Fire early, fire often.
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
131–140 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you please explain in a paragraph what this book made you understand about Apple?
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#133My 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.
I'm on a project right now that's essentially all "taking out the garbage." I sort of feel like a garden gnome, fixing minor little issues here and there, but, this is all being done with institutional support, from my manager on up, so I have no doubt that I'll be rewarded appropriately for it. One of the bigger components of the project is going to end up saving one of our client teams about 9 man hours a day. In the end, I think that's a good enough result to justify a little garbage hauling.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#134My 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.
There's a difference between taking out a little extra garbage and being taking advantage of. I think the OP is referring to doing something like removing an npm warning message in a build or adding a few sentences to the documentation on a Friday at 4:30pm instead of leaving early.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#135My 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…
I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.
I've done this!!! It works _great_! I have a setup script that new employees run and I never quite figured out how to automate one of the steps, so it just prints "Go to www.example.com/whatever and paste in the API key it generates below." It's been 1.5 years and it's still chuggin' along just fine.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, liter…
That is not what was intended. I know because I wrote it. It was a push to the most absurd interpretation.
As for anxiety, you should talk to people with it. It is a spectrum. Being nervous and anxious is not a medical condition but the human condition. Being unable to breath and having heart issues (i.e. a panic attack) is a medical condition. There's a clear spectrum here and and equating nervousness to an anxiety disorder is trivializing the condition that people actually suffer. Clearly I'm not saying you should be forced to do this if you have a real condition (ad absurdum). But if you're just uncomfortable and nervous, welcome to the human condition. While you enjoy your stay I would appreciate it if you don't trivialize medical issues. If you do have medical issues: please seek professional help, and I'm sorry if you interpreted my message as inclusive of you.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#137I make sure I'm up for _anything_. Give me that thing that has been the thorn in everyone's side. Yes, some rather daunting (read: frought-with-peril) tasks present themselves, but... if done well, usually yield a better 'next assignment'.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, liter…
That is not what was intended. I know because I wrote it. It was a push to the most absurd interpretation. As for anxiety, you should talk to people with it. It is a spectrum. Being nervous and anxious is not a medical condition but the human condition. Being unable to breath and having heart issues (i.e. a panic attack) is a medical condition. There's a clear spectrum here and and equating nervousness to an anxiety…
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Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#139My 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…
As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin. Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my…
I'll second this with a personal anecdote as well.
If you do want to do this, clear it explicitly with your manager/person doing your perf reviews...
I had a non-technical manager who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features and received a negative review because of it, even after explaining the situation.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm on a project right now that's essentially all "taking out the garbage." I sort of feel like a garden gnome, fixing minor little issues here and there, but, this is all being done with institutional support, from my manager on up, so I have no doubt that I'll be rewarded appropriately for it. One of the bigger components of the project is going to end up saving one of our client teams about 9 man hours a day. In t…
> this is all being done with institutional support, from my manager on up,
I would be very careful with this. I made many mistakes like this. Unless you know this personally, I wouldn't trust this if its coming only from your manager and one level up.
People who control purse strings just don't care about garbage collection.
Even CEO should understand and value the project you are working on.