Ask HN: What company environment has enabled your best work?

Same here. With the added bonus of selecting my own schedule. I have a 25-26hr sleep cycle so it is very unproductive for me to be available at 9am or 11am or any specific time daily. I also prefer to work longer hours late at night. Thankfully everyone I work with as well as my wife/kid totally understand this and accommodate my atypical hours.

The end result is I am extremely happy in my work hours and arrangement as long as I don’t have early morning doctor appointments or something.

Release Fri, recover from fuckup Sat/Sun?

My first software engineering job was with a big aerospace company about 20 years ago. Back then, budgets were big and the culture was completely different. Even the lowest peon had a huge cubicle with lots of desk space and privacy. Standups were not a thing and Agile wasn’t on the radar. We had lots of time to do anything we were assigned and never had to do much reporting aside from weekly meetings. We all had a general sense of schedule but it wasn’t rushed at all. We also didn’t have rhe always-in communication tools like Slack. Phone calls and face-to-face were it. This all made for a very relaxed environment where no one felt rushed and we had time and space to contemplate and concentrate. This is where I learned and created the most. I basically taught myself Perl, Unix (we had SPARC x-terms), Java, bash, csh, ksh, SQL, Javascript and web application development, and so much more, all of which I still remember to this day. I was happy and relaxed and pretty much always looked forward to learning and exploring more every day. Clearly this type of environment works well for some people, and it certainly did for me. I credit these early years to my success. Fast forward 20 years and I am in a completely different environment - open office plans that encourage collaboration but also distraction, Agile tools that promote micro-management down to the number of minutes you spend on a task, daily stand-ups (sometimes multiple per day if you’re involved in several projects), and constant reporting to management, SCRUM masters and POs. Oh and chat tools. These constant interruptions often make it impossible to truly do creative and deeply thoughtful work. Most of what I do is rushed and measured and we are always analyzing what we can more efficiently and quickly. Responsiveness to messages are also scrutinized. Oh and all the meetings - Sprint planning, retrospectives, reciews, backlog grooming, etc. I estimate that most of what I do these days is a lot of administrative busy work and useless overhead, which is definitely not conducive to doing what I believe I do best - write code.

Your probably not doing "DevOps" if they hired a "team" for it, sounds like ops on aws

One slight alternative which I've had in the past was instead of debt pay down every sprint, it was every N sprints, we'd have a pay down sprint.