Tools you’d miss if you left a company
rachelbythebay.com
Tools you’d miss if you left a company
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#2If you’re not building complicated new systems and just gluing things together, you’re not doing engineering? 1) definitely gate keeping 2) good engineering is about what not to build as much as it is what to build.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#3If you can't come up with anything, it's possible you're just beyond repair and too snarky to think reasonably
Or perhaps that we've mostly worked in crap dev jobs/companies? There are easily enough of them around to encompass a career.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#4I don't know. Having an "80% solution" but not needing to support or fix it is not such a bad price to pay. Also this seems to be a bit skewed towards large networked solutions.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#5If you’re not building complicated new systems and just gluing things together, you’re not doing engineering? 1) definitely gate keeping 2) good engineering is about what not to build as much as it is what to build.
I agree - shouldn't you feel most proud of the products you've built that help actual people who pay you, rather than your coworkers for which those internal tools wouldn't need to exist if not for your customers.
I'd rather have engineers working on products that customers would miss.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#6Wanted to see what Facebook Scuba was, and found this comment thread that really highlights the point of this blog. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463016
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#7I'd miss the engineering machine shop. Those facilities only get developed by accident, for instance if a company gets rid of its professional machinist but keeps the equipment, or something like that. The machines and collections of tooling take a long time to curate. Any modern manager would refuse to allow that much stuff to be purchased if they were asked, and believe in the magic of outsourcing everything.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#8[deleted]
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#9If you’re not building complicated new systems and just gluing things together, you’re not doing engineering? 1) definitely gate keeping 2) good engineering is about what not to build as much as it is what to build.
Yes, exactly.
The view that such work just constitutes writing "glue" is super reductive. So much time is also spent empathizing with others: talking to stakeholders, understanding existing processes, determining requirements, and simplifying. So if we can reduce the solution to glue instead of needing to write a complicated system, that's hands down a win.
Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company
#10I just joined apple and I miss all the Linux tools