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Do hard things carefully
Leaning in without falling over.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 300 posts.
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DIY MBA: My Reading List (2019)
I’m doing a self-taught DIY MBA (read more). Here’s my work-in-progress reading list, add anything you think I’m missing in the comments.
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I'm giving up on open source
Sustainable open source will stay a dream
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I Stayed
My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics. What I do know is that, when given the chance this week to leave my job with half a year’s salary paid in advance, I chose to stay at Automattic.
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Taking Risk
<p>I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College....
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The Undercover Generalist
Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist. I’ve been wanting to write about it for years and even have kept some notes for that purpose. Recently I came across an article by Ben Collins-Sussman…
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Lessons from 15 Years of Indie App Development
Exactly 15 years ago on November 9th, 2009, I got my first MacBook and started learning how to build apps. I was fascinated with the idea that you can build something that other people will find useful and enjoy using. I also heard about those "indie developers" on Twitter who
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How I Got a Digital Nomad Visa for Japan
Curious about living in Japan? Learn from Christian, one of the first digital nomad visa holders, as he shares his experience and tips for obtaining the visa.
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The best way to get unstuck
I started dabbling in entrepreneurship over 20 years ago and have experienced the feeling of stuckness more than I can recall...
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Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)
I decided to leave what had been a promising career in organic chemistry about a year ago. Deciding to leave my program, and then to leave the field entirely, was one of the hardest decisions I hav…
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I sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS 24
last week at NeurIPS’24, one extremely salient thing was the anxiety and frustration felt and expressed by late-year PhD students and postdocs who were confused by the job market that looks and feels so much different from what they expected perhaps when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. and…
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Developing Developers (2015)
As of Fall 2025, Northeastern’s College of Computer Science will replace this curriculum with a set of new courses, starting with Python in the first year.
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Becoming a dungeon master for an interview
Interviews should be as close as possible to the work that the candidate would do if they join. While that seems like a pretty tautological statement, it is unfortunately not always true. When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t…
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People can read their manager's mind (2015)
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
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The Mythical Non-Roboticist
What if everyone could do robotics? That would be great, right? We should make a software framework so that non-roboticists can program robots.This idea is so close to a correct idea that it's hard to tell why it's a mistake.
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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had…
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Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
I’m an AWS Serverless Hero, principal engineer at an AWS centric logistics company, and I build and maintain the AWS News Feed. It’s fair to say that I am very interested in everything AWS does. Bu…
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Warm Handoffs
Warm Handoffs are a procedure I’ve implemented with several teams and organizations to improve communication and collaboration in Slack. As organizations grow and ownership shifts and splits as teams are formed and re-formed, Slack channels proliferate, and it gets harder for folks across an org to know the…
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Ship Something Every Day
Edit : A better title would've been " commit every day that you work ". I don't mean you should work on weekends or not take time off, and whatever you work on doesn't need to "ship to prod".
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We created a fake delivery company to get a job
/imagine one day randomly finding yourself in a foreign country thousands of kilometres away from home. Your own country is suddenly at war, and all you have is a backpack hanging off your back. That’s a weird situation to be in. But you have to figure something out. So starting a fake delivery company sounds like the…
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Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday
Hacker News comments Reddit comments
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Quality is a hard sell in big tech
What the **** does that mean?
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Research as leisure activity
my favorite form of entertainment is downloading PDFs ✦ plus favorite Fluxus artists and early programs
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Simplicity – Google SRE Handbook (2017)
Operational simplicity in aodrqew, balancing stability and agility to enhance reliability, reduce complexity, and focus on impactful innovation.
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How to delegate effectively as your responsibility grows
I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale. And because I’m doing that, this seemed like a good moment to draw on my experience, both in leadership roles and as a management consultant, and lay out a…
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The carefulness knob
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are ado…
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PyCon US 2024 Recap
Unlocking the Parallel Universe: Subinterpreters and Free-Threading in Python 3.13
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Looking for a Job Is Tough
Since the beginning of September, I've been searching for a job after being laid off from my previous role at the end of June. The market is tough, lot’s of fake jobs, so it’s been pretty challenging to even land an interview. Still, I managed to get a few, and, well, not all of them were great — though not…