Saved about $100k / year by switching to our own video transcoder service rather than outsourcing it to SaaS.
how many dev hours did it take to build it and how many dev hours / year does it currently take to maintain/update it?
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
111–120 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't get paid to give tech presentations. Preparing for them would affect the work that I am responsible for. So giving tech presentations would ultimately make me look worse at my company. This explains the passiveness at my company.
At my team we "ticket" presentation prep just like dev work. So if you wanna do some sort of story point / ticket anlalysis per dev is no different.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We have something similar at my current place where every week or two someone presents. It ends up being the same people presenting and I don’t think it is because people are afraid of public speaking, but instead people don’t care about the talks. At most 1-2 people (~20 person eng team) will ask a question, engage with the speaker, say thanks, etc. but most people either don’t attend the video call, or do so with v…
> but instead people don’t care about the talks.
Are you taking into account this kind of comment by Dan Luu[1]:
"Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing."
From that, you might ask your presenters to do 2-4 hours of rehearsal, and for the talk to generate $2,000 of value before it's worth running / worth attending.
I feel many talks are "what the presenter wants to talk about" not "what the audience wants to hear". At least at a tech conference or on YouTube you can self-select so those two overlap. Inside a company, less so, so it's more important that they are done well, actionable, preferably short. They can't solely be mandatory. or solely fun for the presenter. And they certainly can't be spinning a tale of a utopian future for the company which is worse for me personally, or teasing me with a future tool or process or change which is better for me personally but which the company won't permit or won't get behind or actively opposes.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot more people have some degree of social anxiety than one might think, especially in IT. I was interning at this place and the team lead would come and ask the interns what they were doing (at least once a week) and ask really in depth questions. It was extremely nerve wracking because this was the only interaction I had with him and he kept a air of "hard ass" around him. Every few weekly meetings he'd ask the…
As someone who's decently comfortable with public speaking: Your employer is not your therapist and conflating the two is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read on HN.
Calling this "conflating your therapist and employer" is an unfair accusation and clear reductio ad absurdum.
It is training. You are expected to train junior engineers, not just in tech but also in soft skills. Public speaking is a soft skill. It is also something they do in schools. You have to do classroom presentations and reports. I don't think you would make the same argument for them.
Your job should be making you a better employee than you were when you came in (and not just in your hard skills). This is especially true for junior positions. You will be expected to defend your work to your boss and employers. No one is saying to give a talk to an open audience. But you should be able to clearly justify your work.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Passiveness A lot more people have some degree of social anxiety than one might think, especially in IT. Lightning talks originate—and work well in—the sort of tech-bro workplaces where there’s an Xbox, foosball table, and bar in the breakroom. Half the “culture fit” criterion of hiring for those places is just an attempt to filter out potential hires with any amount of social anxiety; so the average level of it in…
> because there’s always still the anxiety that someone might spot a flaw in your argument that you didn’t What's the need to always being 100% right. There are very few situations where there is a 100% right solution. Most are optimized 80-90% for a particular problem set. Indicating that "within our context, we believe this is the best solution" goes a long way in creating that opportunity for discussion and deeper…
Wanting your blog to go through an editor isn't about needing to be right; it's a "defence against the dark arts" of paparazzi quoting your words out-of-context with the intent of getting you pilloried by the Internet.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#116I advocated at my own risk to try and improve our working conditions. Being honest and carrying out my work in the way I was most comfortable doing, directly and assertively asking for better physical and social conditions to perform our duties, and using my own equipment where theirs was a hindrance. The tech stack was relatively ancient, but I accepted that as part of the role, because it wouldn't have improved much of anything to swap YUI for another. Anyway, I learned after I was fired that our group cubes were replaced by something less soul crushing and more configurable, the sales guy who screamed on his bluetooth headset every hour while typing on his mechanical keyboard was moved, and the guy in charge of the failed project I was assigned to was promoted. So honestly idgaf about improving whatever company I'm at anymore. I just try and pick one that will not suck so bad and plan to stick around for 6 months.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#117I left. The people were decent and the product fine, but my personal interest in the company went from "eh, sounds kind of interesting" to "why am I here...?" very quickly, and every day felt like an uphill battle to not rub my disinterest off on my coworkers. Looking for inspiration is a mind trap that is best avoided. Inspiration comes when you are silent and you listen to yourself (and those around you). Keep an o…
What Dev resources (blogs/books/etc) could you recommend that could help better explain this mode of thinking and how to turn it into a practical and practicable methodology of working?
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#118When I started at a previous company, we scored almost 0 on the Joel Test. (Remember that?) By the time I left, we were at close to 100%.
Its only one google search away but ...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
You're welcome.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you say more about this? Is this an initial screening flow that formalizes customer support requests, a self-discovery tool, etc?
We used a tool called Freshdesk in which sending an email to a particular email id creates a support ticket. Also you can reply from it's dashboard. We had b2b customers who used to send a lot of queries everyday. This tool helped in distributing queries among the team. Earlier it was only one person mostly who was handling all queries, thus was overwhelmed. Also it has auto rules which can be used to set priority to…
would love to learn more about how you're using Freshdesk and the types of queries you're responding to! I'm building a customer support app that uses openAI's GPT3 to generate automated responses and it's been working great so far!
How can I reach you?
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#120At a previous employer, we had an incident management bot that was pretty widely used by product teams but for whatever reason, the actual data just sat in a Redis instance (the default Hubot adaptor out of the box) and was never looked at
The data was mostly a mess as the bot had interfaced with Flowdock at one point and later Slack, but even then Slack had undergone a few changes to the message schema. All up, there were about 4 different distinct schemas.
To be clear, what was stored was the representation of an incident that also included data about the person who commanded the incident. Generally the commander data was just a copy of their profile data, and that was the thing that mostly changed over time.
Anyway, one of my first tasks when I joined was to throw together a small web API to expose that data so we could generate reports and what not.
Perhaps the most important thing to note is that nothing I did actually drove any particular change. I just got lucky because when our new CTO joined and started asking product teams how many incidents they often had, product teams started asking our group for reports.
Seeing how much time my manager was spending generating these things, I took the next logical step of throwing together a basic UI (filtering, sorting, exporting to CSV) so that it inverted the overhead onto the teams themselves rather than it being bottlenecked by one or two people doing reports.
Anyway, there's more to it than that, and funnily enough no one in our wider team was really aware of what I put together. Having said that, it was a fun experience and kinda nice getting a little bit of attention for a while. It was more or less a side project so I got to field customer requests (and treat users like customers), balance priorities and so on
I guess the theme here would be a mix of visibility and automating toil?
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I've often thought about doing a New Old Thing style postmortem on that bot. It was rewritten a little while ago now but the first version, using the default hubot adaptor, made me really appreciate Redis. It was doing some highly uestionable stuff under the hood but as a testament to Redis, it never missed a beat.