Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by Hoenoe » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #130

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 t…

It depends on what you value and what your drives are. But to give you a bit more tangible advice. When you are asking your self "Is it time to leave?" a couple of days in a row, it's probably time to leave. And don't fear leaving, the amount of growth and experience it brings you is mostly already worth it.

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

#172

Post by phist_mcgee » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #168

phist_mcgee wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A gross paraphrase I got was "I cant define quality, but I know it when I see it".

That's a great one! Something that can be validated yet not easily calculated. Kind of like hashing!

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

#173

Post by Elixyrs » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 12:38 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #69

At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Cutting deployment time makes a huge impact because it makes everything go faster. You can iterate faster, which means getting bugs fixed faster, getting data to product managers faster, etc. It also has an effect on reliability. The faster you can make changes, the faster…

> At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

We have the exact same issue in my company. Could you explain how you managed this?

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

#174

Post by jedberg » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

Elixyrs wrote: post #173

jedberg wrote: post #69

At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Cutting deployment time makes a huge impact because it makes everything go faster. You can iterate faster, which means getting bugs fixed faster, getting data to product managers faster, etc. It also has an effect on reliability. The faster you can make changes, the faster…

> At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. We have the exact same issue in my company. Could you explain how you managed this?

The way I did it then probably wouldn't work now. I literally just wrote a perl script to automate pushing copies out to all the servers. They were doing all by hand before I got there.

If I had to do it today, I'd be looking at GitHub actions or some other similar CI/CD tool. If you're already using those, then I'd ask what is the slowest part of the process, and how can we speed it up?

To answer that question you obviously first need telemetry and monitoring to track each step of deployment. That telemetry will be useful in not only finding slow spots but tracking your improvement, which will help you both in operating as well as justifying your work to others.