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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.
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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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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.
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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 →
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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.
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Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
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The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
As a software engineer, changing jobs is a way of life. Every day, beautiful recruiters from top tech companies reach out to you on…
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Notes on Shutting Down an S-Corp
Shutting down an S-Corp is complicated.
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What to care about in a job
In 2014, I wrote about how I chose my first job out of college. I’ve learned a lot in the 4 years since then—here’s how I would change my criteria if I were picking a job today.
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Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011)
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 1944 Simple Sabotage Field ManualA Timeless Classic Answer: Read the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. A while back I went to the inaugural meeting of a ‘commun…
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Things nobody told me about being a software engineer
My dad started teaching me Basic when I was about 7 years old, and since about that age I knew that I wanted to build software for a living. It was obviously a fun and useful thing to do, and something that I could do well. But there is a big — and I mean Grand Canyon-scale BIG — difference between “programming” and…
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The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).