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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#191

Post by muzani »

sn41 wrote: post #45

Designing 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…

Amazing. I've avoided work in the public sector because I thought I wouldn't accomplish anything. But this is a great example of how to be impactful in such a job.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#192

Post by muzani »

volkk wrote: post #187
thomk wrote: post #156

Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision. There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him. A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor'…

how can you tell they're attentive?

You can tell by body language normally. There's a kind of look when someone is off thinking about other things, and there's another kind of look when they're listening to every word.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#193

Post by DerekQ »

dharmab wrote: post #5

Writing 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.

How are you storing and sharing these docs? Is it a common Sharepoint library or something similar? I've found the biggest problem is often getting people to look at the document resource / archive when they have a problem whose solution might already be documented.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#194

Post by reinkaos »

thomk wrote: post #156

Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision. There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him. A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor'…

Thanks for that. I'm one of the "Jims" of the world and one of my superiors started doing that to me recently.

As an introvert in a team of very talkative and opinionated people it is often hard to speak up. Having other people creating space for me to speak has been very helpful.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#195

Post by asdko13roasi »

sn41 wrote: post #45

Designing 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…

How much did it increase the workload and manual error rates of the reviewer for having to check multiple documents?

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#196

Post by Stronico »

kqr wrote: post #75
cellularmitosis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets. Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would someho…

This is very insightful. The higher the level you want to perform on, the more responsibility you have to bear yourself. Asking for permission is really asking for someone else to take the risk, the blame, and therefore the responsibility. That only works up to a point, and you will have to get used to shouldering more and more responsibility on your own initiative to truly get anywhere.

Asking someone else to take a risk is a very good insight.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#197

Post by ferver »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #21
ferver wrote: post #15

Having two dry erase boards with various colored fine tip markers on hand

I bought a huge whiteboard and mounted it with my boss one evening breaking facilities regulations. It’s used a lot and facilities stopped grumbling after a while.

invaluable tools -- a computer needs a stack, a human needs a pad

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#198

Post by khalilravanna »

mavelikara wrote: post #92
khalilravanna wrote: post #41

Mine is actually very similar to OP’s! I think regular discussion of code is such an impactful tool in an engineering organization. I think as a manager it’s often the small things that can have the biggest impact. At my current company I helped revive a meeting we have called Code Read. It’s basically a meeting where the engineers sit down and go over the commits from the last couple of days focusing on ones that im…

How big is your team?

When we started we had maybe 4 engineers going. Now it's like 12 going to the meeting. It's a bit more unwieldy but still works.

What we've talked about is basically if it continues to grow we'll need to be a lot more structured or have to splinter off into groups with a good ratio of experienced to less-experienced engineers to still maintain learning.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#199

Post by khalilravanna »

zaphod4prez wrote: post #157
khalilravanna wrote: post #41

Mine is actually very similar to OP’s! I think regular discussion of code is such an impactful tool in an engineering organization. I think as a manager it’s often the small things that can have the biggest impact. At my current company I helped revive a meeting we have called Code Read. It’s basically a meeting where the engineers sit down and go over the commits from the last couple of days focusing on ones that im…

I would LOVE to hear a little more about this & anything you've learned about making these meetings effective. Would love to know how long do they last, how many ppl are in the meeting usually (wondering what the "right size" is), or if you got that idea from somewhere?

Where the idea came from: one of our engineers Will Seitz suggested it. I'm not 100% sure where he got it from. I absolutely love it though and have been a big proponent since the first one.

How long do they last: 30 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursday

How many people: 4 when we started, up to like 10-12 now. I think the right size is like 6-8 maybe. We're approaching critical mass where we either need to add a lot of process or splinter it into separate groups with a good ratio of experienced to less-experienced people.

General musings: We have a separate one for the frontend and the backend each. We started with the frontend one and that's the one I've run and iterated on the process of. The basic structure is just go over the commits from the past 2 days (since we do it Tues/Thurs). You have to rely on the person running the meeting to 1) know what's important to spend extra time on and 2) keep the meeting rolling along through the meaty, important commits. This requires a decent amount of knowledge in the domain area as well as some good sense of the pulse for what's being worked on across different teams so they know when to surface things that would be important for cross-communication. That and even having a sense for good mentoring opportunities (e.g. people keep having trouble with `async/await` so I'll call out this commit with really good examples of using that feature).

So, all and all, the person leading it is one of the most important things. Having a good culture that's open to healthy constructive feedback is super helpful and allows you to dive into some conversations ripe with growth opportunities. It's one of my favorite things we do at our company!

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#200

Post by wurp »

While at Amazon, I started a mailing list that sends one curated software engineering tip each day. It still persists, last I heard.

While working there I noticed that other people did productivity hacks I didn't know, and vice versa, all the time, so I created the mailing list. Others had created tip lists before, but they had just posted their own tips on it, and their list fizzled after a few months.

My list had impact because it wasn't "my list" - I just set up a discussion list and a template, and send in the first forty tips or so. After that, it was essentially all other people's tips. My manager had a game-changing suggestion, too: give phonetool icons for people who submit to the list. It served as both motivation and advertising.

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