Topics /

Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 300 posts.

2024
211

On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…

222

Day Rates (2023)

One year ago, I switched from charging project fees to day rates. It’s been transformative on lots of fronts. > Everything below comes with the following preface/caveat: > 1. There’s no univers…

224

What Is a Staff Engineer?

"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles.

226

Behind the scenes: the struggle for each paper (2021)

The start of my sabbatical has given me a moment to reflect on my publications. But my CV only shows a list of neatly cataloged papers: title, authors, conference. Each one appearing no different from another. But how each paper ended up published is its own story, a story about people and opportunity.

229

How we communicate

The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.

230

Software Friction

In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which…

234

Defensive Communication (1961)

I provide this HTML version of a historical article because it was not easily available but was central to my article: Reagle, J. (2010). “Be nice”: Wikipedia norms for supportive communication. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (Special Issue on Web Science) , 16(1), 161–180…

237

Take the Road Most Documented

How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux…