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Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

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Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#201

Post by DashRattlesnake »

badthingfactory wrote: post #117
criddell wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I could work in an open plan office. I just can't concentrate well enough to do really good work in an environment like that.

Having worked in a bullpen style office (I now work from home), it wasn't the open floor plan that was a problem, it was the number of people management crammed into that open floor plan that became problematic. At one point, we had completely outgrown our space and we were constantly tripping over one another. It was miserable and everyone was constantly sick. Eventually, we got more real estate and everyone was hap…

> and help you feel less imprisoned than cubicles imo.

That's not help. I don't feel imprisoned in a cubicle. I like walls, the taller the better.

I'm currently in a short-wall cubicle farm where we have enough space to not to all get sick, and even there the cross-talk from multiple conversations can be completely distracting.

While management/facilities ignorance can definitely make open plan offices worse, I think they're still not for everyone. Some people seem to not mind being distracted, other people are really sensitive to it.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#202

Post by ma2rten »

dasmoth wrote: post #187
ma2rten wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these things also apply to Google, except: * you decide on a team before you start, but after you know you passed the interview * moving fast is not valued as much I would also add that Facebook uses a lot of Open Source, meaning your experience will be applicable elsewhere. Here are some potential advantages about working at Google: * Being ethical is a core value of the company. * Google/Alphabet is more divers…

>>> Google is trying hard to make it's hiring and promotion process objective and unbiased. That's why they happen by a commission of peers. How on earth does this follow? I know that peer review is in fashion right now, but without some very strong context, this seems more like a recipe for a Keynesian beauty contest than a useful measure of merit.

It's committee of people from all over the company that don't know the person in question. The candidate prepares a document that shows their contributions with some quantifiable metrics.

There has been research that showed that this kind of decision process decreases bias.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#203

Post by ma2rten »

blakeyrat wrote: post #197
ma2rten wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that Google often passes on opportunities to make more money if that would hurt or mislead users, advertisers or publishers. Google's search rankings are unbiased. The ads team is separated from the search team. It's business model benefits from and supports an open internet, unlike other companies which lock users into their ecosystem. Google is very transparent internally for a company it's size. Google re…

You should get the YouTube developers in on this, because their ContentID system is about the LEAST ethical piece of software in common use. In my 2 dozen or so ContentID flaggings, maybe two of them have been by parties with a legitimate claim to the material. All the rest have been fraud. My most recent "pleasant" experience with ContentID was some scam copyright company claiming they owned the soundtrack to Elder…

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454?hl=en

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#204

Post by blakeyrat »

ma2rten wrote: post #203
blakeyrat wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should get the YouTube developers in on this, because their ContentID system is about the LEAST ethical piece of software in common use. In my 2 dozen or so ContentID flaggings, maybe two of them have been by parties with a legitimate claim to the material. All the rest have been fraud. My most recent "pleasant" experience with ContentID was some scam copyright company claiming they owned the soundtrack to Elder…

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454?hl=en

Of course you can DISPUTE the claim. And in fact actual scammers will release the claim right away because they make all their scam-dollars off old videos where people don't check the ContentID status every week.

But there's no way to tell Google, "the guy making this claim doesn't own the content, he's a scammer". That's the feature I need.

I am 100% certain that the company claiming to have owned Morrowind's music: 1) Is not Bethesda (the developer of the game) 2) Is not affiliated with Bethesda in any way 3) Has no right to the music

But I have no way to communicate my research to Google. Because, guess what, those "ethical" Google employees make money off the scam, too! They take a percentage of all ad revenue, even if it's a ContentID scammer's ad revenue.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#205

Post by chmaynard »

Why not broaden the definition of "company" to include open source software projects? If we do that, I would suggest that the Linux kernel project probably has a very successful engineering culture. I'm basing that opinion on the quality of their work, their longevity, and the incredible success of Linux as a server OS.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#206

Post by jacques_chester »

mrswag wrote: post #115
jacques_chester wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically they hire 2 people to do 1 person's work. Pivotal is a for-profit company. We pair program because we think it's more effective for most engineering activities (not all: most) than soloing. I'm vastly more productive in a pair. I don't take 3 hour "5 minute" Facebook breaks. If I get stuck, my pair usually has an idea, so rather than spending a day fighting I spend minutes. Usually the discussion with a p…

I'm genuinely wondering: is pair programming better, compared to doing the design in pair, going to work on your own, then reviewing each other's code? As an introvert I don't think I could handle the "pair all day" approach.

> is pair programming better, compared to doing the design in pair, going to work on your own, then reviewing each other's code?

The literature is, I believe, pretty thin and equivocal. However the suspicion is that pair programming is pretty much the core loop of bouncing back and forth, reduced to the smallest possible size.

It also avoids some of the antipatterns I've seen with code reviews -- widely distributed patches, reviews getting stale because they were too hard for a Monday, then a Tuesday... then a Friday ...

> As an introvert I don't think I could handle the "pair all day" approach.

You can take a break if you need one. Lunchtime is fixed at an hour. I typically go and spend it alone with a book.

There is sometimes a confusion between intro/extraversion and sociability. I'm quite sociable, I genuinely like talking to people, but it drains me because I lean towards introverted. So the lunchtime recharge is very helpful.

Each pair finds their own balance.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#207

Post by jacques_chester »

pc86 wrote: post #102
jacques_chester wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pivotal is the first company I've worked at where I genuinely felt like I was engineering . Most places you work have one or two people who really care . They care about people. They care about process. They care about technology, software design, about doing the right thing the right way. At Pivotal that's everyone . I've yet to meet a single example of the shrugging "eh, it's just a job" archetype I've previously f…

I worked for a public healthcare company with a lot of red tape and new development in Visual Basic as recently as 2012, that also had developers leave and come back. Reverse attrition doesn't mean anything.

In that case, I'll just fall back on "it's awesome, and the people who come back say so too".

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#208

Post by jacques_chester »

bshimmin wrote: post #125
knocte wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trello clone.

...(Pivotal Tracker) which predates Trello by some years! That said, I never much enjoyed using Pivotal Tracker, and Trello seems to do more or less everything it does but in a nicer and more client-friendly way.

Tracker is very, very opinionated and it's not necessarily immediately clear what that opinion is.

Trello is a good tool. I've seen it used on several teams in roles that Tracker doesn't neatly fill.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#209

Post by blakeyrat »

bluesilver07 wrote: post #15

Valve's new employee handbook looks pretty interesting - http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

The "culture" part might be good, but the end-result is Steam-- lousy software which has been lousy for decades at this point, and is unlikely to ever improve.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#210

Post by blakeyrat »

nailer wrote: post #147
seattle_spring wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA taints their perception, for me at least.

And how unmaintained Sourcetree is.

Sourcetree is a pretty crummy product regardless of how maintained it is. It reveals a culture that seems to hold basic usability testing & concepts almost in contempt.
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