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Burnout
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo…
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Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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Gave up a day job. Now what? - Income report #2
I know that many of my blog readers have subscribed my RSS Feed only for my monthly income reports. And as I want to make you happy here is my report from last month. April have ended over two week…
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Code on the Road: Laid off? The one thing you absolutely need to do on the first day
Here is my one piece of advice to you. The single most important thing to do as soon as you make it back to your house with that box full of stuff:
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Considering Applying to Y Combinator?
[Timely note! We're hosting a Y Combinator Meetup in Seattle on Thursday Feb 25... details here!] March 3 is the deadline for YC’s Summer 2010 session. I figured that I ought to throw my thoughts out there on the decisions that lead up to the application, the app itself, and... Continue Reading
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Stress and its consequences for software development
For decades we have known that some people are 25 times more productive than most in software engineering jobs. We also know that there are “gelled teams” which are consistently 10 times more productive than most across the whole project lifecycle.
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Design Lessons & Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems at Google
Jeff Dean of Google did an excellent keynote talk at LADIS 2009 . Jeff’s talk is up at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf and my notes follow:
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Seven steps to remarkable customer service
As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers t…
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Google Hiring Committee Stories
Google's engineering hiring is unique as far as I know. Patterned after faculty hiring by top universities, Google engineering had no hirin...
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You can not buy ideas or talent
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
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Extreme Pair Programming - Guy Steele and Richard Stallman
"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me...
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So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.
A guide to surviving graduate school, from the perspective of what I wished I had known at the start but had to learn the hard way instead.
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Interviewing programmers: coding test results.
I've now stopped accepting new versions, so please don't send me any more. However, there has been such a strong reaction to this that I intend to offer another opportunity for people to write simple code and have it analysed and compared with others.
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My Biggest Surprise: How Law Shapes the Business Landscape, and a Patent Puzzle
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious s…
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Non-Hierarchical Management
You want to get something done. But it’s too big to do it by yourself, so you bring in some friends to help out. In your dreams, all your friends just “click”, understand exactly what it is they’re all supposed to do, and do it quickly and effective. In reality, this almost never happens.
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Rands: Hurry
Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time i
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Why is computer science a sausage fest?
Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to attend JSConf …