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Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

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Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#161

Post by chime »

juststeve wrote: post #61
chime wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. With the added bonus of selecting my own schedule. I have a 25-26hr sleep cycle so it is very unproductive for me to be available at 9am or 11am or any specific time daily. I also prefer to work longer hours late at night. Thankfully everyone I work with as well as my wife/kid totally understand this and accommodate my atypical hours. The end result is I am extremely happy in my work hours and arrangement…

A 26 hour sleep cycle sounds extreme.

Yeah, it's not by choice though. It can really mess people up if they're not aware of it. This NASA TED talk about time on Mars discusses how a different cycle can affect others too: https://www.ted.com/talks/nagin_cox_what_time_is_it_on_mars

Ever since I saw that video, I've worked hard to (1) make sure others aren't negatively affected by my schedule (2) accept that until something brings me back to a 24-hour cycle, I have to persisently keep working on (1). Every other week I will go to bed at 10pm with my wife and wake up naturally at 5am and she'll have a great day being coordinated with my schedule. But within a week I'll be going to bed at 6am and waking up at 12-2pm. Every month or so I will stay up 30-36hrs without even trying.

None of this is due to bad habits, lack of sunlight, or lack of exercise etc. Doesn't matter what I do or don't do, my body just doesn't live in a 24-hour world. So I've learned to let it do its thing and work/sleep/eat/play when I feel like. Never been happier.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#162

Post by scarface74 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #159
scarface74 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most software development like everything else is a combination of inspiration and perspiration. How much time is spent in average day coming up with “ideas” versus just doing the work? Or putting it in production terms, the number of people coming up with ideas for the iPhone in Cupertino is dwarfed by the number of people building them in China.

I'm not sure what you're driving at here.

That you don’t need pair programming to do much of the grunt work that’s involved in development. Do you really need help making sure you write a for loop correctly?

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#163

Post by solarkraft »

bergerjac wrote: post #149
mikelevins wrote: post #134

Looking back over thirty years, and picking out the projects where I think I've done the best work for the greatest lengths of time, the common characteristics seem to be a quiet working environment, a high level of confidence and trust among the people working together (together with a level of competence that justifies it), clearly-communicated objectives, and substantial freedom to choose how to achieve those obje…

I'm a former software engineer where noise and distractions used to bother me to NO end.. someone dropping a pin would make me cringe with frustration 5 minutes in a noisy sales office with 17 people and it all went away.. the brain adapts quickly.. I know building software is different though.. constructing an entire blueprint in the brain.. it takes focus. One of my biggest mistakes is I rarely drew things out. If…

Do you have tips on drawing things out? I feel like I need to draw some things out, but haven't yet found a good system for it.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#164

Post by muzani »

Completely remote company, where everyone was based on Slack.

We were on throughout the day. There were no formal meetings. Just a long stream of discussion on the future, and everyone was always synced on what to do.

Nobody bugged or interrupted each other unless it was really important and they had to drop everything.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#165

Post by quickthrower2 »

growtofill wrote: post #93
quickthrower2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve recently started a job where my time isn’t measured. My time was measure 2012 until 2018. 3 different jobs. Utter misery. Now I’m having a lot more fun and feel very productive in the true sense of the word. There is still stand ups and slack etc. but I don’t mind that so much. Having a stopwatch constantly ticking against you is the main hell I hate in modern tech culture.

Were you working for Crossover or similar?

Nope not worked for any famous companies.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#166

Post by quickthrower2 »

dahart wrote: post #136
quickthrower2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve recently started a job where my time isn’t measured. My time was measure 2012 until 2018. 3 different jobs. Utter misery. Now I’m having a lot more fun and feel very productive in the true sense of the word. There is still stand ups and slack etc. but I don’t mind that so much. Having a stopwatch constantly ticking against you is the main hell I hate in modern tech culture.

Did you have time budgets or quotas? I’m curious how these companies used the measured time, what made it feel so oppressive. (I have no doubt it feels oppressive, just interested in the details.) When I’ve done contract work, and when I ran a startup, I started tracking my own time. I find it helps me focus and account for my time and understand my own habits. It’s not very good for open problems or exploratory work…

It’s more of a case of being dragged into a room to discuss why task X and take Y took 6 hours instreas of 2, or 4 weeks instead of $what-manager-coulda-dunnit-back-in-the-day. At those companies I had to let a lot of shit go through code reviews and take shortcuts. That stuff wasn’t measured.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#167

Post by HandsAtTheReady »

scarface74 wrote: post #156
HandsAtTheReady wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at places that do those too. But they weren't the environment that has enabled my best work. In particular, PRs and design sessions were/are a context switch which add friction. Even when pairing, however, we'd occasionally have team-wide design sessions, depending on the problem.

And it isn’t a context switch to have someone right next to you hovering while you are trying to develop? What context switch? You do a high level design before you start. Do you really need someone over your shoulder to make sure you can turn requirements into code?

> someone right next to you hovering while you are trying to develop

The pair is a collaboration. They develop together.

> Do you really need someone over your shoulder to make sure you can turn requirements into code?

I listed numerous advantages (and some disadvantages), none of which implied pairing was necessary. I'm merely answering OP's question on which environment has enabled my best work.

I'm not advocating pairing (I'm no longer in a pairing team), not even saying it's the environment that will enable the best work for other people. Our hiring process included a pair programming task to try to gauge how well that person would work in a pairing team, though it's also something you get better with in time.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#168

Post by cableshaft »

Working for a startup, working on mobile games. It was just me and an artist, and eventually another developer in a room, just working away, while the founder came by every 1-3 days and would look at our progress, brainstorm ideas for the game with us, and then go off and leave us alone.

Unfortunately he had too much of a "if we build it, they will come" mentality that infects way too many people in charge, and didn't put enough of an effort into marketing, or making sure we were working on a project that consumers wanted in the first place, so the games fell with a thud when they hit the market, but I was able to focus on making and learning, and I learned a tooooon in that period of time.

I haven't worked in a similar environment since. Big open spaces, lots of people and distractions, lots of people constantly wanting status updates, not much time to focus and really get work done, let alone learn anything.

Like at my current job, it's slowly gotten so bad that right now I have 3-4 hours of status updates most days (1 for devs, 1 for our department, 1 for our business unit, 1 for our data center, 1 for a specific upgrade project we've had for the past several months, and each lasts at least 30 minutes, usually longer) along with other meetings so my work day doesn't really begin until 3pm most days (and there's been multiple days when I was stuck on a phone until 10pm or later), and I'm still expected to make progress on four different projects and manage offshore developers and get development work done (that the offshore devs can't do) on top of all that. Things are slipping even with me working into the evening and a bit on weekends and those meetings are just drowning me, but I'm the only person in the department that has the domain knowledge they need (anymore, everyone else has left or transferred to another department) and they're stretching me beyond thin.

My own boss resigned because of this nonsense. He was the one that used to be able to shield me from this, and his replacement has just increased the amount of meetings I have to attend with his gung-ho, "fix all the problems this department has ever had" now attitude.

I really need to find another job.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#169

Post by jacques_chester »

scarface74 wrote: post #162
jacques_chester wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're driving at here.

That you don’t need pair programming to do much of the grunt work that’s involved in development. Do you really need help making sure you write a for loop correctly?

I do if I'm about to do it wrong, or if something other than a loop might be better, or to write the test that drives it out, or to show me a trick I didn't know, or to get me unstuck, or to tell me there's a library function that lets us skip a loop, or ...

Is your argument that I don't know how pairing works? Because my estimate is that I have around 8,000 hours practicing it at this point, which I suspect may be 8,000 hours or so more than your own professional pairing experience. It's possible that I've been sleep-walking through the whole thing, but unlikely. One of the dozens of intelligent, helpful people I've worked with would've pointed it out.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#170

Post by scarface74 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #169
scarface74 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you don’t need pair programming to do much of the grunt work that’s involved in development. Do you really need help making sure you write a for loop correctly?

I do if I'm about to do it wrong, or if something other than a loop might be better, or to write the test that drives it out, or to show me a trick I didn't know, or to get me unstuck, or to tell me there's a library function that lets us skip a loop, or ... Is your argument that I don't know how pairing works? Because my estimate is that I have around 8,000 hours practicing it at this point, which I suspect may be 8…

I’ve been writing code for over 30 years including two assembly language instruction sets (one before going to high school), and C on 4 platforms. I’ve been using my preferred language C# for a decade and JavaScript since it was introduced by Netscape in the 90s. I think I’m capable of writing decent performant code without pairing....
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