After reading Shape Up by Ryan Singer we decided to try it out. It's been incredible improvement. We are now able to focus deeply on hard problems, take guilt-free time to rest and sharpen our skills, and regularly think long term about the direction of our work. I just wrote about about it in-depth on my blog:
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
91–100 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 medium-large companies, work and promotion are about showing off. Even if you do real work it's more important to be noticed than to do it. 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 mana…
It is a part of the "engineer mindset"
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#931. 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...
You are right - that's ncursesw ;)
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#94My 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…
That's a good advice, it's the little things that usually get noticed. I was the one who kept the coffee maker clean, every week I'd wash all the parts and make sure we'd all get nice coffee. After a few weeks it started to catch on and other people also started to do it.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#95My 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…
As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin.
Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my career and our team's success.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#96My 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…
As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin. Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my…
this is true, I've seen someone here lamenting about how people changed his callback code to async while he was adding new functionality which resulted in him changing jobs.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 medium-large companies, work and promotion are about showing off. Even if you do real work it's more important to be noticed than to do it. 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 mana…
That captures a lot of what I was trying to capture. However, the intent was for people to cover work that they are doing (lowering prep time, immediate understanding), tech they are researching (again lower prep time, immediate understanding).
A lot of technical presentations we did are no different than what you would do explaining tech within your team. A few diagrams, and understanding of the core of the tech. Scaling to more than the safety of the team is really where I think people would rather have 3 meetings with 3 different teams to do a knowledge transfer than take the risk of being in front of collecting 5-10 teams worth of engineers.
Looking over the comments, the real gap I expect is the lack of peer management support and encouragement. And expectation that mentoring and teaching peers should be part of the leadership expectations. My view are is the the strongest engineers are the ones that accelerate and multiple the work of themselves and their peers, but there are a lot people who subscribe to the "army of one" 10x engineer philosophy.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#98I left.
The people were decent and the product fine, but my personal interest in the company went from "eh, sounds kind of interesting" to "why am I here...?" very quickly, and every day felt like an uphill battle to not rub my disinterest off on my coworkers.
Looking for inspiration is a mind trap that is best avoided. Inspiration comes when you are silent and you listen to yourself (and those around you). Keep an open mind. What you feel inspired to do may take you in a very different direction than you expect. Maybe the company doesn't need a new tech stack optimization, but would benefit greatly from a BBQ in the park - also no better time to get to know the people you work with better than when they are not sitting at a desk.
If you want to improve your company, listen. That's all there is to it. Listen to the needs of the people you work along side and then answer those needs. You are a part of a small tribe and that tribe values and benefits from active listeners and naturally inspired contributors.
Forceful inspiration typically has an opposite effect, so be mindful of your underlying drive.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#99Listened 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…
What was the after story, if you don't mind going further? This is super interesting, I'm curious what happened with you/the company afterwards or on a longer horizon
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
As someone who's decently comfortable with public speaking: Your employer is not your therapist and conflating the two is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read on HN.
+1 here.
An individual's team/employeer/peers/manager should create the space for your to lead people (which in a lot of cases means stepping out in front of a lot of people), and to be supportive relative to the experience.
Individuals need to take responsibility for their personal growth and find avenues (twitch, toastmasters, meetups, etc) to get stronger that doesn't rely on your employer.