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Hypotheses
Personal blog · ebiester.com · on HN as ebiesterproductivitycareer
Hypotheses is a personal blog at ebiester.com about productivity and career. Since 2020, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “A World Without Engineering Managers?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Cited in discussions of agile and spec writing, including a 2023 post on agile alternatives. Commenters use it as a reference while discussing Royce's paper on building software twice.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is a collection of technical essays I’ve written over the years.
Most-linked posts?
- A World Without Engineering Managers?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-12
What Hacker News says?
That's because they're an engineering manager in tech lead clothing. It's so the company can say they have more engineers and less management, but still fill all of the roles that they need managers to do. (I've written elsewhere how you can run without engineering managers - see https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2024/03/31/a-world-without-en... - but the roles that need to be filled don't stop.)
Comment linking /agile/2024/03/31/a-world-without-engineering-managers.html
on “How I ship projects at big tech companies”Submitted A World Without Engineering Managers? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI would suggest introducing two things. First, introduce The Diataxis framework ( https://diataxis.fr/ ) for documentation. It makes people think about documentation in a more structured way, and allows you to be more specific in the types of missing documentation. (High documentation cultures are often good with explanation but not tutorials, for example.) Second, I would introduct the idea of a Documentation Portf…
Comment linking /documentation/2020/06/02/agile-documentation-takeaways.html
on “High-documentation, low-meeting work culture”Submitted What is your alternative to Agile? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe biggest problem is that "everything else that was tried" wasn't from experts who truly understand information management, nor has our industry learned patterns from other industries that also have similar problems. I'm trying to do that work now. It's not even that I don't think it can be done in confluence or wikis in general, but rather we don't have a great methodology in organizing it. I'm keeping a list of…
Comment linking /annotated-links/documentation/2020/05/04/annotated-documentation-links.html
on “A major reason for departures at Slack was “remote work request rejected””So, while I've written about it before (see https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... ), all methodologies are based on the constraints of the time. Consider that The Pragmatic Programmer (and Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas are original signatories to the manifesto) suggested in Pragmatic Programmer, “Build One to Throw Away (You will anyway)” And Fred Brooks said the same thing in the Mythical Ma…
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alternative.html
on “LLM-powered tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replacing them”I dive into this in my blog, "What is your alternative to Agile?" - https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... - but the Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method as well as PRINCE2 were common in the industry, but both were examples of methodologies that took waterfall and codified it. However, the last waterfall project I was on was in 2013. We had formal gates out of each section of the p…
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alternative.html
on “The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the beginning (2015)”I go through some of the alternatives to agile in project methodology here: https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... Go back to 2001. Which non-agile methodology would you have liked instead? RUP? How about we all end up in the PMBOK circa 2001? We take releasing monthly, weekly, or faster for granted. We take continuous integration for granted. So many of these ideas came explicitly out of ag…
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alternative.html
on “Book Review: "Tidy First?" By Kent Beck”I was looking at this from another perspective and got a little bit down the rabbit hole a few months ago. https://www.ebiester.com/annotated-links/documentation/2020/... I think we need to look outward to other disciplines here. We do a poor job of organization and that causes many of the problems we see.
Comment linking /annotated-links/documentation/2020/05/04/annotated-documentation-links.html
on “Awesome Knowledge Management”I'd like you to go look at PRINCE2 and SSADM. Or read the original Royce paper - https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf was written explicitly to term this Antipattern "Waterfall." (Note that Royce marks it as an antipattern.) I discussed some of this in https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... and it gives a little bit of history of the methods. We are nearly 70 years into this d…
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alternative.html
on “Systems Thinking”https://www.ebiester.com/documentation/2022/12/23/building-d... is my thoughts. Let me know if that answers the question.
Comment linking /documentation/2022/12/23/building-documentation-culture.html
on “I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free”This is probably written better as a blog, so let me put in the highlights and commit to having a blog written by the end of the week at https://ebiester.com - I've written a few things about documentation but haven't addressed it as a cultural element. The basic assumption is that most developers don't hate writing documentation other than they don't feel like they do it well and don't feel like it's effective. The…
Comment linking /documentation/2020/06/02/agile-documentation-takeaways.html
on “I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free”> I wrote about this - https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna ... - Royce was describing what he saw as an anti-pattern that it was risky and invited failure without iterations. Yes, that's why his paper essentially said "you're going to have to build two." One to figure out the mistakes you can't predict ahead of time, and the second for the real deal. Do your best to get through the first one…
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna
on “Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML”I wrote about this - https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... - Royce was describing what he saw as an anti-pattern that it was risky and invited failure without iterations. (and my link to the Royce paper isn't working anymore - I need to fix that!) - I am planning on a followup that takes the last 3 years of change in mind.
Comment linking /agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alternative.html
on “Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML”At the risk of correcting the primary source, I was able to load https://www.ebiester.com/ but not https://ebiester.com/ EDIT: I see you’ve already updated your comment. Thanks!
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”https://www.ebiester.com/ I write some about personal knowledge management and also some about engineering management. It is usually updated in spurts.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Time management is possibly the easiest part, for me. You end up putting it on your calendar and the calendar will take care of it for you. The hardest part that I had to learn as an EM was how to identify ways to be effective with small blocks of time, safeguarding my energy, and making sure I (and my team) were working on the most important things. There are a fair number of considerations for productivity. I wrot…
Comment linking /productivity/2022/12/14/lego-blocks-of-productivity.html
on “How to better organize your time as a new engineering manager”