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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 215 posts.
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in
Thanks to a recruiting process that left a bad taste in my mouth, I refuse to accept any further interviews from large tech companies unless they are on my terms.
My name is Maria. I happily identify as female. I work as an Agile Coach for a tech company in Cambridge, UK. I am not a woman in tech. I grew up in Pjedsted, a village in Denmark, with my mum and …
Full disclosure: my employer makes a Slack alternative. All my concerns about the use of Slack type chat services apply equally to its competitors, including my employer’s.
Have you ever thought to yourself, “I need to get paid far far less than I’m worth?” Me neither. And yet some companies not only pay less, they’re proud of it. Allow me to explain—
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
We've all heard how expensive college is getting, along with plenty of criticism surrounding its value in a changing job market. Of course, there are many benefits beyond the monetary ones that should be considered when exploring college options, but for the purpose of this post I'm going to limit the scope and purely…
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…
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…
Back in 2005 I suddenly found myself sitting on a big pile of money after the Google IPO so I did what any young nouveau-riche high-tech dil...
The differences between system administrators and software developers as well as why all software developers should have some amount of sysadmin experience.
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of…
This year, around February, I started offering telephone support for Taxnote, which I hadn’t done up until then, because the idea made me anxious. I intended to quit if, at any time, I thought it was tough for me to do; but, so far, I have continued with it for over half a year, so
The current draft of the Senate Tax Reform Bill would tax stock options and RSUs upon vesting. Currently, stock options are taxed upon exercise and RSUs are taxed upon release of the underlying shares. This is a HUGE deal to everyone who works in companies that partially compensate their employees with these two…
Did I mention how awesome it is to live 30 minutes from a ski lift?In March of 2016, I launched a course called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Sinc...
In the early 1960s, Richard Feynman gave a series of undergraduate lectures that were collected into a book called the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Absent from
Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started.
Have you ever felt like you were behind? I used to feel that way. I would read articles about a 26-year-old entrepreneur with a billion-dollar company or a 16-year-old kid who invented a new kind o…
I recently read a story here titled “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.”
A surprisingly long cycle has just closed for me and I think it’s a good time to share some lessons learned. I have been collecting these points in the last six months, but none of them poppe…
As software developers, I think we can agree that open-source 1 code has transformed the world . Its public nature tears down the walls that prevent some pieces of software from becoming the best they can be. The problem is that too many valuable projects stagnate, with burned-out leaders:
One of the biggest realisations I’ve come to as part of my PhD, is how little people care about how I spend my time, they only care about what I am able to deliver. Yet in order to deliver, you need to finish. I was recently reading an article on this topic, and I think the advice can be best summed up as:
