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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?

#51

Post by eloff »

Breefield wrote: post #20

Prior to my joining the team, our homemade migration tool used sequential versioning numbers for filenames, i.e. 001_migration_name.sql, 002_migration_name.sql. As our team was grew, it was very common to publish a PR, and right before merging realizing you had a conflict with someone else who'd merged to master ahead of you, using your sequence number. I made a small change to the system, replacing the sequence numb…

I used to lose so much time to that, imagine coupling it with multi week code reviews (another process that needed to be fixed). I'm actually building a migration tool as part of a web framework (free time project). I'm going to "steal" this idea of yours if you don't mind.

To play devil's advocate, probably part of the reason for the sequence number approach is so if that PR that merged ahead of you conflicts with your migration you're more likely to notice if you have to rename it. I don't think that's particularly common though, and the problem should surface when the CI build runs your migrations prior to permitting the merge to master ( a good CI setup requires you to pull master into your PR if it's out of date, which ensures the combination didn't break things.)

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

#53

Post by troycarlson »

ipnon wrote: post #40
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…

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.

This is my observation across several companies/teams. The options seem to be either sacrifice "real work" time to make a good presentation or make a half-ass presentation and have people criticize the low quality.

Do people here think "no prep" presentations could work? Where it's agreed that nobody will do any prep but simply talk about something they're knowledgeable about? Or share their screen and walk through their current project? Everyone in the audience knows that the presenter wasn't "allowed" to prepare so the expectations are lower, but people still get exposed to other engineers' work.

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

#54

Post by emptysea »

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…

We have something similar at my current place where every week or two someone presents.

It ends up being the same people presenting and I don’t think it is because people are afraid of public speaking, but instead people don’t care about the talks.

At most 1-2 people (~20 person eng team) will ask a question, engage with the speaker, say thanks, etc. but most people either don’t attend the video call, or do so with video and microphone off for the entire time.

I long for a group of engineers who care about honing their tools, finding better solutions, making things reliable and efficient, etc.

It becomes draining to have the same people present over and over again.

/end rant

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

#55

Post by ajford »

ipnon wrote: post #40
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…

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.

That's where you need buy-in from management. One of my past employers had a presentation series like that above, and if you were scheduled next, it _was_ considered work that you were responsible for, and counted towards more or less a half-day.

I haven't been at my current employer long, but from what I've heard about our frequent engineering meetings and their presentations, they do the same thing.

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

#56

Post by Nowyouknow »

timtamboy63 wrote: post #36
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!

Edited my comment to include the URLs. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. I can try to pull some SMEs in to answer them if you'd like.

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

#57

Post by Nowyouknow »

tmbkr wrote: post #35
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.

I edited my comment to include the URLs. Interested in what you think, let me know when you have a chance to review.

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

#58

Post by godelski »

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…

> A lot more people have some degree of social anxiety than one might think, especially in IT.

I was interning at this place and the team lead would come and ask the interns what they were doing (at least once a week) and ask really in depth questions. It was extremely nerve wracking because this was the only interaction I had with him and he kept a air of "hard ass" around him. Every few weekly meetings he'd ask the interns for more information and put us on the spot.

It sucked. BUT by the end of the internship I think we all felt a lot more confident speaking and defending our work. So I guess his plan worked, and honestly I'm happy to have had that experience. I think it made me not only a better worker, but a better employee. At the end of the day, we all are in sales in some form. So I do not like the idea of someone else giving the talk, because that's not the person that gets the training from it.

What I'm trying to say is that talks like these really should be used to help your team members with anxiety. A bit of low risk exposure therapy. Speaking is a skill and it is an extremely useful one to every person at every stage in their career. You are supposed to train your employees and sometimes that means making them a little uncomfortable.

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

#59

Post by godelski »

ipnon wrote: post #40
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…

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.

Make it 5% of the work time. Make it part of the job (I also doubt you're working 8hrs at full productivity mode)

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

#60

Post by godelski »

emptysea wrote: post #54
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…

We have something similar at my current place where every week or two someone presents. It ends up being the same people presenting and I don’t think it is because people are afraid of public speaking, but instead people don’t care about the talks. At most 1-2 people (~20 person eng team) will ask a question, engage with the speaker, say thanks, etc. but most people either don’t attend the video call, or do so with v…

When talks are given through video I actually attend a lot more than when they are in person. I put them on, turn off my music, and listen while working. I've actually learned a lot of stuff this way. Of course I'm not putting 100% effort into work, but that's fine. And if it is a talk I'm not interested in that percentage of focus on work is much higher.

Just because people are lurking doesn't mean they don't find value in your talks.

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