is Not a Tool": automation and tool use can coexist, and wielding an LLM well requires skill, feedback, and judgment.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Find Your People
Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube. Thirty-two...
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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
I've worked at various tech companies: from "traditional" shops and consultancies, through an investment bank, to high-growth tech firms. I've also talked with software engineers working at startups, banking, automotive, big tech, and more "traditional" companies. This mix had a healthy sample of Silicon-Valley…
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Software Architecture Guide
Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system's internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
Here are some things that I hated as a student. At the time, I thought my teachers didn’t understand or care how terrible they were.
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Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job.
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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New Grad vs. Senior Dev
A student who I used to tutor in CS occasionally sent me a meme yesterday which showed “NEW GRAD vs SENIOR DEVELOPER”; the new grad is all caps yelling NO! YOU CAN’T JUST USE BRUT…
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What “work” looks like
Collaboration is amazing! There’s absolutely no trade-offs, right? The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to…
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I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now
and i think you do too - but i'll tell you anyway
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How I Run a Company with ADHD
For the first 19 years of my life I was convinced I was lazy. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD. I've since started a company and grown it to a team of 8. Here's how I've learned to not just cope, but embrace the disorder.
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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
Personal website of Dr. Alexander Coward — mathematician, educator, and entrepreneur. Formerly at UC Berkeley, Oxford, UC Davis, and The University of Sydney.
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
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Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
LLMs make it easier to write code, but understanding, reviewing, and maintaining it still takes time, trust, and good judgment.
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Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
on starting, doing, being, and becoming.
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Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
I hope I don't get kicked out of Yale for this.
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Individuals Matter
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't…
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Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
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You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
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The Frontend Treadmill
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend…
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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
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A career ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
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Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)
I think it is important to have a bias for action. Like anything else, this is something you can make a habit of. Moving forward allows you to make progress. I don’t know about you, but I’ve frozen up in the past not knowing what the right path was for me. Moving forward, even the smallest possible step, helped break…