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Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Broken updates, Copilot shoved everywhere, and my system bricking itself. Here's why I finally escaped to Linux.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 217 posts.
2
Don't be a meat proxy
Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:
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Lessons from 14 years at Google
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
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Appearing productive in the workplace
AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert. The failure arrives in two shapes, and both are reshaping the workplace.
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I’m joining OpenAI
I'm joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.
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LLMs reward expertise
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact…
7
Can we have the day off?
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all…
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Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
I’ve taken agency in the treatment of my bone cancer (osteosarcoma in the T5 vertebrae of the upper spine). After I ran out of standard-of-care treatment options and there were no trials available for…
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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...
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HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
How hiring is becoming a luck filter.
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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.
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Being ambitious and being a dad
When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my work.
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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
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Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
15
I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
I was one of the very first advocates for AWS back when it was brand new - SQS, S3, EC2 SimpleDB - it was a lot smaller back then. In fact I...
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Some things just take time
On friction, patience, and planting trees.
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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
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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.
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Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
Leadership at the social media giant has been on an AI-fueled rampage through its engineering org. We report what’s happened
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The worst job interview I ever had
Or how not to do a culture fit interview
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Learning Software Architecture
In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:
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Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
A timeline of founding a company in Germany: €11,800 spent, two companies registered, 203 days to a VAT ID, and a registration nobody mentioned.
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Fuck it, make it anyway
Carrying on in the face of creative devaluation.
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I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
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How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
How listening broadly turns everyday problems into useful project ideas.
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Coding is not solved
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
28
Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
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Doing the thing is doing the thing
Software Engineer, LITM
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Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...