Top all-time · #353
Charity Majors
Personal blog · charity.wtfprogrammingcareer
Charity Majors's personal blog at charity.wtf covers programming and career. Since 2016, 152 different Hacker News readers have linked it 321 times, most often “The Engineer/Manager Pendulum”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 24 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Charity Majors's blog for writing on engineering management, the engineer/manager pendulum, golden-path platform ideas, observability and Terraform practice.
- Recommended for · 24 comments
- Called favourite, excellent, great or worth reading: the manager/IC pendulum, golden path, observability and other posts
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
cofounder and CTO of honeycomb.io; pioneered modern observability. co-author of O'Reilly books "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering", now wrapping up the 2nd ed. loves free software, free speech, and peaty single malts. Click to read Charity Majors, a Substack with thous
Most-linked posts?
- The Engineer/Manager Pendulum18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-05-11
- Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder15 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2019-01-04
- Reasons Not to Be a Manager11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-09-08
- Charity.wtf's about tech, db, startups, engineering management, and whiskey9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-07-24
- Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational F***ery7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-03-09
- Friday Deploy Freezes Are Like Murdering Puppies6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-05-01
- If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-09-08
- The Trap of the Premature Senior5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-02
- The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (and Bad for Business)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-09-24
- Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-09-14
What Hacker News says?
The author: > Charity Majors is cofounder and CTO at Honeycomb.io, a platform that helps engineering teams debug and improve their software applications. > https://charity.wtf/ Blog, latest article an apologia for DEI, "The diversity of your teams over the long run rests on your ability to build an inclusive culture and equitable policies."... "Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be" Hmm.…
Comment linking /
on ““Normal” engineers are the key to great teams”Submitted How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not as a story · 283 points
HN discussion> I fear what will replace me if I leave. Right? I've had this conversation with so many techies-turned-leaders. The way I look at it, managing means I've given up my chance at doing the fun work so I can create a context where other people can get shit done in a way that's effective and rewarding. That does require being very technical, because you have to have a feel for the work and the issues. But it also requir…
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
on “A CTO should be technical”Submitted How to Survive an Acquisition as a story · 276 points
HN discussionA few of my favourites: - Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa... - introduces the idea of the "golden path", where you tell engineers at your company that if they use the approved stack of e.g. PostgreSQL + Django + Redis then the ops team will support that for them, but if they want to go off path and use something like MongoD…
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
on “Logging sucks”Submitted If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion as a story · 186 points
HN discussionRe: going from management back to IC, yes I’ve done it, not within the same company though. It was a good experience for me. Later, I swung back to management. This resonated with me and made me excited to fall back to an IC role for a period: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
on “Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager”Submitted In praise of “normal” engineers as a story · 158 points
HN discussionDan Luu has a list of programming blogs you might like: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/ . The rest of his blog is good too! a few of my favorite blogs: - http://blog.acolyer.org for fantastic daily summaries of CS papers. - http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/ -- she has a business creating a new compression algorithm and I love reading about it - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is pure gold for weird debugging st…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside? as a story · 121 points
HN discussionIf you like Julia Evans style you may also like Charity Majors aka @mipsytipsy on twitter https://charity.wtf/ Also I use the open source Django project Newsblur as my RSS reader, and follow Samuel's blog: http://blog.newsblur.com/ A couple others I like: https://watirmelon.blog https://martinfowler.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted "My boss says we don't need any engineering managers" as a story · 102 points
HN discussionIt seems that those ideas are mainly optimizing for making sure that the group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary , or what she calls "democratic structuring" in the essay. If one wants a default, well-tested structure, hierarchy seems to be a good candidate[1]. Another idea is to optimize for viability, meaning the ability to adapt to and survive changes in the enviro…
Comment linking /2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-culture/
on “The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)”Submitted The Real Reasons I Don’t Hire You as a story · 99 points
HN discussionSeniority is in the eyes of the beholder. But what you say makes little sense. You think you're not senior enough because you can't debug piece of garbage? > I've also thought about transitioning to a PM role Maybe you're just tired of working with code. That's alright after 10 years. And it's ok to want to try management. I can recommend reading this https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
on “Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?”Submitted Notes on the Perfidy of Dashboards as a story · 93 points
HN discussionYou should definitely subscribe to Charity Major’s blog. Every post gets a “oh, of course” from me. https://charity.wtf/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Books to read when you transform from SWE into SWE Management?”Submitted Is it time to version observability? as a story · 84 points
HN discussionDo you think you might like management if you knew it didn’t have to be permanent? Highly recommend Charity Majors’ blog about this if you haven’t already https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/amp/
on “Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?”Submitted How Hard Should Your Employer Work to Retain You? as a story · 59 points
HN discussionGreat article on that here: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Comment linking /2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
on “Coding as an Engineering Manager”Submitted Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum as a story · 55 points
HN discussionCharity Majors wrote a couple of blog posts on the subject that I’ve tried to bring in to my workplace with varying levels of success. But still I’ve had colleagues express surprise that as an engineering manager I still wanted to get my hands dirty with the code of the systems I own. https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum... https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...
Comment linking /2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
on “Is 40 the New 60?”Submitted WTF is operations? #serverless as a story · 47 points
HN discussionWorth noting: Charity Majors' blog on management and tech: https://charity.wtf/ She says several things I've always thought were taboo to even think, including the fact that management shouldn't be viewed as a promotion, it's a completely separate job and some people are better at it than others. My limited experience: it's a separate job, it's a lot more things to juggle and carry, and it mostly makes sense that th…
Comment linking /
on “Peter principle”Submitted "Founder Mode" and the Art of Mythmaking as a story · 30 points
HN discussionHere’s some good food for thought on the engineer/manager decision, [0] and [1]. Good luck! [0] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum... [1] https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...
Comment linking /2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
on “Should managers still code?”Submitted “Engineering-Driven” Leads to “Engineering-Supremacy” as a story · 24 points
HN discussionThis is excellent, I'm going to use this to separate production from test environments using separate accounts. Using VPCs, security groups, IAMs, tags, etc. is great, but those are all constructs you have to take care to implement correctly yourself within your deploy scripts. One slip-up and you could accidentally expose environments to each other, or worse make a mistake that deletes or reconfigures resources in…
Comment linking /2016/03/23/aws-networking-environments-and-you/
on “AWS Organizations: Centrally Manage Multiple AWS Accounts”Submitted Logs vs. Structured Events as a story · 24 points
HN discussion
