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

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41–50 of 216 posts

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

#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 implement something novel or are a good learning opportunity for other devs. Sometimes it’s as simple as “what’s DRY” or “what’s a decorator” and other times it’s a deeper discussion like the performance impact of switching to immutable data structures.

It’s been especially impactful because I also pushed for us to hire some junior engineers and it’s been a wonderful way for them to get exposed to a lot of great lessons and feedback outside of the PRs they already have. Since then, those engineers have all come into their own and some of them are becoming heavy hitters.

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

#43
post #35
post #9

Three 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…

What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?

Not OP, but I share the same dislike. Note that he said that he is against long BTD loops, not BTD loops in general. If it takes more than 5 minutes to get more information about a problem, my mind will wander. I'll check email, read up on conference proceedings, etc. If it takes 15 seconds to get more information, then I can keep focus on the current problem, add the new information, and iterate appropriately.

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

#44
post #35
post #9

Three 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…

What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?

Software development is the BTD loop; you can't eliminate it. I got my start with Logo[1], which has an amazing BTD loop! People like Bret Victor[2] have talked at length about it (although Victor doesn't use that term, IIRC). Even the trend toward "notebook programming" - Jupyter, Observable, etc are really about shortening that loop. A major reason to use an IDE is to potentially shorten the BTD loop. Lots and lots of tools exist specifically to shorten this loop.

And yet some organizations want to run all the linters, all the tests, for all the languages, orchestrated by Jenkins on a huge Amazon cluster. This is bad.

[1] This is very cool - an Apple IIe emulator running Logo in the browser. https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/#logo

[2] Inventing on Principle has improving the BTD loop at its core https://vimeo.com/36579366

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

#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 it will be accepted.

This reduced the phone calls our office received by about 80 percent.

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

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Awareness may not be sufficient, but it's most definitely necessary. You at least recognized a problem, and want to find a solution, even if you haven't found one yet or even tried.

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

#47

Though this is probably not what you're asking for... Realizing that my career is my own, and that I owe nothing to anybody. Nobody is doing _you_ a favor by hiring you. At most, it's a calculated risk. Furthermore, realizing that I shouldn't suffer for management decisions. If you've been putting out fires for a whole year, either the whole team has been consistently doing a very poor job (unlikely, though possible)…

I was laid off early in my career despite being one of the top performers and getting rewards and kudos along the way. It opened my eyes to the fact that no job is a "safe" job and you should think of a salaried position as an open-ended contract that happens to pay out every two weeks.

A company only keeps you around if they can justify getting more value from you than what they are paying to keep you around. Add more value and document that value you're creating for job security.

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

#48
I found out my co worker had high interest loans from life and a coding bootcamp. So I gave him an interest free loan (around 20k).

Then I realized how my other teammates also have bad loans. Planning to sell my RSUs when I get them and give out interest free loans to my coworkers.

I don’t see any other way to make an impact at work because we are building privacy invading products and I think my best efforts at work actually brings negative impact to society. Hopefully if my coworkers are no longer held down by financial woes they’ll be able to stand up for what is right and I won’t feel so alone.

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

#50
Switching my company to remote. It was a gradual process but it worked and now we’re fully remote and everybody seems happy with no exceptions.

I can’t take full credit but we also switched to doing 6 week project cycles[0] and pitches inspired by Basecamp.

[0] https://3.basecamp-help.com/article/35-the-six-week-cycle

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