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Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

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Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#91

Post by danpalmer »

ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

This is why it's important that early team members are experienced engineers. They know which corners should be cut today to get the prototype out, and which shouldn't because they'll take 30 mins to do "properly" and save a day of work before the runway is even up.

I work in a small company that has all the things the author mentioned and that can work quickly as a result. Almost none of it comes from "we'll do it this way", almost all has evolved over time as we've been able to gradually introduce more rigour to our development process. Much is down to some great engineers at the beginning setting us on that path.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#92

Post by wyldfire »

planxty wrote: post #74

Cultural problems are hard to change. If you like your team, one option might be to simply begin testing your own code and ask people to review your work. Don't be overly optimistic, but from time to time the right person can create enormous change simply by doing the right thing and patiently explaining why it's helpful. It's likely your experience of mature engineering practices in a bigger company is largely forei…

> Cultural problems are hard to change.

Agreed, but the culture reflects the leadership. If leaders put up a backstop and say "tests passing gate new commits and new commits should include new tests," then the culture will bend to this. If leaders think that simple process elements are negotiable, then the culture will reflect that.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#93

Post by UK-Al05 »

xwdv wrote: post #60

Always remember, you are not there to make code better or implement robust processes. You are there to make money . Or, if you are working a lower tier job, simply reduce costs . If you are not doing one of those two things as a developer, your job is in grave danger and you will be the first one cut. Throw your standards away, your standards are the company’s standards now. If you want to preach standards go be a co…

Trust me. You can make a lot of money for the company by improving the companies standards.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#94

Post by hannofcart »

ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

This story is so eerily close to what happened at my company, even as regarding specifics that I was tempted to ask if you are a colleague. :)

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#95

Post by luckylion »

toshk wrote: post #65
franee wrote: post #13

Oh my. Run away. If that is their current culture, there will be a lot of pushback if you want to initiate changes. Especially among the senior (responsible for the mess) ones who get defensive real fast. Maybe ask more about how their engineering culture is next time around during interviews.

Not in my experience. The devs in teams I've worked with (including me) are most of time all quiete aware of the places where their code en setup is lacking and as long as they don't feel personally attacked are very happy with people who come with implementable solutions. The not feeling attacked and implementable parts are key.

This. I've never had a negative response when I joined a project and discovered obvious problems when I explained why I think that they are or are going to be a problem and offered to help fix them. Nobody likes the guy that shows up, says "that's all shit, you need to fix it", and vanishes again. But I've never seen anyone hate the guy that shows up, says "I've noticed there's a lot of friction around X. I think we could make it easier to work with and more stable by doing Y".

And I've always liked it personally when somebody does that to me. When somebody with a lot more experience and/or skill helps you, it's like some super high level player carrying you through boss fights: you level up much quicker than if you did it on your own.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#96

Post by rezonant »

nonines wrote: post #73
ransom1538 wrote: post #56

Me as a manager at a startup: "Look, we have 5 months of runway. Does that make sense?" Young dev from large corp: "Yes. But if you don't use Terraform we wont be able to see our infrastructure changes over time. We don't even have a proper code review process." Me as a manager at a startup: "We have two micro instances. Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now." Young dev from large corp: "Sigh,…

The point I think you're making is that "it depends" and I agree with it. I've seen companies that have no funding issues building products that they know they will need to maintain in coming years and still follow a few or none of the best practices. But I've also seen people building SW that no one can guarantee that will ever be used (and gets scrapped after a few months) spending days and weeks setting up the per…

All things with balance, and I agree analysis paralysis and overengineering are real problems to avoid...

but I'm sorry you can't deploy without CI/CD unless it's like a desktop or mobile app or something. You don't skip that for servers. Does it have to be perfect? Hell no, but it needs to be in place before you can seriously call it shipping

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#97

Post by jerkstate »

rezonant wrote: post #90
BerislavLopac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then proceeds to blow 2 hours complaining on hacker news You are absolutely right, that was wrong. They should have instead ignored you and install Terraform.

Why not both?!

where's the import prototype? check it out, I moved our metrics stack to InfluxDB and Grafana! Now we can scale to 10,000 instances no problem!

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#98

Post by Shacklz »

mantap wrote: post #83

It depends on the cost to the end user and the cost of failure. At one end of the spectrum you have free-to-play games. You'd have to be insane to implement a high test coverage on that. Nobody cares if Battletoads Royale crashes. On the other end of the spectrum you have safety critical software, financial software, etc, where the costs of failure are very high. Ask yourself "what's the worst that can happen if this…

Agreeing with your sentiment, but want to point out that there are free-to-play-games out there where I'd be seriously surprised if they didn't do some very serious testing; they make just too much money and put out too many new features too fast in order to forgo automated testing. Just to name a few I know: Dota2, Path of Exile, League of Legends.

Granted, they're probably not the cash-grab-f2p-mobile-game you might have had in mind, but still technically free-to-play.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#99

Post by phyzome »

Align it with business needs and observable outcomes.

Does the company suffer from outages? (Not just have them—but actually suffer from them.) When there's a production incident, do a root cause analysis. If some of the root causes are related to coding and deployment practices, make notes of that. Start aggregating that information. Soon you'll have evidence that you can reduce outages by changing practices.

Does Product feel frustrated by development speed? Start taking surveys. How much time is spent on fixing past mistakes/dealing with bad code/discovering broken tests? That can be used as evidence too, when you want to start a conversation with management about pausing in the race to tie your shoelaces.

Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

#100

Post by wyldfire »

poutrathor wrote: post #85

The Joel Test : https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... * The Joel Test Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do n…

Joel included this in the SO jobs site. I wonder how many employers lie to themselves about the answers to these questions.

In any case, questions like these are great ones to ask during an interview.

Companies with poor process will be pretty frustrating to work at.

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