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Interview like an asset, not a beggar
You're not asking for a job, you're selling a service. The true question behind every interview is "How can you help us?"
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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“Write Every Day” Is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects
A Flawed Axiom Write every day. If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On ... Read more
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The Risks of Staying Put
Friends! Pals! Treasured work associates! Last month Mandy Brown wrote about how she struggled to quit her job and this bit hit me like a sledgehammer: “I...
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How to Survive a Critique: A Guide to Giving and Receiving Feedback
We are committed to advancing the future of design within our communities, among our members, in small businesses and corporations, in educational institutions, and for individuals. Please use this community resource hub as a guide to some of the most critical needs our community faces today, and will face in the…
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Strategy and criteria decision matrix: A framework for decision making
I attended a talk by Evan Moore a while ago, where he described a framework the early team at Doordash used to make decisions and prioritize growth strategies. I was impressed by the systematic way of listing strategies and assigning them weights based on possible impact + predicted effort it would take to execute…
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Should lawyers learn to code? Arguments for and against
Should lawyers learn to code? We examine the suitability of lawyers to coding, plus arguments for and againt lawyers and law students learning to code.
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Coding Like a Girl
(this was originally given as a talk at AlterConf in Oakland)
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An interview code submission that wasn’t even submitted changed our process
In a previous role, I was an engineering manager for a well-known company for a particular tech stack. One way we sorted through all the applications was requiring coding tests for potential candidates. One truly stood out, and it taught me to think about what I am really looking for in these sorts of submissions.
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New junior developers can’t code
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re…
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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to…
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Best Practices – Why I Hate Them
I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.
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My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
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What’s the point of tech conferences?
It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight’s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not …
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You can't git clone a team
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
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“Technical” Skills
If you've ever said "soft skills" and felt weird about it, this essay is for you
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Telling people to leave finance
I used to work in finance, and now I don’t. I haven’t regretted leaving for a moment, even when I’ve been unemployed and confused about what to do next. Lots of my friends that I …
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How to prepare for losing your programming job
Another week has passed, and another 3 million people in the US have filed for unemployment. While the current situation hasn’t impacted programming jobs quite as much, it’s just a matter of time before the economic damage hits most everywhere. There will be layoffs, and plenty of them, and occasionally whole…
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I don't want to be a full-fullstack developer
In the current year web developers are regarded as Jacks of all trades, they gotta do everything from manual testing to frontend ninjutsu, but is it worth it?
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You couldn't pay me to work for Ballmer
I’m not going to lie. I was never a Microsoft fan. Not even when I was using Windows (that I begrudgingly moved to after the Amiga). But at least you used to have some awe and respect for the gorilla that was Microsoft. Bill Gates might have been an evil genius, but at least he was a genius. …
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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.
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