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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
The illegible nature of software development talent
Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a …
How to work with me - a no BS approach
In March 2005, a photocopy was handed to me in preparation for work with one of the top wigs. It enumerated the rules necessary to avoid con...
Phil Haack quit Microsoft for GitHub
.hubot stache me
Being Slow to Criticise
This post is not about that story. This post is about a comment made by one of the readers in the forum where I saw it.
One Bad “Policy Change” Email Can Kill Company Culture
We've all received a work email that made us cringe - the ones that sound formal and threatening or vaguely like a punishment for something we're pretty
When Should I Interrupt Someone?
How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought:
What developers think when you say "Rock Star"
When you say "rock star" in your job post, you're discouraging the best software developers from contacting you. When you write, "We're looking for a rock star developer." A developer sees, "We...
My Time at MIT
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
Hacking is Important
Back in the early 90s, Borland International was the place to be an engineer. Coming off the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland was the third largest software com
My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work
I’ve become increasingly disgruntled at the state of hiring, and now I’m mad enough to write this blog post.
Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
The 2001 agile manifesto was an attempt to replace rigid, process and management heavy, development methodologies with a more human and soft...
A brief update
Over the last couple years, I’ve seen more and more people in technology trying to make government work better. They’re idealists who are also making a large impact. These are people th…
Rules of thumb for software development estimations
Project estimates are a crucial part of project management, helping to predict the time and resources needed for successful completion. Accurate estimates can be achieved through experience, understanding the project's complexity, and using the right estimation techniques. Overestimation can lead to wasted resources…
KDE onboarding is good now
And my history with KDE
B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
The problem of product managers is not that they exist but rather that they have too much power. We have all seen these articles written by developers that explain that product managers are useless. They miss the point. I think it is pretty obvious that PMs (whether you call them …
The Relentless Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO’s in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.
Be Nice Or Leave
We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For […]
The Cult of the Root Cause
“Why?” is my favorite question because it illuminates relationships between cause and effect. And when we ask this question more than once we expose even deeper causal relationships. Unfortunately,…
We Can Achieve Anything If We Stop Trying To Do Everything
All good thing take time to achieve. But if you rely on the power of compounding, you don't have to force things.