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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?

#131

Post by loopbit »

luckylion wrote: post #95
toshk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm of the same opinion. I love getting feedback, better if it's constructive, but all kind of honest feedback is useful and welcome. And it doesn't always come from people with more experience, sometimes a greenhorn will see things that a greybeard like me doesn't.

But I've seen people giving negative responses to the best feedback. Hell, I've had people complaining for hours because someone else replaced their manual process that took an hour to do with a script (and copy&paste of the result) that took literally seconds to run.

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

#132

Post by zaphodias »

I read your post and: wow that's EXACTLY my situation!

It's also a lot disappointing to me that I can have a very basic CI on my github side projects done in half an hour at most, while a company with some great devs in it can't.

I'm not talking about "use this new technology/framework here, blabla". I'm talking about me having to fix regression bugs because no one didn't (or couldn't) write small unit tests on the critical parts of our infrastructure.

As you also said, everyone I spoke to, including CEO, agreed that we are less productive due to this and a company culture shift is needed. 6 months in I still have to see any change.

Plus: I'm not in a small startup that needs to ship something fast. I'm in a smallish company with almost 20 years of experience. They did somehow fine until now, but they're struggling to scale up.

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

#133

Post by an_d_rew »

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,…

> Young dev from large corp: "Sigh, ok, just saying in 2 years from now we wont be in a good spot".

Except in my experience it’s not two years, it’s two months. And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour.

So soon you’re burning your three months of runway with development at 20-50% efficiency, and have no ability to pivot, if needed, because your infrastructure is rigid and hardcoded.

Neither scenario is “correct”, there is only “judgement”, and it can be devastatingly incorrect either way.

A lot of people with strong or extreme opinions (too little or too much tech debt) are inadvertently being fooled by “personal survivor bias“.

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

#134

Post by chasd00 »

darkerside wrote: post #87
brayhite wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your scenario can be a lose-lose situation as it applies to the question. Speaking from experience, you can do the “agile” approach do fail fast, release faster, but with no buy-in from leadership to address the breaks in the future, your compounding problems on problems. So, short-term, you have happy leaders who see releases as they want, and unhappy devs who are in a shitshow of code. Long-term, if your startup is…

Is there any situation under which leadership shouldn't buy in to exactly what tech wants to do?

Scotty wasn't on the bridge, he didn't know what was out the window.

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

#135

Post by elwes5 »

phyzome wrote: post #99

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 P…

Also do 1 thing at a time. Do not try to do them all at the same time. That is a fast track to nothing being done. Put them in order highest to lowest pick of an 'easy' win. Make it easy for people to want to do the right thing. Once in place retro it. Is it working? Why not? CI/CD takes time to build. These devs probably have not done it before and have no interest in it. Because they do not see any benefit. Also be sure you want this. Because in a small group you will own it for a long time.

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

#136

Post by onion2k »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #71
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,…

Rapid prototyping does not mean abandoning established programming practices that help people feel confident about their work.

Yes it does. The clue is in the name - prototyping. A prototype is only supposed to prove the concept works; it doesn't need to be good.

The problem is that most companies can't do prototyping because they don't have the resources. They build a prototype, and then they don't throw it away and build the proper version and they use as production.

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

#137

Post by adrianN »

darkerside wrote: post #87
brayhite wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your scenario can be a lose-lose situation as it applies to the question. Speaking from experience, you can do the “agile” approach do fail fast, release faster, but with no buy-in from leadership to address the breaks in the future, your compounding problems on problems. So, short-term, you have happy leaders who see releases as they want, and unhappy devs who are in a shitshow of code. Long-term, if your startup is…

Is there any situation under which leadership shouldn't buy in to exactly what tech wants to do?

Hopefully there are situations where the leadership has more information available than the engineers.

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

#138

Post by ndmeredian »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #107

Counter these examples with small companies paralyzed by process, introduced by well-meaning hires from large companies with plenty of capacity. A large company is a marathon run. Discipline, strategy, training matter. A small company is running from a bear with your hair on fire.

Man, that's so clear I have to make a tattoo with that

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

#139

Post by hef19898 »

planxty wrote: post #63
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,…

I think you have some things to learn, as a manager, and as an engineer.

I'm no SWE, so it might not be 100% applicable here.

As a manager, one of the your tasks are to make sure that your team knows why they are doing what they do. That way, when there is no time for lengthy discussions, they don't feel demoralized when you give them an order they disagree with.

Another task is, to make sure to get the best out of your team. That means to use the experience and knowledge of people as much as possible. Not doing that only drives down motivation.

What happened to me in the past, in a different domain, was somewhat similar to OP. I was explicietly hired because of my FANG background to imporve operations of a new business unit for a German unicorn. So that's what I started to do. Map processes, talk to the team, shadow them, identify issues and problems, work out KPIs and SOPs... the drill. Ony to be shit down by my manager at every turn "because we have 1,000s of proplems right now and nne are addressed by what you are doing". That sucked, it really did. My impression was, that they wanted FANG level withut putting the effort in. Just having someone with the right experience doesn't magicaly solve your problems.

In the above example, when time is critical, implement it. But hen have an pen discussion with your team about best practices, and maybe use whatever solution your "bi-corp" people have in mind.

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

#140

Post by marcinzm »

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,…

That seems like very myopic management since a) motivated employees will work harder b) technical debt has a continual productivity hit even in the short term. If spending 20 hours on terraform saves the team 100 hours of debugging over the next 6 months then that may be a net win. Keep in mind that due to context switching and flow even a 10 minute "fix it now" bug will use up 2-4 hours worth of productivity.
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