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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
How to Meet Your Next Cofounder
Over the last few months I’ve seen a number of people looking for cofounders on Hacker News or via their own personal blogs. I think this is, at best, a highly inefficient way to find a cofounder and, at worst, a way to fool yourself into finding the wrong cofounder. In any case, it’s a naive approach to finding the…
Rewriting the Technical Interview (2020)
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
Employee Equity - How Much?
The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post. First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much […]
Rands: A Disclosure
My management career began with a misunderstanding. "Rands, you're doing a great job on tools development and I'd really like you to Lead the effort." It soun
Paul Graham On Two Kinds of Programmers and Painters
In the world of painting there are some people who are just fabulously talented at drawing. They can sit down, these are like the kids who c...
How to hire a programmer when you're not a programmer
How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for… 1. How opinionated are they? Ask them about a juicy programming topic (e.g. Ruby or Python?). The tone and reasoning of the answer will reveal a lot. In our recent podcast on programming, Jeff said, &#…
The 75% answer
People often ask what I refer to as non-questions. What programming language should I learn? That’s not a real question. You need to probe further to figure out what they are really asking. Is it your first language? Do you want to get a job? Do you want to bend your brain?
If Your Job’s Just a Job
Well then, you’ll probably really love The 4-Hour Workweek , a 2007 book by Timothy Ferriss . On the other hand, if you love your job and wish you could do more of it, there’s not much here for you but a few handy email-management hints.
Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 1
This is part one of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. The rest of the talk will be published tomorrow and Wednesday. I graduated with a B.S. in Co…
Optimize for now!
One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. Th…
Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things
In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It's no
Joel on Software: Exploding Offer Season
If you’re a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you’re at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That’s because the recruiter does these negotiations for a l…