No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees • Hacker News Board

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#471

Post by cutemonster » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

femto wrote: post #263

paxys wrote: post #39

I work for a large SaaS company with hundreds of engineers and a very healthy revenue. It's widely acknowledged that the company would continue to function exactly as it is now for a very long time if they fired 95% of the staff. Heck stability and uptime would probably improve due to fewer deployments/no new feature adds. So the graph with declining expenses and increasing revenue isn't at all surprising. The proble…

> you'd be powerless to compete with them. A substantial potion of the part-timers could temporarily increase their working hours, possibly doubling or tripling the rate of progress overnight. The company of part-timers effectively has an additional prequalified workforce waiting in the wings for emergencies. The company would then have a period of time to put arrangements in place to bring each person's hours back t…

Assuming the part timers don't have double jobs (which is unlikely if they work about 30 h for you, at least then you're likely the more important one to them)

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#472

Post by lostcolony » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #449

lostcolony wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that doesn't logically scan. If it doesn't imply excess complexity nor effort, it's not premature to optimize it. Why write the inefficient algorithm when you remember the efficient one, and it's no more effort? But if an optimization will imply excess complexity or effort, and you aren't sure it's needed, it's premature. Worrying about load when you have 3 users is almost assuredly premature. Not to say…

Premature optimization is extremely subjective. You can’t actually make any decisions based on it because the data you need to know if it’s premature is in the future. Conversely we know you can’t make an unscalable design scalable after the fact. You may be able to do micro optimizations of hotspots or fix the egregiously bad parts but you’ve painted yourself into a corner. The good news is that most scalable archit…

Yep; the quote was originally about in line optimizations, like profiling to avoid cache misses and tightening inner loops and such. Nowadays, with your main concern being service throughput, the bigger concern is your architecture, not your implementation.

Which is where the confusion is, possibly. Architectures you can't easily undo; that loop or choice of data structure you can. So it's generally worth giving careful consideration towards your architecture (it's not premature to ask "What happens when this one thing becomes two?")); it's generally not worth giving the thought towards your implementation.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#473

Post by 1123581321 » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #383

1123581321 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say if the answer to your questions were yes, yes, and large enough? Why isn't there enough high-value work? One of their organizing principles seems to be that it's okay to do something that seems fun or that creators are asking for, so why should that stop being a guide for people who enjoy the work they do and enjoy listening to customers?

> What would you say if the answer to your questions were yes, yes, and large enough? Then their model isn't replicable as a "better way of working" in general. Most companies with 50+ headcount aren't going to suddenly slash their headcounts down to 25 so that they can assert the cultural benefits that can be achieved with a small workforce and clear messaging that exponential growth is neither expected nor desired.…

Companies aren’t motivated to replicate it, rather.

I would agree though that if a lesson is repeatedly refused, the pedagogy must change.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#474

Post by grapehut » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

fwip wrote: post #356

grapehut wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend in Vancouver had lung xray show up something weird and the doctor scheduled her for an MRI. The appointment was in 7 months. Instead she got the MRI in a private clinic for a pretty reasonable cost and came back with the results for her doctor. If that's not indicative of something broken, then I don't know what to tell you.

What do you think the odds were that it was something that would cause problems in fewer than seven months, or that if she experienced symptoms that they would move her up in line? Genuinely asking, since I don't know any details about her situation or much about lung ailments.

I don't know the specifics, but there's also the mental cost of the doctor seeing something concerning enough that warrants an MRI and waiting 7 months just for the test; praying nothing gets worse in the meantime.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#475

Post by saddington » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

really enjoyed reading this. and providing some light edits on the original. what a pleasure.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#476

Post by bumby » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #407

bumby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, you have a process that you follow in your own work though? There are formal codified processes and there are informal tribal ones. Often when I hear people have disdain for processes, it’s usually they don’t like someone else’s process. Unfortunately, standardized processes tend to become more necessary as systems get more complicated in order to ensure an operation becomes fault tolerant by not being relian…

> There are formal codified processes and there are informal tribal ones True but misleading. A lot of the time the difference is simply doing a bunch of process activities versus not doing them. E.g. imagine team A develops software in a more-or-less sensible way, and team B spends 80% of their time doing the same things that team A does and 20% of their time estimating how long those things are going to take. It se…

I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing. What you’re talking about is the difference between value-added processes vs busy work disguised as risk mitigation. Both are processes but of differing value.

Pointing out bad processes does not refute the point that processes exist and they exist because somebody is trying to mitigate a risk. It’s just a comment about the effectiveness of the process design.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#477

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #355

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, you can buy medical insurance from the same mega corps that offer it through Fortune 500 companies... its just not subsidized by your employer so you pay larger premiums.

They might be the same corporations offering coverage, but the plans are different. It isn't just the employer subsidization that you need to factor in, but that you as an individual will never be able to negotiate the terms of the plans you're offered, nor will you be able to negotiate for group plan rates.

I didn’t say anything about pricing.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#478

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

dkdk8283 wrote: post #21

CydeWeys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, hard pass. If I'm gonna be a 1099 contractor my rate will need to be very high (roughly $500/hr). Otherwise I'm sticking with my FTE job. And I'd need to be able to pick up more than the 20 hours per week than this guy will give me too, so I'd need multiple clients.

20 hrs a week @ 500 is 520k/y. you only need one client.

Once you add in the cost of all the added contractor taxes and loss of benefits like healthcare, this would be a bit of a paycut for me. I'd want more hours.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#479

Post by theptip » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #37

dkdk8283 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love something like this: I loathe the bullshit factory process has become.

Process is one of those things you have whether you think about it or not. It's up to you collectively to decide if it is BS or not, too heavy, too light, etc. I'm not suggesting everyone has the influence to change process much at the place they work, but they idea that there is a single "thing" called process and some places have it and some don't is just dangerously misleading. It is true that process tends to nat…

Agreed. One additional source of disconnect in discussions is that the appropriate amount of process varies depending on what your goals are, your team composition (seniority, personality, communication styles, etc.), your regulatory environment, and myriad other factors.

If you're early-stage Facebook or most consumer-facing recreational apps, "move fast and break stuff" with minimal process is great, since the potential downsides of pushing a bug to production are usually far outweighed by the value of iterating quickly. You can trust your developers to do the right thing, because for the most part developers will, and on the rare occasion that someone doesn't, the consequences are not severe.

If you're Signal, or a FinTech company, or NASA, or a medical device company, then you need significantly more robust process to ensure that appropriate quality control, chain of custody, etc. is being applied at each stage of the process. Trust alone no longer works because even though it will get you the result you need _most_ of the time, that is not a high enough success rate.

Put more generally, more/improved process is required when you cannot tolerate a given failure rate, and in general you trade off throughput against failure rate.

Having said all of this, many companies cargo-cult Google and add process when they don't need to raise the quality bar, or implement poor process that fails to increase the quality bar; these would be examples of bullshit process as the GP puts it. However I feel like we're often not presented enough context to disambiguate appropriate process from BS.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#480

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #38

CydeWeys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, hard pass. If I'm gonna be a 1099 contractor my rate will need to be very high (roughly $500/hr). Otherwise I'm sticking with my FTE job. And I'd need to be able to pick up more than the 20 hours per week than this guy will give me too, so I'd need multiple clients.

I've had some contracting experience as a freelance dev. In my experience even smaller companies (not Google, FB etc.) tend to have high budgets. I ended up with gigs anywhere between $200-300/hr, but that was 40 hrs week. Of course you have to pay for insurance, get your own retirement plan and a bunch of other logistics stuff, but it can make you a lot of money.

Unfortunately that would be a large paycut for me and it would also cost a lot of stability. I wasn't making up the $500/hr figure; that's what I would actually need for this to be worth considering switching to.