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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 467 posts.
The Facebook-era “move fast and break things” startup motto no longer applies in today’s hyper-competitive environment. This is especially true for SaaS startups like Jam, where customers trust and rely on their products to complete their work. If you’ve met anyone on the Jam team, you
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Click to read Mr. Chan's guide to substitute teaching, a Substack publication.
Lessons learned from 10 years at Google
I recently left my job at Honeycomb. They’re a fantastic company, and I think they will be wildly successful. Still, life circumstances are such that I wanted to explore an opportunity at a much larger technology organization. More on that in another post, perhaps. In this post, I want to reflect on a unique aspect of…
My fantasy for work-life integration today
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good
This is one of my favorite stories from all of my years in applying TOC. I use it frequently in my consulting work and again it's totally tr...
I've been interviewing engineers for a while now, and it seems the more interviews I do, the more I realize how many my initial assumptions about hiring were wrong. For example, take resumes. Initially, before every interview I'd carefully review resumes. I'd look at candidate's past
Before I got into tech, I worked at a tutoring company in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., doing a mix of schoolwork-related tutoring and standardized test prep. From a business perspective, it made so much sense - you have kids taking standardized tests and parents who wanted their kids to do well…
Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.” On the other side, I frequently hear from folks who get nervous when they get these meeting invites, “The CEO/CTO/CPO/etc just scheduled…
Even if every technology jockeying for a spot under the 'web3' banner evolves beyond proof-of-work blockchains, these systems will still not be part of the web because they designed not to be. 'web3' ain't the web, and VCs talking their own book don't get the last word, no matter how much dirty money they throw at it.
2021 was not too kind to me. I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me where I just couldn’t let something go because it was wrong or incorrect and it bothered me, now you know why. I have, for better or worse, extremely high standards for…
Code review innocently asks a staggering question: “does this code look good to you?” It’s not even clear how to start to answer this question – which makes putting off code reviews easy.
I was chatting with a manager who was once a PO on a team I coached many years ago. This is only my best memory of the conversation (I didn'...
This document describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”. To motivate this evolution, we identify two separate pressure points: from the business, to grow an increasingly skilled and mature technical …
Interviewing is stressful enough, but interviewing while doing your day job?1 Yikes! Well, I just did it,2 and I’m here to tell you that it’s totally …
I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons. Today's guest is Rick Wolter. He's an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that's all…
Becoming a project manager after being a software developer for many years changed me quite a bit. Below are my thoughts and breakdown of the experience.
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Recently I met a new coworker, a now-former professor who left academia.
Curious if company swag still lands? Get the data on gifting misfires and straightforward ways to reward employees with choices they value.
On looking for alternatives to Slack culture.
For the past several weeks, I've been trying to fix a cranky spec in Karafka integrations suite, which in the end, lead me to become a Ruby on Rails micro-contributor and submitting similar fix to several other high-popularity projects from the Ruby ecosystem. Here's my story of trying to make sense of my specs and […]
To help meet growing demand, Apple today launched updated professional training and certifications for IT support and management.
A simple mental model that can help you navigate your career.
