Interested in specifics around team dynamics, communication, learning, decision making, physical layout, etc.
Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
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Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#2XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code review practices, entire team constantly striving to improve.
Software engineers somewhat involved with most relevant business decisions. We are empowered to respectfully question decisions.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#3XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…
Wow, a company wide standup with 70 people in 10 minutes? As someone who loves quick standups, please tell me how this worked!
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#4XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…
true dat
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#5Freedom to do the work any way, anywhere.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#6I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work.
I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build.
Also, the core business drive of measuring and qualitating your work. So, you can see the impact you are having on the business (positive or negative- NOT in a way that affects your job, but in a way that you can say "I did X which made Y faster, causing a 3% growth in click-though rates).
But I do wish I had a more private workplace. Hexes are better then the nightmare of open offices, and I work on a quiet floor, but sometimes I wish I had a door I could close.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#7XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…
Some of that sounds like a nightmare to me.
- open office - impossible to concentrate.
- constant pair programming - ughhh
- I have a family and friends outside of work. I’ve gone out of my way not to mix my work life and personal life. I have no desire to “play games” and “watch movies” with my coworkers. I come to work to work. I have friends who are former coworkers.
- regular lunches together - again, my lunch time is my time to get away from the office and recharge.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#8The best work I ever did involved a large collection of computers admin'ed by some serious f-ing idiots. They'd break that system in every conceivable way, every day of the week. So, I ended up writing a seriously fault-tolerant piece of software that could make forward progress on my users' problem no matter what. It turned out to be glorious.
Not much beyond that, except that my users had a clear need, and I was given time to do the work. Had a private office, but that mattered little.
My moral: Sometimes you really can make lemonade out of lemons. Maybe the torrent of shit raining down on you is a gift sometimes.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#9I guess this depends on the person, but for me- My boss 100% hands off on my day to day work. I can chose what I work on for the day, week, month, or Quarter. I have my work area, but within that I have 100% freedom to figure out what I need to do- the only thing I need to do is to be able to justify it. I can select the tickets I want to work on, areas to improve, initiatives to take up, or software to build. Also,…
I don’t have that much freedom of the what when it comes to business features but I do have freedom of the how and I’m good with that.
I also have a great deal of influence over my hobby horses - infrastructure (AWS) and Devops.
Re: Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?
#10XP: open office, promiscuous pairing, very little remote work, 4-6 teammates, 2-3 30-minute breaks throughout the day to do whatever, regular lunch n learns, honest retrospectives, continuous deployment, powerful tools (Haskell, Elm, postgresql), daily company-wise “standup” with 70 people that averages 5-10 minutes, bi-monthly team get-togethers to play games and watch movies, regular lunches together, good code rev…
Some of that sounds like a nightmare to me. - open office - impossible to concentrate. - constant pair programming - ughhh - I have a family and friends outside of work. I’ve gone out of my way not to mix my work life and personal life. I have no desire to “play games” and “watch movies” with my coworkers. I come to work to work. I have friends who are former coworkers. - regular lunches together - again, my lunch ti…
Seconded! You could be my work best friend and years after we've moved on we could still enjoy not talking to each other.