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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
Personal website of Dr. Alexander Coward — mathematician, educator, and entrepreneur. Formerly at UC Berkeley, Oxford, UC Davis, and The University of Sydney.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,085 posts.
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
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Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
LLMs make it easier to write code, but understanding, reviewing, and maintaining it still takes time, trust, and good judgment.
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Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
on starting, doing, being, and becoming.
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Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
I hope I don't get kicked out of Yale for this.
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Individuals Matter
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't…
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A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case
How a Google Cloud support engineer found one customer’s missing DNS packets
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Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
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You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites
I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.
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The Frontend Treadmill
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend…
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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
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A career ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
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Bruce Schneier joins EFF Board of Directors
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the newest member of its Board of Directors: renowned security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier is widely acclaimed for his criticism and commentary on everything from network security to national security. His insight...
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Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)
I think it is important to have a bias for action. Like anything else, this is something you can make a habit of. Moving forward allows you to make progress. I don’t know about you, but I’ve frozen up in the past not knowing what the right path was for me. Moving forward, even the smallest possible step, helped break…
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Forgotten Employee (2002)
PART ONE An epiphany was had this morning as I perused SA, sipping Code Red and toying with the notion of stepping outside for my third cigarette in an hour: Nine years and 2 months of my life have been devoted towards the goal of personal advancement within a small yet thriving company. I
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No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
Practical thoughts from a back-end team leader
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The surreal experience of my first developer job
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents' if I moved...
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Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development
Organization skills are more important than algorithmic wizardry, but harder to teach. So we teach algorithms instead. Managing complexity you learn on a job.
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On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
We've all heard how expensive college is getting, along with plenty of criticism surrounding its value in a changing job market. Of course, there are many benefits beyond the monetary ones that should be considered when exploring college options, but for the purpose of this post I'm going to limit the scope and purely…
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An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options
There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to stock options, and I'd like to try and clear some of that up today. As an engineer, you may be more interested in getting on with your job than compensation. However, if you're working at
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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn
Ruminations on outsourcing our values
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Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer
Introduction After struggling a lot with my mental health (anxiety, depressive condition) for several years, I was diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ADHD, at the age of 44. This diagnosis shocked me a lot: I wasn’t a wild child, in fact, I was even a good pupil. With the help…
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The shittiest project I ever worked on (2013)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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