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Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#121

Post by theemptiness »

adam_ellsworth wrote: post #117
kempbellt wrote: post #98

I 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?

I'll suggest Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (for empathy) and Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for quality and values).

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#123

Post by dominotw »

notdonspaulding wrote: post #64

My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is: Take out the garbage. By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your…

> Take out the garbage.

I don't agree. You don't get promotions/pay hikes/bonuses for taking garbage out. Those are given to ppl who ship products directly bringing in tthe revenue.

> I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase.

I agree with this.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#124

Post by reificator »

godelski wrote: post #114
reificator wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> talks like these really should be used to help your team members with anxiety. A bit of low risk exposure therapy.

> You are supposed to train your employees and sometimes that means making them a little uncomfortable.

Reductio ad absurdum only applies if the source does not already convey that message. This literally says that your employer should be providing therapy for anxiety. (Not providing a therapist, literally performing therapy) There's no ambiguity there. It's in the original text, right there.

Anxiety and soft skills are related but soft skills are a thing to learn and be taught and anxiety is a condition. If anxiety is in the way of learning soft skills the solution is not for the employer to provide therapy.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#126

Post by maerF0x0 »

theemptiness wrote: post #121
adam_ellsworth wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'll suggest Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (for empathy) and Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for quality and values).

Massive upvote for Pirsig. I did not understand Apple until reading this book. I think Tesla maybe our contemporary equivalent.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#127

Post by kortex »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #6

I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.

I started using a copy paste with history (alfred on mac). Could never go back. It's such a massive workflow optimizer I can't believe the idea isn't more common. Function fixedness?

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#128

Post by Ecstatify »

bluejellybean wrote: post #73
known wrote: post #23

It's risky unless you can protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)

Well duh, literally everything has risk though. Your comment is effectively useless in my opinion as it adds nothing to the conversation of improving a company, you're just stating it's risky. It's risky to even get out of bed to get a coffee as you are required to manipulate people to do so! Even worse than that, you have to manipulate an entire logistics chain to get that fresh cup of joe. Just ignore that these ar…

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#129

Post by OliverJones »

I joined a small SaaS company when it was 15 years old, in the role of developer. I was the third developer on the team.

I dragged them, kicking and screaming, away from CVS into git for source control.

I did a LOT of documentation of their ancient and honorable :-) SQL schema.

I converted a lot of old legacy code to more modern languages.

I converted a lot of old legacy SQL embedded in their code to use prepared statements and stored procedures, and developed a tiny little framework to make it easy for other developers to do the same.

I came in early one summer morning and washed the windows in the office. Seriously. They hadn't been washed for 15 years, and were disgusting.

I helped talk them into replacing their low end home brew bug tracking system.

I pushed, hard, to get them to gradually discontinue using FreeBSD in favor of standardized Linux cloud distros.

I developed a way for sales, dev, and ops to communicate to do capacity planning BEFORE bringing on new gigantic enterprise customers, not after.

I failed to get them to adopt CI/CD.

I retired.

My working principle: always work myself out of any job. Do all my work so somebody else can take it over.

Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

#130

Post by pmiller2 »

kempbellt wrote: post #98

I 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…

> I left.

You know, this is one thing I need to learn: when to bail out on a situation that's beyond repair. I have a bit of a mental block about quitting without anything lined up, and job searching is just annoying enough for me to not want to do it without the incentive of needing to replace a paycheck. But, there are definitely a couple times in my career that I should have left long before I did, and I believe things would have worked out much better for me if I had.

I'm interested on anyone's thoughts on "when it's time to leave."

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