Zach Holman
Zach Holman — Founder, angel investor, early GitHub engineer
GitHub's 2nd engineer on startup culture, remote work, and building developer tools.
zachholman.comIf you deploy a breaking change to your organization — i.e., hire an incompetent manager who is a huge dickbag — you can't rollback the number of people who quit.
Zach joined GitHub as one of its first engineers and spent five years watching a 9-person company grow to 250. His blog is the unfiltered record of everything he learned and unlearned along the way — startup hiring, getting fired, depression, angel investing, and somehow owning pieces of two professional soccer clubs. The writing is sharp, profane, and disarmingly honest. He'll call something fucked and then explain exactly why with the precision of a deployment postmortem.
Written by Zach Holman since 2009.
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Publishes sporadically
8
Independent Blog
English
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Taking Money off the Table
Recently I had a long call with an old friend who was facing an age-old predicament that I’ve been seeing more and more these days: Lucked out, worked hard, employer is crushing it, and now she’s sitting on a large amount of paper money gains at her startup Company does a tender offer, either buying their stock back or allowing a third party to come in and buy shares Employees might be allowed to sell, say, 10% (or whatever) of their equity So here’s the question: do you sell, or do yo...
Shipping Calendearing
For when you have too many calendars Once upon a time I built a calendar and then wrote an exhaustively long talk about working with time, timezones, calendars, and everything in between. For a few unrelated reasons we ended up not shipping the calendar, but in general, as I mentioned in the post: Zach, whatever you do: just don’t ever build a calendar. Anyway, I built a calendar again! Okay, technically I got away with only tangentially building a calendar this time around, but it’s the...
Losing Money is the Point
It’s mind-boggling how many in the general public don’t understand this, so let me rant about it for a bit: many companies are designed to lose money this year. That’s the fucking point. Today’s main character energy is the news of WNBA players wearing Pay Us What You Owe Us shirts during the All-Star game. The knuckle-draggers on social media immediately clutched their pearls, saying “ohmygod the WNBA lost $40M last year so players should really be paid zero dollars, not given a raise!!111” Yo...
Nontraditional Red Teams
Most developers know about red teams: a specific group of people chosen to be the antagonist to your system, trying to sniff out vulnerabilities in your code or organization. Basically, like Sneakers, or the annoying plotline in The Newsroom season two. (Someone should have really red team’d Sorkin himself on that one.) There’s a few other concepts of a red team I think that every development team should have some exposure to outside of the traditional cybersecurity angle. Someone to look for...
From Cold DM to Owning a Soccer Club
<!doctype html> From Cold DM to Owning a Soccer Club a { color: rgb(233, 155, 64); border-bottom: 3px solid rgb(233, 155, 64); transition-property: color, background-color, border-color, text-decoration-color, fill, stroke, opacity, box-shadow, transform, filter, backdrop-filter; transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1); transition-duration: 300ms; } a:hover...
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Follow Zach Holman
If you want someone who writes about tech careers and startup culture with zero corporate polish and genuine hard-won experience, Zach's been doing it for over 15 years.