Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company? • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by insomniacity » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 10:57 AM UTC

jamestimmins wrote: post #261

sysbell wrote: post #212

Internal URL shortener, every single time. They get rave reviews and in one case ended up being considered a core service that had to be up.

Can you explain what the purpose/benefit of this is?

It turns a mess of internal sharepoint/wiki/confluence links into an easily memorable namespace that can be 'linked to' verbally or on post-it notes.

A common hostname is 'go', so when you launch some new programme, project or tool, you can put 'go/projectname', or 'go/toolname' in places like chat topics, email footers and presentation slides.

Applicable in larger places that end up with a mess of different documentation systems, and where trying to unify everything would be a waste of time.

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

#292

Post by krenel » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

minor3rd wrote: post #225

makmanalp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This honestly took me a while to learn - it's so easy to jump in and be a smartass (and I've been guilty of this before) about how bad things are, but a) suggesting small, incremental changes that demonstrate a nuanced understanding of where things went wrong and b) volunteering to work on making things better goes a long way. Most of the team will already often know and agree on what is bad - but just won't be empow…

> This honestly took me a while to learn Yeah same here. I think I pissed off my manager pretty quickly at my current job by trying to change how they did certain things before getting an understanding of why they did them that way, but I realized my mistake and went into more of an observer-mindset for awhile. Over time I built up a reputation with reducing friction in smaller ways on specific features I worked on,…

Your comment resonates with me.

I work hard to improve things; most of it was worth it, some of it didn't went well but it was a constant fight with my boss. If I failed, he would bring it back for months.

What worked for me was to step back and get into super pasive mode. Give all the responsability to my manager. I didn't question any of his design decisions, gave support to all ideas even if seem plain wrong unless he wanted honest feedback (usually, he didn't because I would change the original idea). Never say or even insinuate "I told you this was not gonna work"; I just acted surprised and asking to him "ok, what do we do now?". It just took a few months for my manager to start reliying on me, more and more. Now I have even more space for improving things, with the full support of my manager because "he wants me to do it" not "because I push my ideas to him".

At the end of the day, it's not dumb if it works.

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

#293

Post by dman » Fri, Jun 29, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

drderidder wrote: post #113

gota wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the Joel Spolsky's post on why you should never re-write your code from scratch [1]. The reasoning goes most 'ugliness' comes from bug-fixes that people encountered along the way, and by re-writing that 'two page function' you lose all that accumulated knowledge. In short, the hacks that make us want to rewrite code are there for a reason [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-sho…

That article by Joel Spolsky was one of the few I can't fully agree with. The greatest successes of my career have often been in creating "next generation" implementations of software using newer or better technology and designs. Those re-implementations have resulted in very significant performance and productivity gains. While rewriting things from scratch can definitely be a naive impulse, there are times when it'…

I have done my fair share of rewrites as well. The hardest ones are where you need the new system to be backwards compatible.