Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#91

Post by Niksko » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 10:41 AM UTC

I'm still figuring things out. Last job was at a big 4 consultancy doing CMS work, current job is at ~1500 employee software company doing a mix mobile and web dev.

Agile definitely feels better than waterfall, but it's also made me appreciate why it goes wrong so easily. You have to be willing to experiment with your process often, and retros have to have the ability to get brutal if things aren't working.

Regular releases (every two weeks or so) are important. They help to reduce scope creep and get you faster feedback. The trick is tweaking what a 'release' is. Having the ability to do targeted, beta or pilot releases helps you get things out more quickly without scaring the rest of your users or screwing up of there are bugs.

Pairing is useful, but there is a tendency in our team to say 'oh, there's not many cards left in the current release, let me pair with you'. That's just wasting time. Pairing should only be for knowledge sharing or speeding up difficult code.

Slicing tasks is very hard. I think it's better if they're sliced vertically (implementing a feature end to end) as opposed to horizontally (you write the react, I'll write the API, and we'll meet in the middle). Horizontal slicing leads to knowledge slios, implementation mix-ups and can also lead to very small cards which means you're constantly context switching.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#92

Post by mstade » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 10:43 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #71

axaxs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me also of my most productive days. Funny how enough people create their own middle management jobs, and jobs like "scrum master", that literally seek to destroy developer time.

If your Scrum Master is destroying developer time, then s/he is "doing it wrong". The main function of the Scrum Master is to shield the developers from all the non-development crap. I've worked with one guy who was so good at it he would play interference and defend us from outside interruptions almost literally (actually blocking people from coming to our desks, making sure we could focus, holding meetings only if…

> But no matter the process, if a manager is destroying productive time from the developers the fault is in the individual, not the environment or process adopted.

Why can't it be both? Bad managers can be empowered by a process, just as good managers could be hampered – no?

Agile provides so many tools for bad managers to micro manage, so that even if the process itself is well intended it still could lead to hell – no?

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#93

Post by growtofill » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #57

temporallobe wrote: post #25

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a g…

I’ve recently started a job where my time isn’t measured. My time was measure 2012 until 2018. 3 different jobs. Utter misery. Now I’m having a lot more fun and feel very productive in the true sense of the word. There is still stand ups and slack etc. but I don’t mind that so much. Having a stopwatch constantly ticking against you is the main hell I hate in modern tech culture.

Were you working for Crossover or similar?

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#94

Post by black-tea » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

My best work has been done while I've been left to my own devices for days or even weeks at a time and I've got this mad desire to build something. I can't really control this mad desire. It happens sometimes but I can't seem to force it. Mostly when someone else wants me to do something I can't get the desire to actually do it. A lot of the stuff I've build has been interesting to me, but not really useful. A few times the desire to build something has actually produced something useful to others, though.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#95

Post by shandor » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #77

aylmao wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my most productive sprints I ever had at a job was after a couple months working on an internal tool that was going nowhere. After being frustrated for a long time with a project's management, I cut the middle-man and went directly to the customer, did my own user research, brainstormed either on my own or independently with others, and kept direct contact with the users to keep a tight feedback loop when ship…

I think the problem is the middlemen feel compelled to add value somehow, since otherwise people would figure out that their job is pointless.

The adage "good leaders make themselves unnecessary" applies.

If you have people under you, or can coach your people to take parts of your responsibilities off you, I think that's a great outcome. If your ICs are so good that they can actually do that, you should give them a raise and be glad you get to focus on other things in the meanwhile.

Of course, if the manager is unable to then broader their own scope, they indeed become disposable.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#96

Post by scarejunba » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:25 AM UTC

8 people in a basement. B2B product. Everyone in a room. I heard our technical services person take the calls. "Do you see an Apple on the back?". Understood the product through listening to our sales guys talk to people. There was a fair bit of chatter and we just burned through ideas and stuff. Solid traction and good growth.

Mmm-mmm. We grew past that, but that was the dream. Just sitting around a table building product with great visibility into the customer's experience. Gold.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#97

Post by tjpnz » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

My previous one. Small tech team of 20 of the smartest and most driven people I'd ever worked with, very little interference from management, lean development processes and an exceedingly proactive IT support team. I learned more in that place in the space of 18 months than I had in my previous 8 years. Of course this didn't last forever - we were acquired by a competitor who burned the whole thing to the ground. We've all moved on since.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#98

Post by ownagefool » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:42 AM UTC

henrik_w wrote: post #68

temporallobe wrote: post #25

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a g…

Here is a counterpoint. I worked with software development at Ericsson for about 10 years before XP and agile came out. I too had a private office, and I recognize a lot of what you describe. While it was nice, it was not a very productive environment. Each release of new SW was enormous and typically took a year or more to get out. The developers had no real idea of how things worked in production. Lots of useless d…

I have no doubt you're right.

The thing is, you can have development standards that require small iterations that are immediately deployable and this are immediately tested and deployed, without pulling all the overhead of some PMs interpretation of scrum.

I often find the power is generally with the wrong people and they promote the things that matter to them at the detriment of everything else.

I don't personally believe this is by design, it's just people in $foo management position tend to have the soft skills to make their job easier, when many of the developers often don't. And managers, who tend to control budgets and define departments, tend to give those departments to more managers and there's not a lot of people in the room telling them that a software person should probably run a software team.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#99

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:43 AM UTC

I don't think it is so much any of those things that enable your best work, it is having a problem that requires innovation, in a company that allows innovation (probably because it will die without it, so a startup), and where the skills required are especially suited to you.

That said probably the companies that provoked my best work where ones that

1. I had a personal investment in

2. There were parts of what we worked on that I found intellectually interesting.

2. had small teams and we were not afraid to argue for days about how to do something, and arguments were clear.

3. technical people that worked together sat together.

The places I did my worst work

1. Hated the concept and what we were doing.

2. Just cashing a paycheck (I have also done good work just cashing a paycheck so not sure how important it is)

3. Even if the teams were small the tasks the team handled were split up in such a way that nobody really had any input on anybody else's area.

4. Argument just did not make any headway on anything. If someone had more power in an area you let them have their way because it was a waste of time saying anything.

5. if you sat with the people you worked with it was almost an afterthought.

Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

#100

Post by danmaz74 » Sat, Feb 09, 2019, 11:46 AM UTC

henrik_w wrote: post #68

temporallobe wrote: post #25

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a g…

Here is a counterpoint. I worked with software development at Ericsson for about 10 years before XP and agile came out. I too had a private office, and I recognize a lot of what you describe. While it was nice, it was not a very productive environment. Each release of new SW was enormous and typically took a year or more to get out. The developers had no real idea of how things worked in production. Lots of useless d…

What you describe looks how agile was supposed to be. What the op described looks like a perversion of agile perpetrated by managers who either don't understand why agile was born, or do understand it, but only care about increasing their power instead of getting things done.