Category: Revision
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Let the ideas do the work
Companies that open a window into the process and culture are able to draw in much more marketing and recruiting than they should be able to. If you want to bolster your recruiting efforts, corporate handbooks are a simple way to start doing this: see Posthog’s, Airbyte’s, Basecamp’s, Valve’s, and GitLab’s. Less clicking send, more…
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6 types of posts for corporate engineering blogs
The majority of experienced developers who responded to this thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. u/improbablywronghere wrote, “Finding a blog post from a company is like you an interviewer at some company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate.” Writing a…
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Writing culture
Remote companies are going to draw in the most talented people. As teams grow, they also need to spend more time maintaining communication. A team of 3 people needs just 3 lines of communication; a team of 11 people will need a whopping 55 lines of communication, and a team of 14 people will need…
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Your future, one post at a time
“On a very long timescale, the entire future of every business is determined one warm intro, cold LinkedIn-outreach, or engineering blog puzzle solution at a time,” Byrne Hobart closes a recent post, The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring. Anything you, your company, or your team puts out there can lead to an unexpected butterfly effect and…
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“We should really write a blog post about that”
People don’t have time to write (Exhibit 1, 2). The difference between, “We should really write a blog post about that,” and a blog post actually going live on the internet is, mostly, time. (Consider, how many drafts do you have sitting in your files vs. live on the internet?) One solution is to shorten…
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Documentation debt
You’ll know it when you feel it; too many meetings, too much management overhead, and hiring more people isn’t really producing as much output as it should be. This is caused by a debt of documentation; when the people on the team have spent too much time working in the business, and not enough time…
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How experienced developers use corporate engineering blogs
A few weeks ago, I started a discussion at r/experienceddevs with the question, “Has a corporate engineering blog made you want to join the company?” I wanted to share some key findings: The majority of experienced developers who responded to the thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it…
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Recent discussions of my work
It’s been a busy time here, I’m sifting through a lot of comments and ideas from one recent discussion of my work, and a research question I asked: Don’t think to write, write to think at Hacker News “Has a corporate engineering blog made you want to join the company?” at r/experienceddevs It’s been exciting—starting…
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How to distribute your writing
A friend approached me a week ago or so with a really great long-form article he’d published. 3,000 words, really in-depth, oozing industry expertise. I wasn’t even part of the industry and I enjoyed it. He asked me for suggestions, and my main question was: What’s the plan for people finding this piece? Our minds…
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Executives who can execute
Some companies need their executives to merely make good decisions; they take in information, influence budgets, and hire. These same companies—usually huge ones with tens of thousands of employees—are the ones who max out their headcount and hire contingent workers and freelancers, agencies and services companies, and research companies, to actually do most of the…