Live data from Hacker News

If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

jamesshore.com

121–126 of 126 posts

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#121
post #75

> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system. Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely Has anyone work…

The "Valve Handbook for New Employees" was an interesting read. I still don't know how much is fact and how much is fiction, but I liked some of the ideas there.

>"We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most," Valve developer Robin Walker tells Keighley, soundly rejecting the ethos that Valve has publicly carried as a torch for some time. The studio used a new Half-Life [Alyx, 2020] project as a way to focus the entire studio—even though, as we've previously reported, that project began life with more modest expectations in terms of length and content.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#122
reminds me of a teammate who pushed for fast tests and clean code. most of us thought it slowed us down, until a big production bug hit. he pushed a fix in 15 min / his tests made it easy to find and solve. after that, we all bought in. small changes can make a huge difference.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#123
Ah, this looks to be my favorite "non-management" bullshit game: Put stickies of words like "People" "Process" "Love" "Care" "Profitability" "Quality" and so on, pick some of those words and build a stupid story around those words. The story is usually summarized as "we'll have the best of the best people, doing best of the quality, with best of the best profitability, spreading much love".

What about all the words that are not picked? That's for 2 years later, when they play the same game again.

Here's the last but least favorite part: beat employees into memorizing those words, have them graded against these words based on entirely subjective interpretations, and reward those who are good at playing this game.

Some people are just story tellers, not doers.

Then I look at the profile of the author of this blog. Yeah, makes sense.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).

Related: Amazon kicked out Oracle from the company. Somewhere along the same timeline, the operational recommendation for teams was to not use relational databases. https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle...

Kicking out Oracle might have to do with factors outside the usage of relational databases...

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: Amazon kicked out Oracle from the company. Somewhere along the same timeline, the operational recommendation for teams was to not use relational databases. https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle...

Kicking out Oracle might have to do with factors outside the usage of relational databases...

[dead]

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently finished a contract at a company who has gone full on dynamo with the idea that if we have slow queries and dynamo is good for Amazon, then it's good for us too. I've ran some explain on the queries causing issues and of course those queries didn't leverage indexes like they thought ....

How did you run explain queries on DynamoDB? Or may be you mean something different and I misunderstood you?

I ran explain on the original mysql implementation. The basis of the migration project to dynamo was mysql couldn't cope with our scale but that was bullshit
Post reply on HN