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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?

#151

Post by muzani »

dominotw wrote: post #123
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.

> 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'd disagree. Pay hikes and bonuses, maybe. But promotions are likely to go to someone who is stable and reliable. Why would you promote the fastest coder out of a coding job? Tech leads and managers are often the ones most comfortable in the system and the one who doesn't yell at others when he's interrupted.

The other little thing a lot of people forget is that it's hard to get anything done in a room full of garbage. So this often leads to better things for the team.

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

#152

Post by muzani »

C1: I was the person with attention to detail. One guy built the system and led things. I spotted cracks in it, and patched it to be stable, then proposed a better system when they needed one.

C2: I was the "living documentation" for the entire system. There was plenty of docs, gigabytes of it in fact. Too much for most developers to know by heart. My job was to actually read it all and answer questions. I'd bring up things like how this portion is not optimized according to this specification here, or that portion is missing error handling N, which happens frequently, or this other server fallback is not being used. The system has millions of daily active users, so every time an API is called twice, that costs serious money. I'd also spot things like unstable hacks that were hidden in the code by some old programmers.

C3: Whole code was a mess. I spent half my time refactoring it, which also meant a few late nights sometimes, and chopping out thousands of lines of code a week. It cut down maintenance and bugs drastically. Where one thing would require 4 hours to do, it then required 10 minutes.

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

#153

Post by heymijo »

suprfnk wrote: post #81
heymijo wrote: post #38

Listened to people. The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions. A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective. Then, we started talking to colleagues. "What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?" Listening alone, letting these people know their voi…

What was the initiative you had? The common concern that you fixed?

This was a school/school district.

The common concern was lack of direction and changing direction with new change initiative one/two/three/four times per year.

We created an initiative for teacher created and led professional development. We used students for live class recreations where teachers could analyze in real time. It was coordinated, structured, and sequenced in a way no teacher's in our district had experienced.

At the same time we took all of the feedback we got from every teacher we interviewed (and we interviewed all of them) and created a vision statement for both teachers and students. We took it back to the teachers and showed how each person's feedback was reflected in the vision. We got the district to adopt the vision. Then we held leadership's feet to the fire and didn't let them do anything that didn't align with the vision. We put the onus on them to explain how any decisions did align.

We used the vision to design professional development, adopt curriculum, craft special education services, and more.

This started as a K-6 initiative, which was wildly ambitious at the time. In the following years the middle school got on board, and then the high school followed suit, led not by administrators but by the teachers themselves. Something we never in our wildest dreams thought would happen.

Five years on the direction is the same and positive change continues.

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

#154

Post by heymijo »

awinder wrote: post #99
heymijo wrote: post #38

Listened to people. The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions. A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective. Then, we started talking to colleagues. "What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?" Listening alone, letting these people know their voi…

What was the after story, if you don't mind going further? This is super interesting, I'm curious what happened with you/the company afterwards or on a longer horizon

Sure. This was a school/school district. We thought big, and started small. Our initial initiative was for K-6 only. In the following years, this spread to both the middle school, and then the high school. Driven by demand from the teachers themselves.

The modern era of education reform goes back to the Soviets launching Sputnik, so 60 years. It has been omnipresent reform efforts in K-12 education since then. Lots of change, little improvement.

We created not only a durable change, but a positive one that is still pointed in the same direction five years after we got this off the ground.

There's more detail about what we did in a reply below you.

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

#155

Post by tasuki »

dominotw wrote: post #123
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.

I don't think there's a disagreement here: notdonspaulding's advice was for "anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company", not for "anyone who mostly cares about promotions/pay hikes/bonuses".

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

#156

Post by phist_mcgee »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #149
someperson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain in a paragraph what this book made you understand about Apple?

Granted it's been about 10 years since I read it... In addition to what electrondood said. It helped me understand that there are some people who just want their technology to work. Not to understand it's qualities. John Sutherland (the character with the BMW). Many Apple users are like that. They want the defaults to work for them. They want to remain clueless and it "just works" ...

And I think getting to the end of the book, and seeing Pirsig descend into a pretty dark place in understanding quality being undefinable in any actionable way, I guess sometimes it's easier to just let go, and not understand something. A lot of times, understanding just makes us more miserable. Fantastic book, read it as a teenager and it deeply affected me.

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

#157

Post by axegon_ »

gmadsen wrote: post #80
axegon_ wrote: post #71

1. Simplify - as a rule of thumb, if something looks too complicated it probably is. If you think there are too much "ifs" in the code, there certainly are. 2. Remove any "shiny-new-toy". A perfect example would be my bank, which operates in ~15-20 countries: Their interface isn't a shiny web interface with pretty animations to cover up a slow response time. The interface all employees use is built with ncurses. That…

i feel like there is an appropriate middle ground somewhere between "shiny-new-toy" and ncurses...

Hypothetically... Late 90's web, which wasn't bloated with 150mb javascript files which run your CPU at 10000000%...

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

#158

Post by muzani »

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)

This is true, but I see this kind of self-protection and political awareness as just another career skill. Too many people try to avoid it instead of acting against it. Or sometimes you can ignore what the company does and focus on your own craftsmanship.

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

#160

Post by nicbou »

snypox wrote: post #101
nicbou wrote: post #79

I implement a few changes wherever I work: - Commit messages must include a ticket number (or a keyword like "hotfix"). This is enforced by a commit hook that's bundled with the project. - Ticket templates that encourage clear tickets. A ticket should always explain why it must be done. It should also contain enough information for any team member to judge its priority, or start work on it. - Any relevant discussion…

Are you me?! Even the party parrot emoji.

Maybe? Do you get a weird feeling in your right elbow when you apply cold water to it?
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