Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 293 posts

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

#211

Post by nmjohn »

cozuya wrote: post #119

(front end js) My new favorite tool is the ridiculously named husky package, which allows for configurable git hooks inside of package.json. Specifically what I'm doing now is precommit eslint and prettier, and prepush test:all i.e. people on my team will be unable to commit if they fail lint and unable to push if they fail unit tests. There's of course positives and negatives to this approach but the former signific…

This completely breaks a number of git workflows. In my opinion a better option is to have eslint / tests / prettier / etc run as part of CI, and have your pull requests require CI to pass before they can be merged.

I like this balance better because the end goal is still met: "bad" code doesn't make it to the main git branch.

But it also allows for git workflows which involve frequent commits. (If all tests have to pass for every commit, even locally when the commits may be rebased away, it encourages very large and hard to review commits instead of the smallest commit possible for the given changes.)

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

#213

Post by icedchai »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #200
icedchai wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Daily standups" are morale killers.

Would you mind expanding on this? I'm interested how your experience with them differs from mine.

Generally people are incapable of communicating efficiently. A standup should cover: 1) what did you do yesterday 2) what are you doing today 3) do you have an issues?

This should take less than one minute per person. "Issues" should be resolved offline.

I once worked on a team where the "scrum master" would update Jira for each person's status. This resulted in a 30 second update turning into 2 or 3 minutes of detailed status.

I also worked on a 15 person team that had a giant stand up for the entire team. The resulted in a 30 to 45 minute stand up.

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

#214

Post by PeterisP »

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.

It depends on why you're brought in to the company. Especially in management it's not uncommon to hire people with the explicit notion that they don't have a satisfactory working process, it needs significant changes to achieve the desired results, and the new hire would be expected to start fixing the current process almost immediately.

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

#215

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #63

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…

I find it helpful to have a "misc" repo just for those weird not-quite-one-off scripts and the like that don't really fit into the main repos.

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

#216

Post by troels »

mosselman wrote: post #18
troels wrote: post #8

The first thing I do is work to gain enough political leverage so that I can manage my own time.

Can you give an example of how you’d do this?

In the broadest sense, by gaining the trust of people and by showing initiative, rather than waiting for someone else to dictate what I should be working on.

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

#217

Post by ryandrake »

JBReefer wrote: post #189
ryandrake wrote: post #158

I once joined a company and found out on day 1 that they had: 1. No source control system 2. No bug/issue tracker (or formal software QA) 3. No build automation 4. No dedicated build system 5. No pre-launch checklists Basically, the latest release was whatever happened to be on one of the engineer's hard drives whenever someone frantically ran in and said "we needed to release!" You can imagine how fun it was to repr…

How long did you last? I worked somewhere like that, most engineers lasted 3 months, I managed to squeeze out 4! Places with issues like that tend to have TONS of other very serious issues.

You guessed right. Turnover was a huge problem too. I lasted just over a year, and only because it was during the depth of dot.com recession 2.0 and there weren’t exactly jobs available on every street corner.

The technical problems were merely symptoms of structural and leadership problems.

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

#218

Post by falcolas »

beat wrote: post #205
falcolas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daily standups for remote workers are godsend. You'd think you could rely on people to communicate over chat or email, but the standup actually gets everyone talking and discussing.

My current team does weekly, and two of us are remote. Our half hour meeting invariably runs over an hour, up to two hours. If we did it daily, we could keep it to the cap without really taking more time.

Indeed; I saw the same problem. Our team (4 out of 8 are remote) does daily meetings now, and it's actually pretty rare that we go over 10 minutes, let alone the scheduled 30.

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

#219

Post by troels »

yitchelle wrote: post #90
troels wrote: post #8

The first thing I do is work to gain enough political leverage so that I can manage my own time.

Sounds like a nasty place to be in if the first time you do is politically based.

I realise the way I put it may sound ominous, but it's for the good of everyone involved really.

Most organisations are shockingly ineffective. Micromanagement and lack of long term planning is abundant. I get hired because I'm good at writing software. This is not wrong, but I can add much more value if I deliver what is needed rather than what is asked. My goal is simply to be able to do that.

Post reply on HN