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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 357 posts.

2012
304

Work on unimportant problems

It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.

312

Learning from competition

I experimented with custom fonts in Instapaper last year, but my efforts fizzled out. Before iOS 5, rendering custom fonts in a UIWebView on iOS was extremely buggy and slow. And nearly all of my licensing inquiries to font foundries went unanswered, so I couldn’t legally ship any of the fonts I wanted even if I could…

316

Mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur

I started my first business eight years ago in 2004. I’ve managed teams as small as two (from our top bedroom), all the way to my current 54-person team at Treehouse. I’ve had some wins and plenty of losses and learned a lot of things the hard way. Hopefully other business owners can avoid these un-fun mistakes …

320

Making shit work is everyone's job

“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work. …

325

$26,679 in 24 hours: Stats from my latest book launch

Do you work on web applications? Then you’d probably learn a lot from my new book, Designing Web Applications. A few years ago I had no idea a day like last Wednesday was even possible. After all, everyone I knew worked jobs that paid a modest yearly salary. My wealthier friends made closer to $250/day […]

330

Workplace experiments: A month to yourself

Back in 2008 we shared some of our workplace experiments including the four day work week (still in effect May – Oct), funding people’s passions (we’re still doing this, too), and discretionary spending accounts (everyone still gets a company Amex they can use for anything work re…