Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

A top-notch VP of Engineering who knew when and how to reduce scope (because he was an active contributor to the code base) and was also one of the best coders in the room.

1) Pair programming, with the VP stopping by every couple of days asking "where are you guys stuck" and would actively try to solve our problem.

2) Story prioritization - each PM would write product stories for the backlog in an effort to get them in the next sprint. The same VP (above) would review each of those stories in front of the PMs and developers. If it were really lazily written, the PM was shamed, it was thrown out, and could be resubmitted for the next week. Developers got to ask questions, add tidbits regarding prior work that may need to be studied to complete the story.

3) If a bug made it out in the release, it was no-one's fault. Everyone worked as quickly as possible to either create a patch or roll back the feature completely.

P.S. That VP of Engineering is Andres Camacho. He's in San Francisco. And he's amazing. Work with him if you have a chance. He's well known for hiring Jr developers, training them via pairing with them intensively, getting them up to speed quickly and having them contribute meaningful code within a few days. He's now the CTO of Better Therapeutics.

I've been at places that do those too. But they weren't the environment that has enabled my best work.

In particular, PRs and design sessions were/are a context switch which add friction. Even when pairing, however, we'd occasionally have team-wide design sessions, depending on the problem.

I live in Bali and occasionally consult for companies back in London. I’m on UTC+8 so if I start early I get most of the day uninterrupted and then an hour or so of overlap.

It’s incredibly productive for me but I’m lucky that I enjoy programming enough to rarely get distracted by my picturesque surroundings during the day.

I’ve recently started a job where my time isn’t measured. My time was measure 2012 until 2018. 3 different jobs. Utter misery. Now I’m having a lot more fun and feel very productive in the true sense of the word. There is still stand ups and slack etc. but I don’t mind that so much. Having a stopwatch constantly ticking against you is the main hell I hate in modern tech culture.

At the macro (yearly) level I am most productive with:

1) condensed higher intensity blocks followed by larger breaks

2) distinct "seasons" of work that differ in projects/pace

At the micro (day-to-day) level:

3) no logging of hours

#1 and #2 are a product of the academic calendar. I find the regular 9-to-5 work week paradoxically draining. I'll trade a good chunk of my weekends and evenings for longer breaks between "ON" periods.

As for #3, one company I worked for simply trusted that you'd put in your 40 hours a week. It was more flexible and quite simply freeing. If I were in a good flow state I might work late to finish up a feature, then sleep in the next morning (provided there were no meetings). All without the tedium of counting quarter-hours.