Decide and communicate the metrics that matter for your business, then constantly educate and remind engineers of how they can help to reach those goals. Increases the number of good ideas from people with the best context and reduces the bridges-to-nowhere.
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
11–20 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#12I left.
That's a large oof.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#13I'm a Dev Manager but started as a mid-senior developer at my current company (now about 350 people). We grew a lot by acquisition and one thing I noticed was many "cultural silos" that made it hard to build a shared, unifying identity. Myself and another developer worked to try and address this with a lot of small things focused on cutting across teams & groups: a book club-style bi-weekly discussion, "Tech Talks" from across the teams to diverse audiences, some hackathons and making online conferences (MS, AWS, Google, Etc) into company events. Literally things that "make people spend time with people outside their direct team". It's been pretty successful and pushed lots of new initiatives in some unexpected areas.
So my advice would be to look for a broader area where you see a gap or failing, and then look for ways to address this that don't need a huge investment of people or resources; guerilla activities FTW! If you can show some success, you can then pursue as appropriate/desired...
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#14Worked for a SaaS that took in sales data and generated customer surveys. There were a few things I did
1. Create an easy way for support to login as a different user so that they could see what the customer sees.
2. Created a report that figured out how often each customer sends data and noticed when they were 2 standard deviations away from their average data send. We went from customers calling upset that their data is not up to date to us calling them and letting them know that they stopped sending us data.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#15My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off of work and reduce errors/surprises. Another…
Your last example is also the sort of thing that makes people really happy.
(And, unfortunately, a small number of folks will practically hate you for it, since you're taking away their "easy" work.)
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#16We implemented a customer support software, it was a game changer. It resolved most of the chaos.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#17Document, host meetings, buy food, drinks and invite co-workers to have "time off" during a "work meeting" every now and then, but really documentation and generate good excuses that necessarily does not blame other departments.
Document pain points is a big one, everyone says them, but not always are they fixed or prioritized. Something to fix those will work - like creating, documentation, sigh.
People skills and politics, not even technical. :(
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#18I left.
So did it actually improve? Or did it continue to go down hill?
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#19I'm a Dev Manager but started as a mid-senior developer at my current company (now about 350 people). We grew a lot by acquisition and one thing I noticed was many "cultural silos" that made it hard to build a shared, unifying identity. Myself and another developer worked to try and address this with a lot of small things focused on cutting across teams & groups: a book club-style bi-weekly discussion, "Tech Talks" f…
I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try a new iteration next time.
What made your attempt successful, in your opinion.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#20Prior to my joining the team, our homemade migration tool used sequential versioning numbers for filenames, i.e. 001_migration_name.sql, 002_migration_name.sql.
As our team was grew, it was very common to publish a PR, and right before merging realizing you had a conflict with someone else who'd merged to master ahead of you, using your sequence number.
I made a small change to the system, replacing the sequence numbers with unix timestamps and added some previously non-existant tests to cover the migration utility.
Unfortunately the subsequent PR took weeks to be approved by the team/eng leads because there was a lot of hand-wringing about this change. Once it was merged though we never thought about it again, it worked exactly as I'd hoped and nobody ever had to make a final "fix migration name" commit again.