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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,085 posts.
Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.
It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
As a senior developer I get asked sometimes if constant change of technology is making me, well, obsolete. Personally I don't have problem w...
Learning needs to be effortful to be effective
Online content makes edutainment the norm among curious and intelligent people, who don't realize that they aren't actually learning what they think they are.
How to Network as an Introvert
A calm guide to networking as an introvert—learn how posture, presence, and small signals can help you connect meaningfully without faking extroversion.
Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech
You can now find it at /posts/2016/why-i-wont-talk-about-being-a-woman-in-tech-and-neither-should-you/ . If you don't do anything, you'll be redirected automatically (if your browser supports that).
Next dream job can be in an HTTP header
Have you ever thought to find your next job in an HTTP header? cURL can reveal this and many more secrets.
What to Learn
It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems…
Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI
How to use AI coding assistants without letting your hard-earned engineering skills wither away.
Write some software, give it away for free
This website which you're on right now is free (as in beer), free (as in freedom), open source software called Nonograph. It cost about $600 USD to release, mos...
Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain
From chronically sore to chronically curious about the mind 🧠
Consider working on genomics
Genomics needs more talented software engineers—here's why you should consider joining the field.
Good at programming competitions does not equal good on the job [video]
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often we talk to customers
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced
I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding…
HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points
Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses. ... HTML, CSS and our vanishing…
Don’t point out something wrong immediately
This is not a post on a technical topic, but rather on a common pitfall for engineers – we like to point out something wrong the moment we see it. Understandably, we are very good at it. We are basically trained for it. When it comes to code reviews, or design reviews for complicated distributed system protocols, we…