Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

martinfowler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–168 of 168 posts

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#161

Post by kiplingsif »

onethought wrote: post #117
joana035 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sell each consultant hour ~100 and pay ~30. After the initial project implementation swap the whole team to India, move the existing people to another projects. Keep everyone in a cult like mindset, profit.

Do you work somewhere that pays you exactly the same as the value you generate? Are you saying ThoughtWorks bait and switch their customers? Do you mean without their knowledge? Or are they convincing them to accept dev teams from India?

Anecdotal but that's exactly what ThoughtWorks did for a company I work for, and then we entered protracted legal battles around Intellectual Property for the work/crap they had produced.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#162

Post by Aeolun »

xyzelement wrote: post #68
Aeolun wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this hard to justify to myself. It’s literally my boss’s job to fix these impediments (and the boss’s boss, and their boss). Am I supposed to teach them how to do their jobs? In addition to doing my own?

If you are a senior member of the team and problems are apparent to you, I would expect you to productivity call them out. It sounds like you want to gripe about the problems on HN but not actually try to solve?

No, no. I’m talking about bringing the problem to some higher ups attention, but also needing to expend the effort to both come up with a plan for fixing it, as well as actually convince this 50 person team to do this thing.

And then still have nothing happen because the people above are mostly paying lip service to improvement, but not actually changing their ways.

It’s like needing to expend 200% effort because others are expending only 10%.

Edit: But yeah, I also gripe about it on HN because it’s carthartic ;)

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#163

Post by aiisjustanif »

dvt wrote: post #9

> There is an overwhelming amount of good advice, practices, tools, and processes that you should use to improve. I disagree. Advice is contradictory, practices and processes are often orthogonal, and tools quite literally don't exist. I say this as someone that's worked in large companies and saw how lengthy not only process feedback loops were (especially developer ↔ product team), but also engineering feedback loo…

Have you heard of BackStage [1]? A few companies have been adopting it to help make teams and departments to help devs. Target is a notable example of going from a really unproductive environment to much more supportive of devs [2]. Including handling building out infrastructure stacks you mentioned. * 1. https://backstage.io/ * 2. https://tech.target.com/

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#164

Post by anthony_barker »

dvt wrote: post #9

> There is an overwhelming amount of good advice, practices, tools, and processes that you should use to improve. I disagree. Advice is contradictory, practices and processes are often orthogonal, and tools quite literally don't exist. I say this as someone that's worked in large companies and saw how lengthy not only process feedback loops were (especially developer ↔ product team), but also engineering feedback loo…

I find it depressing. People talk of an AI revolution but it is super hard just to setup some baseline infrastructure on these "AI" providers infra.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#165

Post by xyzelement »

Aeolun wrote: post #162
xyzelement wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a senior member of the team and problems are apparent to you, I would expect you to productivity call them out. It sounds like you want to gripe about the problems on HN but not actually try to solve?

No, no. I’m talking about bringing the problem to some higher ups attention, but also needing to expend the effort to both come up with a plan for fixing it, as well as actually convince this 50 person team to do this thing. And then still have nothing happen because the people above are mostly paying lip service to improvement, but not actually changing their ways. It’s like needing to expend 200% effort because oth…

It's a little hard to follow you but it still sounds like this to me: there's a problem I am seeing, others are "bad" for not fixing it but I am "justified" in doing nothing. So it's not surprising nothing gets done.

For what it's worth, my strategy has always been to grapple with these situations. Sometimes you get to have impact and learn in the process: eg how do I communicate about this problem in a way that gets traction? If you can do it, you will "level up" in your career.

Alternatively you may learn why things being as they are is a reasonable trade-off for the situation you are in. This may also level you up by helping you think on "what makes sense for the business" rathe than simply "I don't like it" level.

At worst, you'll have a story for your next interview about how you tried and failed to make a big improvement like this. I have a similar story and it resonates really well for senior roles.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#166

Post by bananapub »

throwarayes wrote: post #4

Patterns on the most effective teams I’ve worked on: - high degree of trust and emotional safety between team members. The team can safely share feedback and risk sharing our crazy ideas - high degree of care for the craft. We hold each other accountable to quality - ships, regularly, to real customers - little status seeking - goes with emotional safety - few individuals on the team need to be “in charge” or hold ar…

amen. I've found that pushing on all these levers to improve things makes me happier and more productive, and to a lesser extent everyone else happier and more productive, too.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#167

Post by Doxin »

futureproofd wrote: post #148
toong wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now that you're all working from home anyway, I might as well outsource your job to India! That will save me a truckload of money too!"

Our company recently did this and our best developer left. I now have no one to talk to about best coding practices, new technologies, or other fun concepts. Just a bunch of overseas ticket jockeys trying to avoid lashings.

Sounds like that's your cue to leave if you ask me.

Re: Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

#168

Post by specialist »

throwarayes wrote: post #4

Patterns on the most effective teams I’ve worked on: - high degree of trust and emotional safety between team members. The team can safely share feedback and risk sharing our crazy ideas - high degree of care for the craft. We hold each other accountable to quality - ships, regularly, to real customers - little status seeking - goes with emotional safety - few individuals on the team need to be “in charge” or hold ar…

> ...not too much catering to “super stars”. 1-2 heros does not a team make, the senior people make it their job to lift everyone up. The team doesn’t obsess over their high performers.

Amen.

A team is only as fast as its slower member.

h/t The Goal, theory of constraints

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

Post reply on HN