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.
Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#22Writing 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.
Thanks a lot for your hard work!!
It's because of people like you that I have a very good life.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#23Interview process. From the start, we did away with whiteboard questions and instead opted for a take home test. The test wouldn't take more than an hour or two, depending on how much effort the candidate wanted to put into it. They got 2-3 weeks to complete it, with the help of the internet.
Because the test was specially designed to weed out people that didn't know how computers/compilers worked, it was surprisingly effective at removing 90% of candidates. The people that got in were of the highest quality.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#24Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
> it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case.
I don't know how true / substantial this effect is, obviously. Nonetheless, seems like good self awareness shown in this comment. That's more than a lot of people can say
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#25I was the fifth employee of our now-acquired startup. Being in that early amplifies a lot of decisions, both good and bad. The contributions I’m most proud of and still are practiced/referenced today are:
- I was the one-person support for a while, and created our support process, user guides, etc. Any way that I could automate the process to speed up response time and free myself up to do other small tidbits of work, I tried.
- I was the one-person QA team, and documented known corner cases, golden paths, feature-specific regression testing guides, etc. When another employee began helping with QA, it made it much easier to onboard them to the process. We’ve since hired someone to build test automation programs and they’re referencing the same guides that are years-old now to guide their automated tests. I thought that was pretty cool.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#26Unconference - a meeting twice in a month where anyone from team present on any topics except controversial topics like politics. This helped everyone to learn completely different things
Initiatives: More and more initiatives and idea discussion - because of this everyone started thinking everyday to build innovation and became adaptable to take risk.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#27I worked for a company that had gone from selling on premise software to cloud, and going from build to production release took a while. Realistically you could expect 1-2 days if everything went well. This was definitely not problem #1 at the company but I really wanted to push to see how much time we could shave off. I got some like-minded teammates to put time into a new release pipeline process, and we built some…
don't leave us hanging!! More details! (please)
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#28Emailing “Dave’s week in review” every Friday afternoon, to a distribution of everyone I have ever met professionally. The email summarizes what I did that week, both professionally and personally. Every week I hear from someone I know, as a result of the email. Many opportunities have resulted.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#29Two things come to mind:
1/ carefully rearranging headers in a large C++ product, cutting build time from hours to 30 minutes. Think levelization a la Viega (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjFpKJ8Xx78).
2/ setting up JSP->java->class compilation to detect syntax errors at build time rather than at web server startup, eliminated finding such errors in the field completely.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#30Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
> it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. I don't know how true / substantial this effect is, obviously. Nonetheless, seems like good self awareness shown in this comment. That's more than a lot of people can say
Thanks, but undeserved. Self-awareness may be good eventually, but sometimes it just makes you feel like a helpless observer to your own actions. I think you need more than just awareness - you need to practice feeling the feelings and not acting on them in the usual way. That's the part that will yield results, I hope.
Alternatively, I'd like to work for an organization that's on the same page here. Effectiveness in software (or anything that depends on iterating on a design) relies more on a fast loop than anything; I'm tired of fighting this battle.