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author here thanks for posting the article on HN - i am a daily (more or less) lurker and a huge fan :) let me know if any parts in the article aren't clear or major points are missing - happy to extend or answer here
Thanks for a great article!
Good communication practices are equally important, but I feel like those are less often overlooked these days.
Why wouldn't you fix tech debt on a normal working day?
author here thanks for posting the article on HN - i am a daily (more or less) lurker and a huge fan :) let me know if any parts in the article aren't clear or major points are missing - happy to extend or answer here
Just throwing this out there - the animated gifs are cool and fun but make reading the text next to them almost impossible.
> In contrast, if you are 5 people co-located you just stand up and say: “everyone over there - we talk now”. I much prefer working on software teams with other people in the same office, and yet this is one of the things I hate about it. Just because I'm physically near you doesn't mean there's zero cost to interruptions. Working remotely is like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Maybe in a perfect wor…
Have you worked on this small of a team before? When the team is actually small (not a small part of some mondo corp), you get a lot of great team dynamics, and it's very easy to know that 'ken doesn't like being interrupted. Working with a small team in the context of an open office w/100 people where 10-20% of the team is actually remote is what I've found to be the most unique intersection of terribleness.
> In contrast, if you are 5 people co-located you just stand up and say: “everyone over there - we talk now”. I much prefer working on software teams with other people in the same office, and yet this is one of the things I hate about it. Just because I'm physically near you doesn't mean there's zero cost to interruptions. Working remotely is like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Maybe in a perfect wor…
Have you worked on this small of a team before? When the team is actually small (not a small part of some mondo corp), you get a lot of great team dynamics, and it's very easy to know that 'ken doesn't like being interrupted. Working with a small team in the context of an open office w/100 people where 10-20% of the team is actually remote is what I've found to be the most unique intersection of terribleness.
The last software team I was on was about 3 or 4 (depending on how you count), in a company of about 10. Nobody in management or sales ever really learned the "doesn't like being interrupted" lesson.
In my experience, as soon as a company is big enough to hire non-programmers with physical access to programmers (usually around 4-6), this problem rears its head.
> Friday’s employees can work on what they think creates value: > fixing tech debt Why wouldn't you fix tech debt on a normal working day?
Companies have a hard time prioritizing things that only engineers can see. Especially small things. So some form of reserved engineer bandwidth for tech debt can be useful.
I enjoyed this article but I wish those GIFs were not there, constantly trying to grab my attention.
With SuperStop, you just hit Shift+Esc and all animations will stop. :)
Culture is key:
- People have to be of the mindset that meetings are short and purposeful. Nobody is in the meeting because they are the boss, or forced to join in order to soak up the atmosphere. (Both of those are real things, somehow).
- People exercise judgement in deciding how many people to write to: either DM, or 3-way, or dump it in a public channel.
- Most work is async by far. People post what they're up to, and other people will go and bother them if they're doing something relevant.
There's good and bad things about this:
- We can hire people who are highly experienced, and offer them totally flexible work. Some people like working at 3am. Others like to pick up the kids from school.
- We tend to only hire highly experienced people. There's nobody with under 8 years of work on the team. Juniors will have to somehow convince us they can do it; it's somehow more believable that an older person will be able to work independently than a younger one.
- Work blends in with not-work. Some people like having a division, other people like being flexible and moving their work time around.