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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
In the past 6 years I’ve worked on web applications in Rails, Clojure, Java and back to Rails. This is an overview of these past years, the benefits of working with such different tech stacks, and also it’s drawbacks.
This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…
With increasing IT volumes in the world, landscape change is getting harder and harder, and we need to adapt to that fact. Upper management is very slow to adapt and the Enterprise/IT Architect/Str…
This is the return code blog, tech and other stuff.
Stewardship in the age of cheap code
This is a transcript of the bonus material at the end of the giant How to Get Rich episode. A common question we get: “How do I find the time to start investing in myself? I have a job.” In one of the tweets from the cutting room floor, you wrote: “You will need to rent your time to get started. More
Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young ... Read more
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
A recap of the recent interview process with several companies, what I learned, and what others should know.
Also see: cold emails (with examples) Here’s how Travis Kalanick’s inbox looked like back in 2013: Source (perma) If you wanted to reach Travis — and keep in mind that at some point during the last six years he probably hit #inbox1m — would you just send him one email and hope that it wins the lottery when he randomly…
This blog post was supposed to come out two years ago in response to, I think, this article. Better late than never? After literally years of people
For some of us, the backend vs frontend discussion just doesn’t cut it. What do do, then?
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
/imagine one day randomly finding yourself in a foreign country thousands of kilometres away from home. Your own country is suddenly at war, and all you have is a backpack hanging off your back. That’s a weird situation to be in. But you have to figure something out. So starting a fake delivery company sounds like the…
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
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…
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
