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

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

#61

Post by BossingAround »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #33

I am reminded of patio11's article "Don't call yourself a programmer". I would say this comment section should be renamed "Don't make a big impact at work without clearly getting the credit for the value added" Before you do any more impactful things at work to benefit someone else's equity, do the following - set up an internal blog location where you can write up, each friday, what you and your team have achieved -…

"Don't call yourself a programmer" - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... (2011)

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

#62

Post by bathtub365 »

fersho311 wrote: post #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…

Why do you stay if you are compromising your values on a daily basis?

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

#63

Post by Cyph0n »

javajosh wrote: 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…

> multi-minute long build-test-debug loop

You should try writing software for SP routers :)

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

#65

Post by Cyph0n »

I developed a router automation framework tailored towards my team’s usecases. I then used that to setup a nightly regression suite that runs on a live router and collects code coverage information (metrics heh).

More recently, I worked on improving/refactoring the bundle (link aggregation) implementation for the upcoming Cisco 8000 router.

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

#66

Post by cellularmitosis »

Stronico wrote: post #56

1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a persona…

Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets.

Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would somehow get done. In reality, if it doesn’t become a ticket, it won’t get done.

Here’s the rub: in many orgs, there is simply too much resistance to getting engineering-centric tickets injected into a product-owned ticket pipeline. They are either outright rejected, or deprioritized to the point of being a “soft no”.

If you are in this situation, my advice is to take a risk and simply stop asking for permission to do the self-development and engineering-centric tasks which you think are important. Set aside regular time for yourself (without asking for it), track your own private backlog, and just do it.

This was the biggest change in my ability to deliver impact: realizing that I wouldn’t be given permission to get these things accomplished, and would have to bear the risk myself and just do it.

Worst-case scenario, this won’t be tolerated and you’ll be fired. Good.

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

#67

Post by rayuela »

Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)

This has saved my ass more than I can count. You've earned your bragging rights

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

#68

Post by notyourday »

Two things:

1. I embraced that Perfection is a mortal enemy of It Works. Our customers pay us for it to work now, not be perfect at some point in future.

This allowed us to save millions of dollars a month and made us a viable going concern.

2. "Mongodb is Webscale" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

We aren't Google. We don't have Google-level global problems that we need to solve. Anything below Google level can be solved using boring technologies that just work.

This allowed us to significantly and rapidly improve customer experience.

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

#69

Post by geocrasher »

At my current employer I have done two things that I think have had a big impact. I didn't do them alone, and in some cases, I couldn't have done them alone.

The first was to root out a customer-blaming culture that had festered for far too long in the company. I recognized how toxic it was, and how bad it was for customer service, when I arrived. Not long after that I became a supervisor and my manager (also a new hire) and I agreed it was really bad. I worked at my end and he worked at his end, helping those who would change to change, and giving those who wouldn't the opportunity to find new work. It wasn't easy. Part of it was for me to write a couple of hours of customer service training material and deliver it to all new hires. That led to me becoming the company's trainer, and I get to weave it all together in a 2 week orientation and training for all new hires.

The second thing I've done is create documentation where it didn't exist and have cleaned up documentation that was messy. I took 25-30 disparate articles on one subject, weeded out the stuff that was irrelevant or deprecated, put it all into two clear documents, and called it a run book. It went over really well and helped the department who depended on it.

Lastly, I've also had the opportunity to write new tools for front line support staff and rewrite old ones, and create documentation and training regarding their use.

In the end, I write and talk for a living, all to the end of making it easier to provide great customer service in our sector (web hosting). I love it.

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

#70

Post by arez »

developed a tool together with a colleague that ket anyone ask anonymous questions to the founders. We had the problem, that the founders wanted to get more people to ask questions in our all-hands meetings and me and my colleague thought it might be that a lot of people are afraid to ask them in front of a big crowd. So we created an easy to where anyone can submit questions anonymously and everyone can up and downvote them. We're both not working at the company anymore, but the tool is still used for 3years
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