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Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#71

Post by kabdib »

bshimmin wrote: post #45
raverbashing wrote: post #39

> My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a Who is the fscking idiot that calls himself a startup founder and makes people report in 3 different tools?

This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks…

Sorry, an hour a day doing busywork (like entering hours) in a startup is utterly indefensible. I've done a bunch of startups and not only did this never happen, it would not have been tolerated. Even at > I never spent more than about ten minutes a day doing tracking; during heavy bug crunches, maybe an hour doing detailed writeups within bugs for other groups, for communication purposes. In a small team in a company with a short fuse, you can't afford this.

Either you have people who can do the work and coordinate, or all the tracking in the world is not going to help.

(Time tracking by the hour . . . I can't even . . . it's time to get a new manager by firing the current one or finding a better job elsewhere. Totally serious).

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#72

Post by jdmichal »

I see a lot of advice about individually contributing. I'd recommend another path: Figure out how to be a force multiplier for your team. Sure, maybe you're great at spitting out code and tests. But that's still only one developer of work. If you have 10 people and make them 10% more efficient... That's also one developer of productivity gains.

Since you're new, you don't necessarily have all the insight to make this happen on your own. So ask your team! "What can I do that would make everyone more efficient."

Also, make it clear that you are available for general questions on technology, architecture, algorithms, secure coding, etc. I spend one to two hours each day fielding questions like this, and I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of our code. But all code needs architecture and algorithms and security best practices. And since I don't have to actually spend the time coding, I'm multiplying my capacity to make decisions. It's also great for developer ownership, when I get to say things like, "I can give you general advice, but you know your code the best. So apply it with discresion."

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#73

Post by baby »

melvinram wrote: post #33

Sounds like your team needs better onboarding documentation. Make creating those docs your responsibility so that the next person that joins doesn't need to do what you're going to need to do. Start by having someone on the team give you a brain dump. Record it. It doesn't need to be high quality. Use Quicktime and your laptop's webcam. After the braindump, write out everything that was said and make the following di…

I'd add one thing: write a threat model as well. What are you protecting against? What are you not protecting against? What do you do if X leaks?

X can be user hashed passwords, server's certificate keys, etc...

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#75

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #63
Jedi72 wrote: post #4

I am 1 month into my new position, same position you're in - new stack & straight into senior role. My tips so far: 1) Take over all the admin stuff you can to free up your devs from distraction and pointless tasks. Productivity and morale will immediately go up. My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a <10 person startup!), I just started writing a summary of our standups and told them they…

Additionally, start up a refactoring project on a feature branch. Seriously, the most useful thing I've ever done is just refactoring half of a project to see how it works.

The existing devs will hate you. They already knew how it worked - now they may not even you've finished - and unlike normal refactoring you never knew how it was supposed to work.

This is a good way to cut the velocity of whole project so you don't look as lost though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#76

Post by vurso »

Find out what all the blockers are. What is stopping all the dev's from being productive consistently.

Find out what are the black holes (the problems that will pull you in and not let go).

Introduce one improvement to the exsiting processes (automation, documentation e.g. wiki, lunch & learn/brown bag/dev days etc)

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#77

Post by vurso »

Find out what all the blockers are. What is stopping all the dev's from being productive consistently.

Find out what are the black holes (the problems that will pull you in and not let go).

Introduce one improvement to the exsiting processes (automation, documentation e.g. wiki, lunch & learn/brown bag/dev days etc)

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#78

Post by champagnepapi »

bshimmin wrote: post #45
raverbashing wrote: post #39

> My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a Who is the fscking idiot that calls himself a startup founder and makes people report in 3 different tools?

This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks…

I am at a 13 person startup. We use Confluence, Bitbucket, Google Apps, and we also use Asana (instead of Jira). It is a nightmare... Information is spread out all over these platforms. We can't stick to only Atlassian tools because the CEO thinks they don't allow you to collaborate... We spend a lot of time looking for where information lives and debating where it should live, complete waste of time. In a smaller company this sort of behavior can be catastrophic.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#79

Post by ljw1001 »

delecti wrote: post #68
superplussed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love all of your advice, but I would start straight-away with writing tests. Not only is it low risk, it is the best way to start understanding the code base, and gives you an avenue through which you can start introducing small refactorings. The other important thing is that developers LOVE to have outside help with testing and a pair of fresh eyes to look at the test-suite through.

From experience, I find that I'm not really able to add meaningful tests until I have an idea of what's going on.

I've had the same experience. I'm sure it's somewhat context dependent, but if the code amounts to business rules and they are not documented, which is very common, you can only reverse engineer what the system _does_ and then write tests for that.

Of course you can ask people who are more familiar but whether you end up helping or being a distraction then is an open question.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#80

Post by mcv »

bshimmin wrote: post #45
raverbashing wrote: post #39

> My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a Who is the fscking idiot that calls himself a startup founder and makes people report in 3 different tools?

This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks…

If the non-technical staff wants to use Trello, that has nothing to do with the technical staff (though it might be painful for the people caught between the two).

In my opinion, detailed time tracking is pointless. I've worked for companies that required it (only small ones required this), and it was just a painful distraction that never had any perceivable benefit. In larger companies, most people just write 8 hours a day for their project, and that's it. No need to make it any more complex than that.

And Jira is not a reporting tool. It helps you keep track of the work you need to do, and roughly estimate how much work that is, but it's not suitable for detailed reporting. And for a small startup, you don't need detailed reporting. If the boss wants to know what people are doing, he just needs to drop by at the standup meeting.

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