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Our SQL interview questions
The exact SQL questions we ask developer candidates during interviews, with the schema and the answers. Steal them for your own hiring.
Topics /
Career & Management
The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
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Tech salaries are risk premiums
This blog post was supposed to come out two years ago in response to, I think, this article. Better late than never? After literally years of people
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Career advice for young system programmers
For some of us, the backend vs frontend discussion just doesn’t cut it. What do do, then?
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Why I'm done with Scrum
My first foray into Agile was with a product team back in 2004-2005. It was my first “real” job out of college, and my first experience with a death march. During the death march, I was struck on how bad the idea of death marching was. Working weekends, long hours etc. were a sign of failure not on the development…
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A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
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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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A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter (2018)
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
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I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing
After 5 years in DevOps, I moved into Solutions Engineering. Here’s what I was missing, what changed, and who this path might be for.
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The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
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409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered
Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…
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Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – Aka RFCs
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
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My 25-year adventure in AI and ML
This is the 25-year story of how I fell into the field of AI.
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Developer on Call
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
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Sucks to be an old engineer
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
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Vesper, Adieu
If I could do it all over again, here is what I would do differently.
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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…
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How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack
Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which…
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You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: "If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the dat
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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So you want to be a consultant?
Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
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