511–520 of 704 posts
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> why does our tracking pixel return a purple image? Now I'm really curious, is there some exciting non-obvious reason for a tracking pixel to be purple? Was it #FF00FF or more like #6600DD?
This definitely needs an answer. In fact, until OP can give us the right answer, we immediately need even wrong answers! You reading this. Yes, you. Give your best wrong answer below.
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Before anything else, getting buy-in for any kind of major change from the execs is key. Explain the situation and the effects. Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures. Push back hard every time this commitment gets sabotaged because something is supposedly on fire. Get a guaranteed budget for external trainings and workshops, again in writing. Then talk to the team. If you cannot get those comm…
"Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures" It is possible that the executives won't take it well to all of the formality here (writing and signatures). How would you convince them that this is necessary?
It’s interesting to see how all responses focus on the signature part as problematic due to its supposed formality. Is this an American work culture thing? I see signing off on an agreement as a signal of professional conduct and reliability.
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git init seems like job #1 because at least then you can delete every commented out line and start a little cleaner.
to loose all the comments? :D that would make it even harder to read
First off, no, a full rewrite is not only not necessary, but probably the worst possible approach. Do a piece at a time. You will eventually have re-written all the code, but do not ever fall into the trap of a "full re-write". It doesn't work. But before you re-write once line of code - get some testing in place. Or, a lot of testing. If you have end-to-end tests that run through every feature that is currently used…
I'd argue that the first order of business is getting the code committed to SCM. Then you can coach the team on new branches (features/bugs), and build the culture of using the SCM. Do this before going to the execs and giving the 10,000 meter view.
Go to the execs and get buy in on the scope of what you need. I'd recomment articulating it in terms of risk reduction. You have a $20M revenue stream, and little control/testing over the machinery that generates this. You'll work on implementing a plan to get this under control (have an outline of this ready, and note that you need to assess more to fill in the details). You need space/time/resources to get this done.
Then get the testing in place. Make this part of the culture of SCM use. Reward the team for developing sanity/functionality tests. Get CI/CD going (a simple one, that just works). From this you can articulate (with the team's input), coding/testing standards to be adhered to.
After all this, start identifying the problematic low hanging fruit. Work each problem (have a clear problem statement, a limited scope for the problem, and a desired solution). You are not there to boil the ocean (rewrite the entire thing). You are there to make their engineering processes better, and move them to a more productive environment. Any low hanging fruit will have a specific need/risk attached to it. Like "we drop tables/columns regularly using user input." Based upon the culture you created with SCM/testing, you can have the team develop the tests for expected and various corner cases. From that, you can replace the low hanging fruit.
Keep doing that until the fruit is no longer low hanging. Prove to the execs that you can manage/solve problems. Once you have that done, you can make a longer term roadmap appeal, that is, start looking at what version 2.0 (or whatever number) would look like, and what internal bits you need to change to get there.
Basically, evolution, not revolution. Easier for execs under pressure to deliver results to swallow. Explain in terms of risks/costs and benefits, though in the near term, most of the focus sounds like it should be on risk reduction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before anything else, getting buy-in for any kind of major change from the execs is key. Explain the situation and the effects. Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures. Push back hard every time this commitment gets sabotaged because something is supposedly on fire. Get a guaranteed budget for external trainings and workshops, again in writing. Then talk to the team. If you cannot get those comm…
To be fair if I was an exec at a company and the new IT lead wants me to commit, in writing, to XYZ, I’d not keep them around long. You can’t run a company on that kind of deep mistrust. Nothing in the OP suggests abusive management. Incompetence, maybe, but I see no reason to assume that they’ll backtrack on agreements, and a new management hire who immediately starts sewing mistrusts is not someone I’d trust to get…
Emails are writing, if you're imagining the IT lead walking in with a paper contract I see why you would say that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before anything else, getting buy-in for any kind of major change from the execs is key. Explain the situation and the effects. Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures. Push back hard every time this commitment gets sabotaged because something is supposedly on fire. Get a guaranteed budget for external trainings and workshops, again in writing. Then talk to the team. If you cannot get those comm…
To be fair if I was an exec at a company and the new IT lead wants me to commit, in writing, to XYZ, I’d not keep them around long. You can’t run a company on that kind of deep mistrust. Nothing in the OP suggests abusive management. Incompetence, maybe, but I see no reason to assume that they’ll backtrack on agreements, and a new management hire who immediately starts sewing mistrusts is not someone I’d trust to get…
As a programmer contractor and a guy who sometimes gets called to save small businesses due to stalled development (happened 6 times in my 20y career) I'm absolutely not even opening my laptop anymore -- before I see a written commitment from execs (email is enough; I tag/label those and make sure I can easily find them in the future).
Reasons are extremely simple and self-defensive in nature: execs can and do backtrack from agreements all the time. At the time we arrive in an oral agreement they made 20 other invisible assumptions they never told me about and when one of them turns out to be not true (example: they thought you can get onboarded in 2 days into a system with 5000+ source files and be productive as a full-blown team member on day #3) they start backtracking faster than you can say "that's not professional".
I don't dispute your positive experience. But please be aware that it's not the norm. Most execs out there treat programmers as slaves with big salaries and nothing more, and we get exactly the treatment you might expect when they have that mindset.
Sorry not sorry but I have to save my own arse first; I've been bound to extremely awful contracts when I've been much younger and stupider and I am not allowing that ever again.
I can single-handedly make a business succeed with technology, and I have done so. I am not staying anywhere where execs hand-away everything with "should be simple and quick, right? k thx bye".
But if I could hijack and m curious the HN opinion on a variant: what if the product never launched? It’s 10,000 files of spaghetti and dreams that just cant work well enough to put in fro t of customers?
I was brought in on such a project and the very kind business owner was under the impression they were close to launch because of all the features he’d seen demoed in isolation. But it was like a bridge built of gum and two-by-fours, spanning a massive gully but with a 10 foot gap in the middle, and nowhere near the strength to fill that last span.
> this code generates more than 20 million dollars a year of revenue From a business perspective, nothing is broken. In fact, they laid a golden goose. > team is 3 people, quite junior. One backend, one front, one iOS/android. Resistance to change is huge. My mistake, they didn't lay a golden goose--they built a money printer. The ROI here is insane. > productivity is abysmal which is understandable. The mess is just…
This 100%. This line is an immediate nail in the coffin: > This business unit has a pretty aggressive roadmap as management and HQ has no real understanding of these blockers. And post COVID, budget is really tight. I've been at a company not unlike this... several MLOC of VB WinForms that was total spaghetti, but a highly successful app that brought in a lot of revenue. In our case the majority of the dev team was i…
The CEO/Founder wouldn't even consider a refactoring or cleanup session, let alone a full or partial rewrite. Only features drive sales, and we've sold so many things we don't have, so all he wanted was feature cram. Every so often, a VIP customer complained about some major use case that simply didn't work, so only in those cases was bug fixing permitted. And in those cases, the VIP customer would get a custom bespoke build made with the bug fixed. I was hired because the last person of my seniority could not cram features in fast enough and gave up in disgust.
They only got source control because I came in on a weekend, unpaid, to do it. I lasted a little over a year. Bootstrapped founder (and sole shareholder) eventually sold the company for ~$150M. Sometimes it seems there is no justice in the world :)