management 14
- Kind leaders usually do beat sociopaths in the same role, but only if they are also good at business.
- "Hire great people and get out of their way" is dangerous advice for anyone in a leadership role.
Charity Majors
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab. Co-author of "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering". Writes at charity.wtf about on-call, hierarchy, hiring and the engineer/manager pendulum.
Charity Majors did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
What Charity Majors says most about
hiring 6
- Hire for a person’s unique strengths rather than for their lack of weaknesses, because a team exists to cover what any one person is not.
- There is no such thing as the best people; you are trying to hire the right people for this team at this stage.
code generation 3
- Lines of code are the wrong artifact to review; what we should be storing and reviewing is an architecture that generates the code to spec.
- If you are not going to read the generated code, what you need is conformance testing: proof that it performs within the boundaries of the code it replaced.
software quality 3
- Lines of code are the wrong artifact to review; what we should be storing and reviewing is an architecture that generates the code to spec.
- If engineers do not hold themselves to a high standard and build efficiently, somebody else will come along and impose it on them.
vibe coding 3
- Trust is an account: whatever you withdraw from it by not reading the code has to be built back up somewhere else.
- If you are not going to read the generated code, what you need is conformance testing: proof that it performs within the boundaries of the code it replaced.
coding agents 2
- The step change in AI coding in 2025 came from the harnesses and the tooling around the models, not from the models themselves.
- AI-validated pull requests beat human review at exactly the things humans are bad at, which frees the humans to argue about direction instead.