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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 395 posts.

2023
215

Be careful of the examples you use. They stick

Introduction We spend huge amounts of time sweating the details of our products. We want to remove all the friction we can from using them and want to make sure we never leave our users confused. To get this right, we do a bunch of things: we use simple language, we make extensive use of context-sensitive…

217

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

Productivity is one of my pet topics, because it's always dogged me a bit, especially early in my career. I'd pull long days and nights and then realize I only actually worked (as in, typing in code, debugging stuff, and thinking about problems and their solutions) maybe 20% of the time. Upon talking to coworkers…

221

What I Learned at Stripe

In February 2022, I left my job at Splunk to take some time first to relax then to focus on finding a fantastic next job . I managed to do both during my three months of funemployment, landing a job at Stripe in the Atlas team in May. I was laid off in November 2022, along with most people who were hired during this…

223

Becoming a contractor

How many roads must a programmer walk down before you call them a contractor? It’s been about three years since I went down this (bumpy) path, and I finally have the feeling that my contracting business is “bootstrapped”1. Here’s an account of my journey so far, hoping you find it inspiring! 0. Contents Articles about…

231

What makes developers productive?

Many ingredients go into developer productivity. Some are obvious and easy to measure (build times are an easy example to point to). But I think we tend to miss other important factors, perhaps because they are hard to directly measure. For example, no system collects a number that shows how well each developer…