81–90 of 174 posts
Listened to people. The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions. A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective. Then, we started talking to colleagues. "What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?" Listening alone, letting these people know their voi…
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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 t…
In that light, I don't understand how you and the OP could consider that it's preventing to do real work. Powerpoint is the real work. And it shouldn't be difficult to justify spending 1-2 days on it, with 100 people assisting to the presentation as witnesses, unless your manager really doesn't want you to give presentations (it's showing off your team so it's good for your manager too).
I get it that it's not part of the engineer mindset of course. If I have to give some advice to strong engineers who do good work, that would be to take credit for your work.
This can be code, build systems (or lack thereof), missing automation, or even lack of clarity between various stakeholders.
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> 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…
Your employer is not your therapist and conflating the two is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read on HN.
I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
Surely they have also been available on mac and Linux for as long? Can it possibly have been a good investment to write your own?
1. Simplify - as a rule of thumb, if something looks too complicated it probably is. If you think there are too much "ifs" in the code, there certainly are. 2. Remove any "shiny-new-toy". A perfect example would be my bank, which operates in ~15-20 countries: Their interface isn't a shiny web interface with pretty animations to cover up a slow response time. The interface all employees use is built with ncurses. That…
i feel like there is an appropriate middle ground somewhere between "shiny-new-toy" and ncurses...
Compared to maintaining that, ncurses doesn't sound too bad.
I recently read this book and found it very interesting and useful. I think it might be for you. The book is: High Output Management by Andrew Grove. It is a dated book but many of the procedures described are still valid today (obviously using real digital tools). I highly recommend you to read it. Improving a company often means improving the way people in the company work and interact while also increasing the qua…
1. Simplify - as a rule of thumb, if something looks too complicated it probably is. If you think there are too much "ifs" in the code, there certainly are. 2. Remove any "shiny-new-toy". A perfect example would be my bank, which operates in ~15-20 countries: Their interface isn't a shiny web interface with pretty animations to cover up a slow response time. The interface all employees use is built with ncurses. That…
i feel like there is an appropriate middle ground somewhere between "shiny-new-toy" and ncurses...
I used to provide dev teams with cli tools (testing, infrastructure debugging, etc.). They used them from time to time but only after implementing basic gui with tkinter or simple html/js/css they started to use them more often. I prefer terminal more than gui but if you don't use terminal 90% of the time it's much easier to click the button on a website.
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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.