My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry • Hacker News Board

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#171

Post by e3bc54b2 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

js8 wrote: post #19

sdevonoes wrote: post #7

Isn't the statement a bit obvious? Most of the tech companies out there were not born to make an impact on society, they were born to make money (which is totally fine). Only a handful of companies can be proud of making money while actually having an impact (good or bad) on society (e.g., Apple). Most of us (us != HN crowd) work for companies in the first group. On the other hand, the vast majority of side projects…

> Isn't the statement a bit obvious? No, it isn't obvious, just like the Earth is not obviously round. Even 40 years ago, the statement wasn't obvious to many public intellectuals in the West, when they were in favor of neoliberal economic policies, under the broad assumption that free markets will automatically bring meritocracy (whatever it is). I think this example is one of many that show that meritocracy doesn't…

Earth has been _obviously_ round for at least 2300 years. Ancient Greeks knew that because a ship on the horizon disappears below the ground instead on gradually getting smaller.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#172

Post by patio11 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:55 AM UTC

sheetjs wrote: post #116

Our story is very similar. I wrote a small library for converting XLSX and XLS files to CSV. Over the years, that grew into one of the most popular open source libraries on npm/github: https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs Back in 2015, 'patio11 reached out to us. In addition to a structured license purchase, he gave great insights and actually wrote a blog post about the experience https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/…

I’m thrilled that this is going so well!

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#173

Post by lazide » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 4:03 AM UTC

nicoffeine wrote: post #166

lazide wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones exactly and how did they pull off this apparent massive conspiracy? Near as I can tell, Greenspan pumping trillions of near free credit into the economy is nearly if not more culpable than the loose underwriting at these banks - after all, if they didn’t loosen them, they’d lose their market share in near free credit environments. And what about the borrowers that were signing up for these completely unrea…

> Which ones exactly and how did they pull off this apparent massive conspiracy? Most of those details are in the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission [1]: "More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by th…

Your documentation literally backs it up as a wide scale failure of an industry resulting from many contributing factors slowly building up over time, not an explicit conspiracy, or caused by concrete players who had all the cards and knew the whole situation or had any historic examples that could show where what they were doing would go.

You can certainly go on about all the folks who didn't stand up and say 'Stop!' - but really, we've got a bunch of those brewing in tech, and no one listens to anyone saying stop there either. There are a million apocalypses predicted every day - and it's rare if any of them ever ACTUALLY happen.

In retrospect, you can find those doing it in Finance back then, but they couldn't stop this mess anymore than anyone else - and plenty of people easily papered over the possibility of the crash, the same as we paper over a million other issues in tech.

The regulators were in on all this too.

So you can blame 'finance', same as someone could blame 'tech' for the election. But it doesn't really mean anything and it won't change anything, because it doesn't provide any useful information or potential corrective action.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#174

Post by conductr » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 4:10 AM UTC

georgeburdell wrote: post #87

As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product. The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't…

As a hack, could you use the work as inspiration to create a similar port in another language during off time?

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#175

Post by myth_buster » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #98

DrOctagon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the interest of full disclosure it was a government org. Your point still stands though.

> government org Governments and corporates function incredibly similarly.

Government is a corporation at extreme.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#176

Post by Aeolun » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 4:42 AM UTC

sgc wrote: post #159

Aeolun wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine if we stopped doing those things the number of freeloaders would increase. So the net benefit is negative now, but it’s still better than the cost of not having the measures at all. Also, yeah, it shouldn’t be easy to freeload. Make them work for it!

Your comment made me chuckle because it started "I imagine" and then reached a "so" as a "therefore". Virtually every time you integrate anti-freeloading measures, everyone pays the price to catch a relatively small minority of people abusing the system. It does not at all follow without study that the suffering these measures cause are better than the alternative of allowing some level of growth in the abuse of the…

> Anything else is likely harming people and more drum beating than solid work.

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I think people are happier while being harmed by the measures than by the freeloaders.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#177

Post by kevinmchugh » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #158

tialaramex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is valuable to have someone for the customer to talk to that is on their wavelength (often less technical and sometimes more domain knowledge), and who has more soft skills than you might seek in developers. Calming down an angry customer is a useful ability and that's not what you hired me to do. However, sometimes the problem is just technical, and every game of telephone makes it worse. I have had two week back…

Yeah, it’s sometimes a bit distressing to interact with the users directly if you haven’t done so for a while, because you find out they spend hours a day on tasks you never even considered and can literally take away with a few minutes of work. Asking them to tell you next time doesn’t always work since they just cannot imagine that the thing that takes them hours a day can be fixed in 5 minutes, forever. I think th…

They also don't have any idea where complexity lies in an opaque system. More than once I've heard about users wanting more control over how a certain view sorts records. Users will pitch strange ways of getting some kind of stable sort. When you realize they want a field tracking creation order or update time they think you invented the idea. (Good PMs can figure this out, too)

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#178

Post by wreath » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

reader_mode wrote: post #142

wreath wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen more engineers completely disinterested in anything customer related (and even calling users stupid!) more than I've seen PMs isolating devs. Every time I ask a PM if I could interact with a customer (not asking for permission, but to hook me up) they were delighted. Every single time. Another way to solve this problem is to have engineers on customer support rotation of some sort. This way, engineers get t…

I agree about PM/dev/customer part but disagree on dev/support rotation. This sounds great in theory, in practice working on any non-trivial software means there are parts you know little-nothing about. Having spent time on support duty I'd end up pinging team members for help (disturbing people without having a sense of priority since I don't do support), budding into other people's stuff without the capacity or des…

I think it depends on how teams are organized already and the size of the company.

Few things I noticed that made this work in practice:

* Engineers pair up for few rotations with other engineers who are experienced in interacting with customers, triaging issues, troubleshooting issues across the system and identifying which internal service is causing issue and ping the team that supports it and/or move it to their support queue.

* The goal is not to fix every single bug or issue in the queue. Prioritize incoming tickets and gather as much information as possible before moving it to some team's backlog. Solve only problems that you think are manageable within the length of your support rotation.

* One engineer per team or owners of a set of services should on the rotation (this again depends on how teams are organized already).

* Pair with customer support or customer success agents when dealing with difficult customers, situations or need help communication-wise in general.

* Bring in these bugs to your team and make sure stakeholders are aware of them. This is important especially when the team ships something and moves on to the next thing thinking they have 100% capacity for the new project. This is another feedback channel that PMs should be aware of.

* Engineers on support rotation are exempt from their team duties while on support. Again, this communicates what capacity the team will be operating on in the next week or two.

I learned so much about other parts of our product and APIs, how users interact with it, and most importantly (for me at least, since that was the new part) working with people in the company who are not in engineering or product!

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#179

Post by high_byte » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

tppiotrowski wrote: post #51

I’ve worked at a VC funded startup that burned $3 million for 2,000 users. I built a side project that I put on Reddit that got 5,000 hits last month. The second seems like better ROI

you spent $7.5m just last month?! on a side project!

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#180

Post by oxmane » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #151

As an employee your contribution to the world is just a little more than your wage. Which, since you take your wage home, is just a little.

I believe this is incorrect even from the simple economic perspective.

Many companies (BigTech for example) are extremely net-positive financially. This means that the value they gain per employee is much higher than what they pay them.

Taking this further - the customers in many cases (and certainly in ideal cases) are getting more value than the price they are paying (hence they agree to pay), so in a sense you could argue that the value is actually even larger. This of course scales several times when working on some infrastructure (though the effect is very not obvious).