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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.

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212

Before the Startup

October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…

213

I got robbed of my first kernel contribution

Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control…

215

Your own company? You can do it (2011)

When I was 17 and a high school drop-out I went to work for a bank. My mom was ecstatic, I had a job, in spite of my failure to ‘get an education’. Never mind that the job that I got was mailroom gofer. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a mail runner for a bank. And run I did. So fast that…

223

Get me out of data hell

It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.

226

Always Be Quitting

A good philosophy to live by at work is to “always be quitting”. No, don’t be constantly thinking of leaving your job 😱. But act as if you might leave on short notice 😎. Counterintuitively, this will make you a better engineer and open up growth opportunities. A thread 👇.

232

I hope work from home continues

I just hope my employer continues to allow me to work remotely. Working from home I: Have been exceeding production for the past year Don't have to share a keyboard/mouse/desk with another shift (gross). Do not spend an hour a day(+/- 10 minutes) driving, and save all the money associated

234

Options vs. Cash

I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for…

238

Costs of running a macOS app studio business

I created The low-tech guys, a brand under which I develop macOS apps for a living. I started this business with a good friend of mine, thinking I could help him stop working long hours at his consulting job and ease into more creative work. However, getting to a state where you earn enough to live off the app sales…

239

Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…