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Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

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Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#11

Post by dagoat »

auslegung wrote: post #2

XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…

While I'm glad it works for you, this set up would definitely not work for me.

I prefer less ceremony, remote when I like, no open office, etc etc

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#12

Post by HandsAtTheReady »

auslegung wrote: post #2

XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…

+1 to XP.

Pairing removes many barriers to development:

* built-in code review

* knowledge sharing: removes silos

* helps avoids overengineering (few pairs have the same overengineering idea, so you tend to settle on a decent un-overengineered solution)

TDD, which I'm not fully convinced on, acts a clock for pairs: one person writes a test, one person writes the implementation, flip roles, repeat.

Other XP practices: everyone works at HEAD, deploys from HEAD, retrospectives.

Small features went from discussing with customer, to writing the implementation, tests, monitoring, and deploying it in half a day.

The disadvantages of ~full pairing: remote is harder to support, I missed getting into flow, fixed working hours.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#13

Post by lykr0n »

scarface74 wrote: post #9
lykr0n wrote: post #6

I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work. I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build. Also,…

I don’t have that much freedom of the what when it comes to business features but I do have freedom of the how and I’m good with that. I also have a great deal of influence over my hobby horses - infrastructure (AWS) and Devops.

We're large enough where we have a specific DevOps Teams and the Team doing AWS is doing it wrong. If I didn't have the freedom I have now, I would have a very different opinion of this place and be looking for a smaller shop

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#14

Post by g10r »

lykr0n wrote: post #6

I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work. I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build. Also,…

Funny enough I've been obsessing over this concept of "aligning vectors" / measuring the impact of personal KPIs against the total progress of a business.

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” — Elon Musk

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#15

Post by hitekker »

auslegung wrote: post #2

XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…

> We are empowered...

Good!

> ...to respectfully...

Sure.

> ... question decisions.

Uh, that's empowerment? The right to ask "respectful" questions about decisions that are already made? As everyone else is already pointing out, what you know may be separate from what you (want to) believe.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#16

Post by lykr0n »

g10r wrote: post #14
lykr0n wrote: post #6

I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work. I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build. Also,…

Funny enough I've been obsessing over this concept of "aligning vectors" / measuring the impact of personal KPIs against the total progress of a business. “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” — Elon Musk

It's quite nice to see the positive impact you have on the rest of the business. It gives value to what you do day to day. Where I work is very data driven, so any chance can be measured if you know how to look

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#17

Post by ww520 »

auslegung wrote: post #2

XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…

> daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes.

That sounds horrible. Even if half of the people have something to say, that's about 15 seconds per person. Beyond saying, hi, I'm here, I'm not sure what else can be accomplished. It sounds more like a daily pep talk by the leaders to the whole company.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#18

Post by ww520 »

Small team, offices for developers, open door for free to walk in to chat, close door for don't bother, lots of whiteboards, ah hoc discusson, weekly team planning meeting on Monday, weekly release/resolution meeting on Thursday after lunch, release and recovery from fuckup on Friday.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#20

Post by ozmbie »

At a studio I worked at once, two others and myself were assigned to a new project. Since we were the only ones working on the project, we got permission to clear out a storage room and convert it into an office.

It was just the three of us in a decent sized room and I feel that my work satisfaction and productivity was double what it was anywhere else in the open plan office space. There were very few distractions, but our office was open-door and just off a commonly used hallway so we weren’t hiding. We had enough space for a whiteboard and a 4th desk that we used for reviewing work together.

A few months later one of the managers saw what we’d done and decided he wanted it for his personal office. We went back to open plan :(

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