Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,085 posts.
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
I write letters to CEOs and many of them write me back. Here are some of the responses that I’ve received and the lessons that I’ve learned.
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
Jeff Bezos stopped by our office yesterday and spent about 90 minutes with us talking product strategy. Before he left, he spent about 45 minutes taking general Q&A from everyone at the office. During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who are “right …
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
I have a hard time believing I'm the first person to post this after not finding anything in the forum. I wouldn't doubt if Microsoft is deleting them...
On selective agency in capable people
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve come to rely quite heavily on data. I’ve counted typos on resumes, I’ve sifted through a corpus of engineering offers, and I’ve skimmed thousands of recruiting messages to tag them by personalization level. This post, however, is going to be a bit of […]
I've struggled with some side projects and had success with others. In this post, I'll focus on the actions and adjustments that have worked for me.
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...
Internal job applicants who face rejection are nearly twice as likely to leave their organizations than those who were either hired for an internal job or had not applied for a new job at all, ILR School research finds.
Productivity inspiration and tactical advice that's actually useful.
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that individual productivity…
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
Things you should know about stock options before negotiating an offer
Workaholism or work addiction risk is a growing public health concern that can lead to many negative mental and physical health outcomes such as depression, anxiety or sleep disorder. Perception of work (job demands and job control) may become a major cause of employees’ work addiction. The international group of…
How to Land an Engineering Job.
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
Pulse is a platform for team alignment. Engineered to help modern teams stay more connected and aligned by communicating more openly and asynchronously.
Let's assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a gar...
A surprisingly long cycle has just closed for me and I think it’s a good time to share some lessons learned. I have been collecting these points in the last six months, but none of them poppe…
When people ask me what they should know first about going into technical interviews, they get the same answer: be prepared to talk .
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.