The obvious answer to this question is often increasing gross sales through design improvements. Also, finding correlations with data can also be extremely helpful.
Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
141–150 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#142Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
It sounds like you also deserve credit for measuring the 80% improvement in call volume and using it to show the value of the change. That is how you make shit happen; respect.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#143At my current employer I have done two things that I think have had a big impact. I didn't do them alone, and in some cases, I couldn't have done them alone. The first was to root out a customer-blaming culture that had festered for far too long in the company. I recognized how toxic it was, and how bad it was for customer service, when I arrived. Not long after that I became a supervisor and my manager (also a new h…
> opportunity to write new tools for front line support staff
Any learnings you could share on success factors / features in the new internal tools?
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#144The three major things I did was automate everything, document everything and require justification in every task I do.
Whenever I had a task that recurred more than once, the second reoccurrence was when I implemented automation of that task. Didn't matter what it was or how much time it actually saved. The purpose was to have documented, reproducible results on any task I do. I often switched roles and then a year or two later I suddenly had to perform an old task I was "really efficient at." With automation i was able to do the task right away with almost no need to jog my memory.
Documentation requires you to get in the habit of writing. Doesn't have to be good, doesn't have to be smart and color coded. You just have to do it. I have vimwiki setup to a git repo and every discussion, every meeting, every project or note I took ends up here. Searching is easy enough and I don't have to worry about losing anything.
The last one deals with people so it requires tact. Whenever I'm asked to do a job that is a one off of something else or has additional work attached to it, I ask what the justification for the added engineering time would be. The point is to make me available for as much development as possible so if I'm stuck doing things that aren't actually needed it wastes resources. It also reduces complexity as there are minimal special cases for things.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#145Getting enough sleep.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. When something needs doing, I just get it done. If you wait for everyone to agree that it needs planning to be done at some point in the future, it'll never get done because the feature firehose never relents. This has cost me a few weekends, but a) it meant that I kept my sanity in the long run and b) despite said fixes reducing the company's dependency on me (ie. supposedly damaged the job security) taking th…
Indeed, doing successful rogue projects enhances your job security. Unsuccessful ones, though, watch out!
Yes, that's why these cost me a few weekends... if it's done in my Free Time(TM) they don't have to know about the unsuccessful ones.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#147Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
That's amazing, kudos to you, I imagine it's difficult to pull this change? Are there political consideration that a line of command must all answer to?
No, you just have to overcome inertia. There are legal considerations for multiple uploads - who decides which document is valid etc. But once the policy is clearly vetted and publicly stated, the courts are usually fine with it.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#148[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#149Writing accessible documentation. Most people either write no docs or they write a doc that assumes the reader already knows what the thing is. I write docs that assume you're a new employee and explain the thing in simple, plain English before building up the technical details. Notably, these kind of docs make it easy to handoff maintenance and further development to someone else so you can move on to new projects.
I wish I knew more people who think like you.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#150I work in a state govt department.
Very simple infrastructure additions have paid out majorly for us. It's my job to innovate around research infrastructure, so the following should be read as outcomes of my role, not bragging.
I migrated my division from Word docs on shared drives to Atlassian Confluence Wikis, which made knowledge more discoverable amd accessible.
For a work group, I set up a CKAN data catalogue. Soon after, our division adopted it, and after demonstrating it at a GovHack hackathon, I got seconded to our sister agency to build the first production version of https://data.wa.gov.au.
For a statewide turtle monitoring program, I switched out paper-based data capture with electronic data capture using OpenDataKit. We now have real-time data analysis and reporting. Many colleagues have found a similar need for electronic data capture. Claim to fame: wrote an R package `ruODK` to facilitate data access from ODK to R.