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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability (2017)
For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a couple…
Steps to Building an Engineering Competency Matrix
Learn how to provide your employees and reports with a clear, agreed-upon, and well-defined path for growth within your organization.
The Functional Programming Hiring Problem
If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypothetical functional programming language called Gooby. In these discussions, often someone…
Engineers should do customer support and success
The best PLG founders, startups, strategies, metrics and community. Every week.
“Cost of Living” pay for remote workers is BS
Some companies think it's okay to pay people less just because rent is cheaper, but compensation is about so much more than the square footage you live in.
DHH: Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?
Techies, VCs, and the press are always swooning over the glory of the Bay area. This is where all the excitement, the money, and the people are, they say. And that’s true to the extent that your great big idea fits the current cultural mold of that environment. If you’re looking to b…
Personal software factories are a waste of time
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
I want to discuss why programming and coding are not the same, and why I can no longer support the Learn to Code movement. I can no longer tell my friends to learn coding. Although I’m passionate about it, it’s too arcane and insular for mainstream practice.
Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes and I Am Not Laughing
I've followed through on my commitment to interview in the tech industry without relying entirely on in-network referrals as I normally do (for a good reason - my network consists largely of the most competent people at mediocre companies!). It is dystopian out there. These are some anecdotes on my interviewing…
In defense of shallow technical knowledge
Whenever a new piece of technology comes out (these days, mostly AI) I go to some effort to understand it. Usually I end up writing a post about it, so I can be…
Compensation as a Reflection of Values
Compensation: the word alone is enough to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in many. But we in technology have the good fortune of being in a well-compensated domain, so why does this issue induce such anxiety when our basic needs are clearly covered? If it needs to be said, it’s because compensation isn’t merely…
This is how you hustle
Recently, the company that provides hosting for this website experienced some technical problems and my website went down. This was rather frustrating, and I sent them a Tweet to ask them to please resolve the issue. Before they even responded to me, I suddenly had this email in my inbox.
Mistakes You Should Never Make (2014)
I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had almost no money left, and that it was all my fault.
Data engineering and software engineering are converging
The official JS client for connecting to ClickHouse.
Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
Making OKRs more playful using hill charts
OKRs for Managers and C-Level? Great! But have you ever asked your teams? In this post I am sharing how I make OKRs less dry and more enjoyable for the teams I manage.
Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design (2018)
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design
Mark Cuban on How to Get Rich
Thats what so many want. Right ? I’m certainly not going to lie and say it is not a whole lot better having lots of money. I had a whole lot of fun and loved my life when I was eating mustard and ketchup sandwiches and sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment that housed me and 5 buddies.
The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
As a software engineer, changing jobs is a way of life. Every day, beautiful recruiters from top tech companies reach out to you on…
Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What"
A few weeks ago, I changed my Slack channel sections. I’m now more responsive and engaged, while also feeling less stressed. How? By sorting my Slack channels by urgency, or how often I want to read them. Versus Sorting by “how often” lets me read my most urgent messages first, focusing my energy on what