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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#51

Post by cpitman »

My experience is that often the lowest effort changes also have some of the biggest impacts. I work in consulting, and I think one of my largest impacts has been to create a pre-engagement checklist for one of our very common engagements and then getting our team to review the checklist with clients ahead of time. It took maybe a day to get the first version out, and cuts ~1-2 weeks off of our projects.

Unexpected downstream effect, this had a big enough impact that other groups started creating checklists for other kinds of scenarios.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#52

Post by martincmartin »

Related question: What did you do that had the biggest impact, but wasn't recognized by such by the organization?

For example, speed up the build might make people more productive, but in a way that's not obvious to management, or even to the people working on it. It might be seen as a nice thing, but relatively minor. The knock on effects -- releasing more often, which leads to being able to try more experiments in production -- might not be noticed.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#55

Post by steev »

maest wrote: post #35
javajosh wrote: post #9

Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…

What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?

My main objection is it dramatically decreases your productivity. If building and testing takes 5-10mins (which is the case in our codebase) trying to fix a bug can take forever when you aren't exactly sure what the cause is. You don't want to try multiple fixes simultaneously because if something doesn't work you aren't sure which of the fixes (if any) might be causing the issue.

Maybe a different way to look at it is: if you could shorten the BTD loop to a minute or two, why _wouldn't_ you want that?

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#56

Post by Stronico »

1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a personal infrastructure tool (what ever that winds up being) you will have something to show for it at the end of the day - and therefore you will do it again. Those sort of things build upon each other nicely. Tooling/infrastucture is a marathon.

2. Set aside 30-60 minutes a day for learning, however you define it - for me it's PluralSight and Anki - that is usually how I start my day. Having it on the calendar, without many options to choose from makes it very efficient. Learning should be in sprints.

3. Set aside some amount of money every month for tools and capital purchases - targeted savings accounts are perfect for this - having the money in an account targeted for this purpose instead of a general account prevents a lot of money anxiety and allows you to do a better cost-benefit analysis.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#57

Post by Yoric »

Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users.

I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked.

I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase.

And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#58

Post by kingludite »

Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)

Oh, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#59

Post by WhompingWindows »

One minor thing: Recently, I uncovered that around 5% of the legacy code I was using was based on the wrong Date variable starting from its SQL pull. One of the variables was EnteredDate and another was EffectiveDate, I kept getting duplications using EnteredDate , so I dug around the organization and found someone who said "Oh, I always use EffectiveDate".

I had to re-run models and tables, the faulty code was an important variable-builder for my multivariate logistic regression models, so I needed it to be 100% accurate.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#60

Post by martincmartin »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #6

“For me, it was probably starting holding regular tech book review sessions.” How did you do these so people actually participated? My company is very deadline driven so people don’t really care about learning. Every attempt at regular learning meetings quickly died because people feel they don’t have time. Do you have a specific format? I have led regular meetings about coding style in another company. These went pr…

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

“Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

-- The 7th habit of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

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