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Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#41

Post by bytasv »

astonex wrote: post #26

If you just arrived at a company why are you pushing to change anything. They obviously already have a working process and you should be careful to change anything that works, especially when you may not yet know all of the more hidden details.

Even if the process that they have is working it doesn't mean that it can not be improved. And if you obviously see the parts that could be improved because you already stepped on the same rake many times why not do that? Ofc as a newcomer trying to change things you are always gonna be welcomed with strange looks but that's another side of it - how to implement the changes so that everyone is happy...

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#42

Post by mattlondon »

fastbeef wrote: post #6

For the first month or so I take a very humble listening position, even if I immediately see things I want to fix. More often then not, there is a background and a history to things that could lead to a) my “fix” being unnecessary and/or ill-informed and b) friction with the rest of the team because here comes a whippersnapper upending all our stuff. Process and code fixes are _much_ easier once you have good rapport…

+1 for this.

Unless you've been hired specifically to help them change their dev practices, I'd go along with what they have until you've got some understanding and reputational-clout to start suggesting such huge changes to how everyone works.

Rocking up and on day one start asking people to change their development practices (particularly around branching policy which is something very contentious and/or strict everywhere I've been) because "It makes my work easier" is a sure-fire way to get people's backs up and dislike you. And where do you stop? First it "It makes my work easier" to change the dev practices, but why not start demanding that everything is rewritten in Go/Vue.js/Haskell? It'll make your work easier. How about we change the product from a Desktop App to a web app? It'll make your work easier. Why dont we just sub-contract the whole thing out to off-shore teams? It'll make your work easier. There might be a case for any of those, but I'd personally wait (and I would prefer any hires I bring in also wait!) until the right time before advocating for massive sweeping changes right away.

tl;dr - Arrogance & know-it-alls can be disruptive (in a bad way). It takes a village and flexibility is key to working with any team.

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#43

Post by pjc50 »

s_kilk wrote: post #37
mason55 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also Chesterton’s fence. You don’t want to change something until you understand why it’s there in the first place. https://abovethelaw.com/2014/01/the-fallacy-of-chestertons-f...

Chesterton's fence has always bothered me a little because it presumes there will be a sensible explanation for the fence, and that the reason will reveal itself to us if we have the patience and guile to see it. Knowing what I know about how some organizations work, I don't think this is necessarily a safe assumption.

You can't expect it to just come to you, you have to ask. Unfortunately many organisations are bad at institutional memory, so reasons get lost. But fundamentally this requires a "why?" conversation, it can't be done by purely technical means.

If you're very confident that your test suite covers all use cases, then you can just change it and see what breaks.

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#45

Post by systemtest »

colinbartlett wrote: post #22
gpetukhov wrote: post #13

Linting and code style guidelines. Easy to introduce, but makes a big positive difference.

In that vein, I invariably have one massive commit on every project to remove trailing whitespace first. That way when my well-behaved editor removes them with each commit, it's not littering up the diff.

My opinion is that every team member should have the same editor with the same settings. The settings should be easily accessible from Confluence or a similar knowledge base.

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#47

Post by arethuza »

astonex wrote: post #26

If you just arrived at a company why are you pushing to change anything. They obviously already have a working process and you should be careful to change anything that works, especially when you may not yet know all of the more hidden details.

More at a management level, but I have joined small commercially successful companies who had utterly dysfunctional development processes (backups? revision control? sane deployment processes?....).

Re: Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?

#48

Post by readhn »

izolate wrote: post #27
stealthmodeclan wrote: post #19

1. Every now and then we run into Paywall. Give everyone employee debit card so that they can buy stuff which helps their productivity. 2. CI using Drone.io 3. Add trello 4. Everyone gets their own AWS account. It makes it trivial for them to experiment with new ideas from their home or at office without begging anyone for credentials. You start by empowering your employees. Now, we consult startups which work differ…

Do you have a list of companies you consult for by any chance?

haha. seriously?
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