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I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

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Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#61

Post by panic »

sidlls wrote: post #58
devmunchies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything . It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.

> I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything. I find spending a few days writing a detailed, in-depth design document for a given implementation often saves weeks or more of development. In the immediate term it takes longer. In the medium to longer term a thorough design can often lead to fewer bugs, less severe bugs, and less complicated enhancement development. What you describe is what engineering is, at…

I don't think this is an argument for requiring plans, though: you can always encourage them, but in the end it should be up to the person doing the design. Otherwise you end up with the absurdity of having to write a detailed plan and wait a month for approval just to change the positioning of a button slightly.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#62

Post by sethherr »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #43
headcanon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basecamp is a small company (~50 employees) that is headed by leaders who put an uncommonly extreme level of thought into how the company should operate. From my vantage point they feel like a "philosophical experiment" in technology company leadership. They also do things that many companies would never think of doing, like cutting most of their products and focusing on only one. Friedman and DHH are great thought l…

And yet, very importantly, Basecamp is insanely crappy.

I'm curious what you mean by "crappy" - I don't find Basecamp useful for my needs, but lots of people do.

Are you saying you don't personally enjoy using it? Or that you think it's poorly engineered?

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#63

Post by sidlls »

panic wrote: post #61
sidlls wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything. I find spending a few days writing a detailed, in-depth design document for a given implementation often saves weeks or more of development. In the immediate term it takes longer. In the medium to longer term a thorough design can often lead to fewer bugs, less severe bugs, and less complicated enhancement development. What you describe is what engineering is, at…

I don't think this is an argument for requiring plans, though: you can always encourage them, but in the end it should be up to the person doing the design. Otherwise you end up with the absurdity of having to write a detailed plan and wait a month for approval just to change the positioning of a button slightly.

If the implementation outlives the implementer it most certainly shouldn't be up to him whether he does the design or not.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#64

Post by tigershark »

sidlls wrote: post #58
devmunchies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything . It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.

> I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything. I find spending a few days writing a detailed, in-depth design document for a given implementation often saves weeks or more of development. In the immediate term it takes longer. In the medium to longer term a thorough design can often lead to fewer bugs, less severe bugs, and less complicated enhancement development. What you describe is what engineering is, at…

This is the best solution when you are building a whole system from scratch. If you have to build a feature or whatever it is then it already got implicit permission from the jira sponsor or the product owner or whatever stakeholders are in charge. And for a feature I don't have to lose days writing long documents. I just think how it should work, I discuss it with the senior members of the team and with the stakeholders if needed. From that point on I just speak with the users to understand exactly what they want showing them whatever I'm building to have an early feedback. I think that is much more productive spending several days in a tight feedback cycle with your users than spending the same amount of times drafting the architecture in a document.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#65

Post by eagsalazar2 »

sethherr wrote: post #62
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, very importantly, Basecamp is insanely crappy.

I'm curious what you mean by "crappy" - I don't find Basecamp useful for my needs, but lots of people do. Are you saying you don't personally enjoy using it? Or that you think it's poorly engineered?

I think it is a UX abomination.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#66

Post by panic »

sidlls wrote: post #63
panic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is an argument for requiring plans, though: you can always encourage them, but in the end it should be up to the person doing the design. Otherwise you end up with the absurdity of having to write a detailed plan and wait a month for approval just to change the positioning of a button slightly.

If the implementation outlives the implementer it most certainly shouldn't be up to him whether he does the design or not.

What I'm saying is that depends on the nature of the code that's being written. Many small improvements can be made with a simple code change that has clear meaning on its own -- a long approval process would just make these changes less likely to happen.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#67

Post by sidlls »

panic wrote: post #66
sidlls wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the implementation outlives the implementer it most certainly shouldn't be up to him whether he does the design or not.

What I'm saying is that depends on the nature of the code that's being written. Many small improvements can be made with a simple code change that has clear meaning on its own -- a long approval process would just make these changes less likely to happen.

The point of having an approval process of any length or complexity is precisely to make changes less likely to happen ad hoc. That's a Good Thing (tm)!

Sometimes "small improvements" have ramifications outside of the context of the change (potentially significant ones). The person implementing these improvements has to understand the scope of the change (including side effects on external systems, if any), and that effort should be documented somewhere or at the very least reviewed by peers for correctness, especially for truly mission-critical or sensitive systems.

It doesn't have to be a "fill out these forms in triplicate and don't forget the new cover on your TPS report mmmkay" kind of documented effort: it's not one extreme or another.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#68

Post by sidlls »

tigershark wrote: post #64
sidlls wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything. I find spending a few days writing a detailed, in-depth design document for a given implementation often saves weeks or more of development. In the immediate term it takes longer. In the medium to longer term a thorough design can often lead to fewer bugs, less severe bugs, and less complicated enhancement development. What you describe is what engineering is, at…

This is the best solution when you are building a whole system from scratch. If you have to build a feature or whatever it is then it already got implicit permission from the jira sponsor or the product owner or whatever stakeholders are in charge. And for a feature I don't have to lose days writing long documents. I just think how it should work, I discuss it with the senior members of the team and with the stakehol…

How do you get from "I just think how it should work" to "discuss it with the senior members"? You've got notes, at the very least, that you've jotted down about the proposed changes. Guess what: that's the draft of a design document! If you've taken any reasonably thoughtful approach you'll have just a little more work to make it formal, invite formal comments and feedback, etc. Not weeks "drafting an architecture" document, just days (or possibly hours, if it's a small change). That's a small price in time to pay for such a big dividend down the road.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#70

Post by devmunchies »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #54
devmunchies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything . It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.

I just left a place where nobody writes design documentation. I requested that several teams write documentation for their tasks and they refused. As your company grows from small-sized to medium-sized, your technical processes need to grow, too.

I agree with documentation, but detailed "plans" are different. Its a doc about what my product/feature/quarter/sprint will entail and almost never matches up to reality because things change. Documentation, on the other hand, it written after or during the code and has nothing to do with planning.
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