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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?

#111

Post by fhbdukfrh »

henrik_w wrote: post #101
danmaz74 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe looks how agile was supposed to be. What the op described looks like a perversion of agile perpetrated by managers who either don't understand why agile was born, or do understand it, but only care about increasing their power instead of getting things done.

I know. When I first read the XP book by Kent Beck it was a revelation. That was the first time I saw a methodology that I felt worked and agreed with my own experience. Planning everything out in advance is hopeless. There are two great quotes that I think capture this: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” John Gall “Enlightened trial and error outperfor…

How about "a team of skilled developers is likely to be successful with any software development approach; an inexperienced or untalented team is doomed regardless of the chosen methodology"

After 20 years that's been my experience

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

#112

Post by noir_lord »

kreetx wrote: post #105
noir_lord wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciously looking, I had two offers one for where I am and another for more pay (about 16% base but I get a bonus that offsets a lot of that) The other one was for a larger company in a big open office. It wasn't even a choice tbh I can't articulate how much I loathe open offices.

It's good to hear how well how it has worked out for you! My situation isn't exactly as good, but it's getting there I'm hoping. The current job I have started out as part time so that I could work on my side project. This didn't work out but then I suddenly got more trust and freedom for doing things my own way, and now it's much better.

If I could go back and say one thing to 18 year old me it would be "it's better to seek forgiveness than ask permission", every single time I've made the bold choice it's either worked out or I've learnt something from it.

I far more regret the things I didn't do.

It's good they are rewarding trust earned with more trust, that's rare in a lot of work places.

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

#114

Post by AuthorizedCust »

I am a developer and innovator. Absolute worst is being managed by sys/app admins. They bring their cultural baggage to the relationship, screw us up by insisting on recipe/plan-based project management, are jealous of the "fun" stuff that developers do, and are fearful of our analytical skillset, which we've honed differently than them because that's our focus, instead of keeping the lights on.

Best environment is the polar opposite of that.

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

#115

Post by thoman23 »

Volrath89 wrote: post #109
growtofill wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you working for Crossover or similar?

(not OP) it seems to me it is now "normal" for remote companies to track every second; is it really as soulcrushing as it sounds? Do you have any real world experience with crossover? (I am seriously considering applying with them)

Isn’t Crossover a scam of some sort?

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

#116

Post by scarface74 »

lykr0n wrote: post #36
mustardo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your probably not doing "DevOps" if they hired a "team" for it, sounds like ops on aws

"DevOps" doesn't mean shit. It's a bullshit term define by who is using it. That team is in charge of kubernetes, and automated application deployment stuff, so they are the team ensures developers can push to production quickly. Which, now that I google it- it's exactly what the "official" definition is.

Well, in our case, dev ops means the developer is also responsible for setting up the CloudFormation template to create any resources, CodeBuild to create packages and CodePipeline or Octopus Deploy to deploy code.

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

#118

Post by thewsc »

henrik_w wrote: post #68
temporallobe wrote: post #25

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a g…

Here is a counterpoint. I worked with software development at Ericsson for about 10 years before XP and agile came out. I too had a private office, and I recognize a lot of what you describe. While it was nice, it was not a very productive environment. Each release of new SW was enormous and typically took a year or more to get out. The developers had no real idea of how things worked in production. Lots of useless d…

Have you asked people who work at Ericsson today? From what I have heard it is hard to think that things are better today despite moving to things like agile.

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

#119

Post by jacques_chester »

ww520 wrote: post #17
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.

Office standups where I work are of the form: New faces, helps, interestings and events. It's not the same as a team standup. You can get through both in 20 minutes flat.

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

#120

Post by rglullis »

mstade wrote: post #92
rglullis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your Scrum Master is destroying developer time, then s/he is "doing it wrong". The main function of the Scrum Master is to shield the developers from all the non-development crap. I've worked with one guy who was so good at it he would play interference and defend us from outside interruptions almost literally (actually blocking people from coming to our desks, making sure we could focus, holding meetings only if…

> But no matter the process, if a manager is destroying productive time from the developers the fault is in the individual, not the environment or process adopted. Why can't it be both? Bad managers can be empowered by a process, just as good managers could be hampered – no? Agile provides so many tools for bad managers to micro manage, so that even if the process itself is well intended it still could lead to hell –…

One of the tenets from Agile is "People before Process". Bad managers will micromanage no matter what processes or tools they have at hand.

So, no. Bad managers should not be empowered by Agile. They should be weeded out, by other people first and, failing that, results second.

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