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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?

#61

Post by faceruler »

MattGaiser wrote: post #39

Figuring out where the most time is wasted. About 1/5 of my job is chasing SQL queries that didn't get run in some environment. I keep pushing for active tracking of which queries have been run where to try and eliminate that.

I was in the same boat about 10 years ago. I wasted time confirming that sql scripts were deployed to different production databases. I needed to chase down logs and contact dba's through email, etc... It was a big time-waster.

My team created a standard adhoc script template to help with this. The goal of the template was:

1) confirm script is deployed to the correct database 2) inserts record into log table (start date, end date, description, etc...) 3) updates log table when script completes / fails

We asked the script runners / dba's to reject any script that doesn't use the standard template. They reviewed and contributed to the template and were totally onboard.

The majority of our script writers use sql prompt, which allows for sql snippets - so everyone is used to starting out with this standard template as they write these scripts.

No issues since we implemented this. And I can confirm when and where scripts ran quickly.

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

#62

Post by ravedave5 »

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…

Funny my team had the same issue and I did something similar, except I went with one file per release and they would merge changes like any other code file.

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

#63

Post by ravedave5 »

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…

We did week long hackathons across the company and anyone could join any team. In fact people were encouraged to switch roles and teams for the hackathons. Especially QE becoming devs or devs handling BA type roles.

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

#64

Post by notdonspaulding »

My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is:

Take out the garbage.

By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your peers. Take that task off of their plate (most folks will gladly give it to you) and do it for a while, and then see if there's a way to eliminate it, automate it, or otherwise improve the experience of doing the job.

Especially as a software person, the amount of power you have to take little parts of the business that are rough and make them smooth is tremendous. Taking out the garbage is just an easy way to get started helping out.

I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase. Find the little problems that everyone else is ignoring because they have bigger things to worry about and tackle those for them. Beyond being helpful to the team, it helps you learn the territory of the codebase more quickly than you otherwise would.

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

#65

Post by ravedave5 »

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 read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.

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

#68

Post by jasonlotito »

Helped build, grow, and maintain a hackathon. Over the course of 8 years, we've held 21 hackathons. Some have been more successful than others. One of the things I've always done is protect the underlying goal: that it's 2-days the company gives for people to work on whatever they want. People have used this time to make furniture, work on games, learn new technology, and of course, work on new products or tools for the company. You do NOT have to present.

While not all hackathons have produce production level ideas, many have. One hackathon resulted in the initial iteration of the biggest product shift in our company. One that I'm incredibly proud of.

This might not be what you were asking for, but I know for a fact that doing this literally had the most impact on the company.

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

#69

Post by jedberg »

At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

Cutting deployment time makes a huge impact because it makes everything go faster. You can iterate faster, which means getting bugs fixed faster, getting data to product managers faster, etc.

It also has an effect on reliability. The faster you can make changes, the faster you can fix errors (as long as you aren't introducing them faster too!).

It's always the first thing I focus on.

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

#70

Post by unspecified »

ryaan_anthony wrote: post #52

I organized a cookie swap. There are dozens of process improvements and internal efforts that I've had success with but the cookie swap is my favorite story. Without some culture, work is work.

I would love to exchange browser state with my coworkers and act as them for a few hours. I think I could really clean up our ticketing system if I was logged in as someone who could outright delete tickets instead of merely marking them as closed.
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