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If you need the money, don't take the job
Money: how to get people to give it to you, how much to ask for, and how to be worth what you're asking. Some real talk about the challenges you’ll face as a newly independent worker.
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Simple sabotage for software (2023)
How to sabotage software productivity, in the style of CIA
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I love programming but I hate the programming industry
On being a faulty cog in a machine when the machine itself is faulty
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As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)
Companies are willing to lay off employees despite being profitable.
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What you've got is in fact a people problem
In which I provide you with hundreds of dollars worth of software consulting, for free, in a single blog post.
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Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
In this short video Steve Ballmer talks about a puzzle question he would ask candidates interviewing at Microsoft. Solving it is based on b...
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Ask for Advice, Not Permission (2015)
The world is full of gatekeepers who think they have veto rights. Don’t believe them. Pitbull got it right when he said "Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice."
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Why so few Matt Levines?
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
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Please stop the coding challenges
Let’s talk about tech interviews – specifically, the ones that go overboard with unrealistic coding assignments. If you’re a developer who’s been asked to de...
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Why Not Comments
Why not "why not" comments? Not why "not comments"
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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
Musings on software, technology, and life by Darren Kopp
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Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
Yes, just set that deadline.
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When should you give up on a project that doesn't work?
I spent most of my free time after work over the last month working on a project and today I'm giving up.
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Winning a hackathon, losing my sanity
A few weeks ago, my friend Ben and I won JumboHack , a hackathon at Tufts University. Our entry generates a Spotify Wrapped-like summary of students’ dining habits by scraping Tufts’ meal plan portal. Through some clever promotion on Ben’s part, we managed to get hundreds of students to use it in just a couple of…
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Why to Not Write a Book
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
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A useful productivity measure?
In my new role as VP of Engineering , there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?”
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A Eulogy for DevOps
The DevOps movement has died out. What went wrong?
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Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build
Lessons from leaders at New Relic, Credit Karma, Reforge, Hubspot, Trulia, Intercom, VSCO, and more
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Bring back private offices
Open Office Sucks
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Marketing to Engineers (2001)
I am a chemical engineer and have been writing copy designed to sell products and services to engineers for 10 years. Here’s what I know about appealing to this special audience:
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How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer
Jump ahead • Timeline • Meeting the extraordinary ability criteria • How much does it cost? • Should you work with a lawyer?
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40 Years of Programming
In April, 1984, my father bought a computer for his home office, a Luxor ABC-802 , with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a yellow-on-black screen with 80 by 25 text mode, or about 160 by 75 pixels in graphics mode, and two floppy drives. It had BASIC in its ROM, and came with absolutely no games. If I wanted to play…
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Losing two jobs in one year
and learn to accept imperfection
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How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, which starts at $1/month! My 🌶️ spicy take 🌶️ is that I don’t like seeing tech talks live. I get very little out of 95% of…
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Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
Four archetypes in software engineering