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

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

#31

Post by Nowyouknow »

Not me, but a "startup" I'm consulting for today that's pivoted many times over the last 13 years. They spun out a different website focused on a single offering about a year and a half ago that led to them developing a focus (sales and tech both) on a specific market and has led to a crazy uptick in business. I can share the URLs if the HN community is curious to see the difference between the two.

Editing to include URLs: - Original site: www.devhub.com - Spin-off: www.rallymind.com

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

#32

Post by mooreds »

cpitman wrote: post #7

My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off of work and reduce errors/surprises. Another…

I did the same thing for a consulting company. The onboarding process involved creating and populating a google drive folder, a slack channel, and a trello board. I used Zapier to create everything off of one entry in a google spreadsheet.

Tons of fun for me, saves some time for someone else, created consistency for everyone.

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

#33

Post by rsync »

We simplified our offering.

From the beginning, rsync.net offered standard ftp service along with ssh tools. It pleased me to offer an old fashioned standard that "just worked" and allowed some weird corner cases to function for people.

Simultaneously, I wanted a "clean" nmap. I wanted to see port 22 and nothing else. So, we disabled ftp (and with it, inetd on all of our FreeBSD storage arrays) and reduced our attack surface as well as the number of processes we need to run and audit.

We made this change about 18 months ago...

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

#34

Post by staysaasy »

mdorazio wrote: post #29
staysaasy wrote: post #11

Decide and communicate the metrics that matter for your business, then constantly educate and remind engineers of how they can help to reach those goals. Increases the number of good ideas from people with the best context and reduces the bridges-to-nowhere.

Be careful on this one. When not done well it quickly leads to people optimizing for metrics rather than outcomes. It's also a quick path to dark patterns.

Yes, it has to be done extremely carefully. Picking metrics well is one of the most important jobs of company leadership.

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

#35

Post by tmbkr »

Nowyouknow wrote: post #31

Not me, but a "startup" I'm consulting for today that's pivoted many times over the last 13 years. They spun out a different website focused on a single offering about a year and a half ago that led to them developing a focus (sales and tech both) on a specific market and has led to a crazy uptick in business. I can share the URLs if the HN community is curious to see the difference between the two. Editing to includ…

Yes please.

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

#36

Post by timtamboy63 »

Nowyouknow wrote: post #31

Not me, but a "startup" I'm consulting for today that's pivoted many times over the last 13 years. They spun out a different website focused on a single offering about a year and a half ago that led to them developing a focus (sales and tech both) on a specific market and has led to a crazy uptick in business. I can share the URLs if the HN community is curious to see the difference between the two. Editing to includ…

Would love to see this!

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

#37

Post by jrwoodruff »

derefr wrote: post #28
mtippett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try a new iteration next time. What made…

> Passiveness A lot more people have some degree of social anxiety than one might think, especially in IT. Lightning talks originate—and work well in—the sort of tech-bro workplaces where there’s an Xbox, foosball table, and bar in the breakroom. Half the “culture fit” criterion of hiring for those places is just an attempt to filter out potential hires with any amount of social anxiety; so the average level of it in…

Another option is pre-recording your presentations. Shoot for a 15 minute presentation, followed by questions and conversation. Think a dev recording their screen, showing the work and talking over what they're doing, mixed with a few powerpoint slides.

This gets over the hump of public speaking, creates an artifact that can be sent out as a follow up, and gets to the goal of having shared knowledge of a topic and a sense of community outside of normal silos.

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

#38

Post by heymijo »

Listened to people.

The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions.

A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective.

Then, we started talking to colleagues.

"What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?"

Listening alone, letting these people know their voices were heard by anyone, went a long way in building relationships, alignment, and getting things done.

Then we took what we were hearing, developed an initiative, pitched it to leadership. They rubber stamped it without really paying attention or asking questions.

We executed.

People were shocked. Their voices had been heard, and something had been done to address common concerns they had. I don't know how to measure or describe this impact, but it's the most significant thing I have ever accomplished.

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

#40

Post by ipnon »

mtippett wrote: post #19
ticmasta wrote: post #13

I'm a Dev Manager but started as a mid-senior developer at my current company (now about 350 people). We grew a lot by acquisition and one thing I noticed was many "cultural silos" that made it hard to build a shared, unifying identity. Myself and another developer worked to try and address this with a lot of small things focused on cutting across teams & groups: a book club-style bi-weekly discussion, "Tech Talks" f…

I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try a new iteration next time. What made…

I don't get paid to give tech presentations. Preparing for them would affect the work that I am responsible for. So giving tech presentations would ultimately make me look worse at my company. This explains the passiveness at my company.
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