/Career Advice

Downturn Career Decisions

- Will Larson tl;dr: "My general advice to folks would be to stay where you are as long as you’re reasonably happy day to day and feel like you’re learning at a good rate. Even if your effective compensation has declined a bit, it’s very hard to determine if the compensation at any other company will hold up either. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re unhappy for non-compensation reasons, then of course you should find another role." Will provides advice to both managers and ICs on navigating career decisions in the current climate. 

featured in #332

16 Bell-Curve Opinions On Engineering

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: (1) You should always use Kubernetes and other "correct" infrastructure. (2) Technical debt is bad and should be avoided at all costs. (3) We need to build an internal developer platform that abstracts cloud APIs away from our developers. And more. 

featured in #331

Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems

- Matt Hudson Shishir Mehrotra tl;dr: 3 techniques for expert framing, including Eigenquestion, when one critical decision has ten related questions. The Eigenquestion is the question that, if answered, answers all the subsequent questions as well, discussed in more detail here.

featured in #330

Learning HTML Was Too Hard So I Made A Compiler Instead

- Austin Henley tl;dr: "I was struggling to learn how to design web pages with HTML in 5th grade so I set off to make my own language. Yep. But that meant I first had to learn how to code and then learn how to make a compiler. It took about 10 years! Fun ensues."

featured in #330

So You Want to Become a Sales Engineer?

- Allen Vailliencourt tl;dr: What is the mystery behind the Sales Engineer career path, what makes it exciting, and how do you get here? This post dives into a typical day in the life of a Sales Engineer and gives tips on how you can jumpstart your career in Pre-Sales.

featured in #329

Learning A Technical Subject

- Murat Demirbas tl;dr: Murat believes cultivating the following attitudes helps navigate learning more easily: (1) curiosity, (2) relentlessness, (3) being a hands-on maker, (4) being social & learning to communicate well, (5) analyzing and drawing lessons, (6) leveraging previous experience. 

featured in #329

Hard Things In Computer Science

- Nicolas Frankel tl;dr: Nicolas gives an explanation as to why for each: (1) Cache invalidation. (2) Naming things. (3) Dates, times and timezones. (4) Estimates. (5) Distributed systems.

featured in #329

How I Learned To Love Feedback Loops (And Make Better Products)

- Neil Kakkar tl;dr: "One common theme that stood out was how feedback loops between each stage lead to much better decisions. In this post, I want to talk about why these feedback loops are useful, and how to actively seek iterative gains from these loops."

featured in #328

Mental Model: Difficult Problems vs Hard Work

- Ben Congdon tl;dr: "In other words, Difficult Problems involve operating in a higher dimensional space than Hard Work. Strategies that can collapse the higher dimensional Difficult Problem into a lower dimensional form of Hard Work reduce the cognitive costs to solving the problem." Ben discusses his approach to balancing the two. 

featured in #328

Keep Your Experiments Separate

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: "Add features one at a time — not as a series, but on alternate timelines. With version control, we have this superpower." Jessica believes this is a superior process for learning new frameworks, programming style, and more.

featured in #327