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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?

#181

Post by torgian »

This is tough since I have changed careers three times, but i have found the remote work I do to be highly effective for me. It’s my first software job and I’ve been good about managing my time and delivering successfully.

I don’t get micromanaged but have clear goals that are set forth.

The only problem I’ve faced is occasionally unclear communication with other coworkers; mostly because I’m still getting used to some of the jargon and need to phrase my questions correctly.

Some coworkers use English as a second language too, so that can be a slight barrier; fortunately my experience as a language teacher helps me in that regard.

Overall I’ve been learning a lot and I can see myself working with this company for a few years at least.

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

#182

Post by jacques_chester »

scarface74 wrote: post #170
jacques_chester wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

In my anger I turned this into a measuring contest.

I think what you're reading is me saying "it's impossible to write good code without a pair", which (a) isn't true and (b) isn't what I said.

What I'm reading is that you say pairing is strictly less effective than soloing, which (a) isn't true and (b) isn't true.

If we were talking about professionally programming in assembly language, I would take your views seriously because of your relevant experience in that matter. In doing so I might not agree and I would very likely be wrong, but I would acknowledge your expertise on that topic.

What I ask is the same courtesy when it comes to pairing.

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

#183

Post by scarface74 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #182
scarface74 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

In my anger I turned this into a measuring contest. I think what you're reading is me saying "it's impossible to write good code without a pair", which (a) isn't true and (b) isn't what I said. What I'm reading is that you say pairing is strictly less effective than soloing, which (a) isn't true and (b) isn't true. If we were talking about professionally programming in assembly language, I would take your views serio…

The opposite of “pair programming” isn’t “developing solo”.

Like I said above, most problems that developers are working on everyday isn’t some complex algorithm it’s translating business requirements to code.

Collaboration is often definitely better than developing solo but it isn’t “pair programming”. But developing solo can be faster. The more developers you add to a feature, the more communication and coordination overhead you have (The Mythical Man Month a book written in the 60s). Honestly, we’ve found that three people working on three separate features solo can get more done than three people working on the same feature over the same amount of time. Again we make it a point to switch up so we can see the whole picture.

When the product owner comes in and realizes we didn’t consider something, it’s almost always faster to have that one person who knows how the change will affect the whole stack - UI/Back end/database/deployment, infrastructure requirements than to have five people trying to coordinate the change.

Collobaration can mean “war rooming” or “swarming”.

War rooming for example is getting your back end and front end developer together in a room along with your QA person, your Devops, and your product owner working on their piece of the feature, rapidly iterating.

I work on a team where each developer can easily go back and forth between the three languages we use (JS/C#/Python), front end development in React, database design, Devops with CloudFormation, CodeBuild, Code Deploy and Code Pipeline sometime we will split up the parts. Other times one person will do a quick design session, do the whole stack, do a post review along with design docs in MarkDown.

If you have well rounded developers, they will often switch roles on the next feature just to have knowledge and a different perspective.

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

#184

Post by tcbasche »

johntheme wrote: post #60
temporallobe wrote: post #25

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a g…

I keep reading about how scrum,agile,openspace,slack,oncall,whatsup outside of work has ruined developers productivity and life after work. WHY dont we do something about it? why are we going like cattle to the slaughter house? We are developers right we are supposed to be smart, intelligent yes, we have let this come all over us step by step until we have lost our life. Developers - it's time to raise to the basic w…

Since taking a new developer job about a year ago I made a commitment to not sign into my work email on my phone and it's been great.

But yeah, what the other commenter said. Just do it!

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

#185

Post by shandor »

Aeolun wrote: post #180
shandor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adage "good leaders make themselves unnecessary" applies. If you have people under you, or can coach your people to take parts of your responsibilities off you, I think that's a great outcome. If your ICs are so good that they can actually do that, you should give them a raise and be glad you get to focus on other things in the meanwhile. Of course, if the manager is unable to then broader their own scope, they i…

Oh certainly. There are a lot of managers that add value. I was talking more about the 5 layers of confusion (product manager, project manager, business manager, business architect, designer) that exist between our customer and the developers. There may be more that I haven’t yet discovered. We recently spent quite a while on developing a feature only to find out the customer didn’t actually want it.

Ouch. Sounds like your product manager and business manager are indeed not doing much more than warming their seats :)

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

#186

Post by dawidw »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #121

No company at all. My best work I've done between 5:30AM and 7:00AM on my home machine before I got ready for work. The code I have created there runs hundreds of websites and causes me less than 5 trouble tickets a year. My home computer sits in a mud room full of boots and heavy coats where no one bothers me first thing in the morning. It's a littler cooler than the house. I drink tea and espresso. There is no phon…

5:30 AM? What is your daily routine?

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

#187

Post by throwawayloco »

josho wrote: post #129
fhbdukfrh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "a team of skilled developers is likely to be successful with any software development approach; an inexperienced or untalented team is doomed regardless of the chosen methodology" After 20 years that's been my experience

Yes. But unfortunately not every team can be made entirely of rockstars. So the purpose of a methodology is to increase the probability of success for a moderately talented team.

What is is about "skilled developers" that makes you think "rockstars"?

Inexperience is easy correct if you have skilled developers and the inexperienced person is willing to learn.

I do have to admit, I'm not sure about what to do with untalented...

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

#188

Post by justin_evans »

According to the Tony Schwartz research, founder of The Energy Project, humans naturally get physiological fatigue after full focus and energy and need to take a break after every 90 minutes. Our body sends signals, but we usually overcome it by drinking coffee, energy drinks, etc. until we don't have energy left which is not a good sign.

The Draugiem Group in Latvia determined with the help of time tracking software that the most productive employees worked less than others and took more breaks. Productive individuals worked an average of 52 minutes and had breaks of 17 minutes long.

Nobody, not even the most productive person in the world can work for 8 hours. Learn to take short breaks. It is one of the project management hacks that is good for your brain, body, and mood. Set scheduled short and long breaks as they will keep your mind fresh throughout the day.

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

#189

Post by eternalreturn »

thewsc wrote: post #118
henrik_w wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a counterpoint. I worked with software development at Ericsson for about 10 years before XP and agile came out. I too had a private office, and I recognize a lot of what you describe. While it was nice, it was not a very productive environment. Each release of new SW was enormous and typically took a year or more to get out. The developers had no real idea of how things worked in production. Lots of useless d…

Have you asked people who work at Ericsson today? From what I have heard it is hard to think that things are better today despite moving to things like agile.

I work at Ericsson today. Unfortunately, the environment is very much like the one described by the OP: open plan office, noise, chit-chat, interruptions, daily stand-ups (which are mostly a waste of time), scrum meetings which take place far too often, retrospectives which turn into blamestorm sessions. All of this makes the office a rather unpleasant place to be. Which is a shame, because whenever I get to actually sit down and get some work done, I tend to enjoy it.

You'd think I could cope with this by working from home, but that option is limited, too.

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

#190

Post by rammy1234 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #178
rammy1234 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shaming is not criticism. criticism is an expression of disapproval of an idea not the person. But shaming is personal. This is not constructive to improve.

You are, of course, correct. But people often choose whether or not to take something personally, and their reaction determines the outcome. Consider the following situations: A. (Bad case) You criticise my idea/proposal, and I interpret that as you criticising/shaming/blaming me (i.e. I take it personally). I then decide to ignore your criticism, because I feel it is based on your personal opinion of me, which I kno…

people reacting to situations is about individual. but we know every individual is unique and different. Team should be encompassing and not assuming. CEO or Project Director's boundary is only with the idea and not the individual.

Idea can be criticised, never individual. Your argument may sound right, but it is not considering everyone. Your argument is saying how one should react, but is not answering what if one reacts differently. How can we mend it.

Leader is one who is compassionate and has ability to differentiate idea from individual. Work is not entirety. Idea will never define a person. whenever we critique, it is best to keep it till the idea and never to person. my few cents.

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