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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?

#61

Post by awinder »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #25
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…

> Process and code fixes are _much_ easier once you have good rapport with the team. And one doesn't get that by walking into a place expecting to make sweeping changes. What's worse is job hoppers were asked so this means people are going into a shop, making these changes, and leaving shortly after. The hell?

More realistically they’re going into a shop proposing changes immediately, getting slapped down, becoming disillusioned, leaving, and then trying again somewhere else. Even when people do make changes like this, it’s unlikely they stand the test of time, I’ve definitely seen people’s “pet changes” get rolled back within microseconds of them exiting.

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

#62

Post by Techinica »

cncrnd wrote: post #31
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…

Agreed. I have a theory that the reason contractors want to change everything when they arrive is so that they have infinite work. I also always see contractors wanting to start self-initiated projects from scratch rather than working in the codebase, which is of course easier to produce a visible result in.

As a person working in this scenario I find the biggest issue coming into work on an established code-base is the lack of documentation and a lack of interest from the company's own people to divulge any information about the code base. This unfortunately leads more often than not to the situation you describe, re-written code or projects perhaps unnecessarily separated.

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

#63

Post by monk_e_boy »

Hahaha! Good lord. First I push for a DEBUGGER. Second I demand they test their backups. An untested backup is just a delightful wish.

After months of push back for those two and I've made myself a hateful person to all involved I ask for ALL code to go into repos. Often there is a bunch of "Oh, my code doesn't need to go in, for reasons." No FUCKING NO, your code needs to go into a repo and needs reviewing.

The boss needs all passwords. Okay, not your personal passwords, but if you're not in and you're sys-admin, we need to get into the f-ing box. You can not be the only person with a login. Create more users, give those users permissions. So many companies have one guy/gall who has access to some critical part of the puzzle and no one else knows how to even log into it, let alone all the hacky scripts that are needed to push a change live.

Automatic testing. We almost got there in one company. So close... until one day they ran out of money. We found that an SQL statement wasn't coded right and we hadn't billed 50% of our customers. Ever. No a dime. Not a cent. Accounts never realised. Even in the early days when they only had ten or so customers. The billing record shows they only sent four bills out. Come on people.

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

#66

Post by cncrnd »

Techinica wrote: post #62
cncrnd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I have a theory that the reason contractors want to change everything when they arrive is so that they have infinite work. I also always see contractors wanting to start self-initiated projects from scratch rather than working in the codebase, which is of course easier to produce a visible result in.

As a person working in this scenario I find the biggest issue coming into work on an established code-base is the lack of documentation and a lack of interest from the company's own people to divulge any information about the code base. This unfortunately leads more often than not to the situation you describe, re-written code or projects perhaps unnecessarily separated.

Very true as well, and if that were plainly stated the problem could be addressed. The issue is that some of these people are smooth talkers able to convince managers that these big shifts are necessary right away...and inevitably end up abandoning big projects they push for.

Others are able to poke around the codebase and ask questions till they can contribute in a meaningful way, but these are rare in my experience.

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

#68

Post by Joeri »

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.

I understood it differently. As in: there is always a reason for the fence but you never know whether it is justified or not without understanding it. Don’t tear down the fence until you understand why it was put there for the wrong reasons.

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

#69

Post by sakarisson »

systemtest wrote: post #45
colinbartlett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as everyone has the same linters, what does it matter what editors they use?

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

#70

Post by vijucat »

aetherspawn wrote: post #40
macht wrote: post #34

I go from git to SVN. It's just easier for me to work with and once the team gets used to it, it's a win-win.

SVN is really heavyweight for branches and tags. It used to take like a minute to branch with SVN but when we swapped to git it took like less than a blink. Also —rebase is way better than merge. I haven’t had to merge git for over 6 months but with SVN I was doing it twice daily, at least.

If you use a repository URL rather than a local filename / dirname in svn copy, it's a purely remote copy and is instantaneous:

$ svn copy file:///var/svn/repos/test/dir1 \ file:///var/svn/repos/test/dir1_jira_1886 -m "For bugfix to SERV-1886"

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.branchmerge.using.htm...

https://svnvsgit.com/

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