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Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)
[Another submission from a former postdoc at one of the top ten universities in the U.S. The e-mail came to me as follows: "I read your b...
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 290 posts.
242
Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
I really screwed things up as a young faculty member at Harvard. It worked out OK in the end, but, man, I wish I could go back in time to w...
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Why Most Software Engineers Lose Nothing by Unionizing
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
244
Where Yegge’s Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first…
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How to Pay Remote Employees
Running a remote company in the US requires using terrible government websites and filling out onerous paperwork. Tortuga [https://www.tortugabackpacks.com] has seven US-based employees across four states. Four of those employees have moved between states while working for Tortuga. In total, we've registered with…
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Turning a Job Opening into a Dream Job for Top Talent
Few investments can compete with the ROI of building a truly effective team, but finding the right people can be a challenging process.
249
Bullshit Job Notes
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
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Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email
Meet the experts. Explore the digital magazine where innovators share tech strategies, executive insights, and advancements in AI and IT transformation.
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How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy
Slack is both amazing and awful. At a time when many companies quit Slack, we refined our processes to make it work well for us.
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Earning Your Stripes: An Interview with Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison started Stripe, dropped out of MIT, and reads 1–2 books a week. In this episode, he breaks down how Stripe was built, what most orgs get wrong about bets, why speed beats precision in decision making, and how to actually learn from the right people. It’s a masterclass in clarity.
254
I’m leaving Mozilla
It's been five great years, but now it is time for me to move on and try something else. During these five years I've met and interacted with a large number of awesome people at Mozilla, lots of new friends! I got the chance to work from home and yet work with a global team … Continue reading I’m leaving Mozilla →
255
Unequal Cofounders
One of the big myths in Silicon Valley is that co-founders should be equal. However, if you look at the most successful tech startups of the last 50 years, almost all of them had a dominant co-founder for most of the life of the company. This includes[1]:
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Some thoughts on equity compensation
A hallmark of startup companies, the tech sector more broadly, and certainly our portfolio companies, is that they include equity in their compensation packages for their employees, often all employees. If you work for a tech company, chances are good that you will get options as part of your compensation package. I…
257
Being a perfectionist is an obstacle and how to beat it
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Leveraging Introversion as a Career Strength
Being an introvert doesn’t mean you lack great management potential—but you need to play to your strengths
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The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
How to deal with ideological censorship in a community? Who gets empathy and who is humanized the most? Does contemporary rhetoric about toxicity hold up to scrutiny? “When you keep rewarding…
261
What is Software Engineering?
Nearly all of Go’s distinctive design decisions were aimed at making software engineering simpler and easier. We’ve said this often. The canonical reference is Rob Pike’s 2012 article, “ Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering .” But what is software engineering?
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C++ Programming Questions to Ask on Interview (2017)
All C++ interview questions have everything you need on live interview – explanation, possible right/wrong answers, following questions.
263
Slack channels are a waste of time
Make better decisions, faster with chat that’s organized right. Follow the discussions that matter to you, easily and efficiently, in real time or asynchronously.
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Augmenting Agile with Formal Methods
I really like the c2 wiki as a historical artifact: a lot of big names in Agile and Extreme Programming argued with each other there.1 One thing they did was the Extreme Programming Challenge, where people tried to test the limits of these approaches. They’d find edge problems (designing databases, remote teams, etc)…
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The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
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Consider applying for grad school
9 reasons to apply to grad school right now, and 8 reasons not to.
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Commitment vs. Forecast: A Subtle But Important Change to Scrum (2011)
One of the most controversial updates to the 2011 Scrum Guide has been the removal of the term “commit” in favor of “forecast” in regards to the work selected for a Sprint. We used to say that the Development Team commits to which Product Backlog Items it will deliver by the end of the Sprint. Scrum now encourages the…
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Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability (2017)
For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a couple…
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“Cost of Living” pay for remote workers is BS
Some companies think it's okay to pay people less just because rent is cheaper, but compensation is about so much more than the square footage you live in.