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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 243 posts.

2014
6

Before the Startup

October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…

8

Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy

When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…

14

Employee Equity

Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors...

15

Founder Depression

If you ask a founder how her startup is going, the answer is almost always some version of “Great!” There is a huge amount of pressure as a founder to never show weakness and to be the...

21

The Engineer Crunch

For most startups in the bay area, the engineer crunch is a bigger problem than the Series A crunch (this somewhat applies to designers as well, but most startups need far more developers than...

27

Saving a Project and a Company

I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.

30

Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

This post is a fairly exhaustive summary of the things I learned during my recent Silicon Valley job search. It is really quite long, but has been edited aggressively, and I’ve tried to make sure that nearly every point is either actionable, interesting, or both. If you’re currently or may one day be looking for a job…