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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?

#81

Post by berdario »

stult wrote: post #62
bshimmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>time-tracking by the hour is incredibly important As someone who does the R&D tax credit for a lot of tech companies, let me tell you that it really, really is. It's worth somewhere around 10% of all your developers' salaries if the company is profitable. As in, if they work 10 hour days, entering data into a time tracking system is a net benefit even if it takes up to an hour a day.

I'm wondering how widespread claiming "R&D tax credits" actually is.

To think that most companies could/would seems preposterous (how many are truly doing something worth of the monicker R&D?)

I'm seeing an ecommerce business applying for R&D credit, and that seems absurd, since

> Your company can only claim for R&D tax relief if an R&D project seeks to achieve an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field of science or technology through the resolution of scientific or technological uncertainty - and not simply an advance in its own state of knowledge or capability.

From the gov.uk article:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/corporation-tax-research-and-dev...

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

#82

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

I sometimes do this with code that nobody understands but generally you should first talk to the people already there and understand the code.

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

#83

Post by ljw1001 »

stult wrote: post #62
bshimmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>time-tracking by the hour is incredibly important As someone who does the R&D tax credit for a lot of tech companies, let me tell you that it really, really is. It's worth somewhere around 10% of all your developers' salaries if the company is profitable. As in, if they work 10 hour days, entering data into a time tracking system is a net benefit even if it takes up to an hour a day.

I think that you're not necessarily considering the side effects of (A) working 10 hour days, and (B) spending an hour on paperwork. People will often start to wonder why they work so hard if the company doesn't take their time seriously. This can negatively impact morale, and that has a real, if hidden, cost.

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

#84

Post by raverbashing »

stult wrote: post #62
bshimmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>time-tracking by the hour is incredibly important As someone who does the R&D tax credit for a lot of tech companies, let me tell you that it really, really is. It's worth somewhere around 10% of all your developers' salaries if the company is profitable. As in, if they work 10 hour days, entering data into a time tracking system is a net benefit even if it takes up to an hour a day.

What kind of tracking do you need and what's the needed resolution?

Can we just have "customer work" or "R&D work" for 8h a day?

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

#85

Post by marktangotango »

laythea wrote: post #49
marktangotango wrote: post #26

Turns out, this happens pretty frequently, getting up to speed on new code bases is a skill in itself IMO. After you've done it a few times, it does get easier, but still very annoying. I try to go in with an open mind and assume the developers who went before were at least competent and had good reasons to do things the way they did. Sometimes this charity is unfounded, and the code truly sucks, but usually some poo…

"I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal ticket, and he wasn't talking. It used auto tools so I converted it to cmake so I could build locally. Then I spent about two weeks just reading the code..." I am interested to know what happened to the "old timers" meal ticket?

He saw the writing on the wall (so to speak) and moved on. The app was eventually rewritten in Java.

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

#86

Post by ljw1001 »

This is a symptom of a problem you might help to address. companies spend a fortune on recruitment and next to nothing on on-boarding. The problem is multiplied when there is a lot of technical debt or weak infrastructure, because they make onboarding harder.

Often, the people who grow up with a mess don't see the issue because they learn it a little at a time as it's being created, but bring a new person in and require that they understand it all to be successful and you have a real problem.

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

#87

Post by rdsubhas »

Pair program with a few people half a day for a week or two, and you'll become productive both with codebase and with your team mates (as long as you didn't capture their keyboards). Spend rest of the day on everything else mentioned in @Jedi72's comments and get the larger context.

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

#88

Post by steverb »

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'll add: find the requirements documentation for the system. Chances are it doesn't exist, or if it does it is horribly wrong. Go fix it.

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

#89

Post by vayarajesh »

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…

Really great tip!

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

#90

Post by stult »

berdario wrote: post #81
stult wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>time-tracking by the hour is incredibly important As someone who does the R&D tax credit for a lot of tech companies, let me tell you that it really, really is. It's worth somewhere around 10% of all your developers' salaries if the company is profitable. As in, if they work 10 hour days, entering data into a time tracking system is a net benefit even if it takes up to an hour a day.

I'm wondering how widespread claiming "R&D tax credits" actually is. To think that most companies could/would seems preposterous (how many are truly doing something worth of the monicker R&D?) I'm seeing an ecommerce business applying for R&D credit, and that seems absurd, since > Your company can only claim for R&D tax relief if an R&D project seeks to achieve an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field…

Well I'm in the US, so I can't speak to the UK's regs with much expertise, except insofar as I know most of the world's R&D credits are based on ours. But in the US, most web dev qualifies, including fairly run of the mill ecommerce site.

Just judging from what you quote here thought, the US rule is less rigorous. Taxpayers must resolve technological uncertainty just as in the UK, but it's a taxpayer centric test. Meaning, that uncertainty can be "simply an advance in its own state of knowledge or capability."

Honestly, I shouldn't say this because it's very much against my own interests, but the US regs are way too loose and permit credits for work that just does not seem to me to be worth subsidizing. But for a normal development company, it's worth tracking hours to gain that subsidy because the IRS primarily challenges us on the validity of the underlying data at this point rather than the qualification of the activities themselves, because a large amount of litigation has settled most of the questions in that area in favor of taxpayers.

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