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Tools you’d miss if you left a company

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#81

Post by geofft »

tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

I'd wager that internal tooling that takes 5+ months to get up to speed on doesn't count as good internal tooling. :)

That is, I expect the 5+ months is more how long it takes to find a good project and ramp up on it and deliver something of value while figuring out the social processes, not how long it takes to learn how to use the tools. I would not expect that developers just aren't writing code for their first four months.

For instance - I am generally under the impression that Google interns get something done (not necessarily a lot, but they do complete a project) in a 2-4 month internship, and they use the same tools as everyone else.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#82

Post by zhte415 »

I've recently branched out on my own. Never had great tooling, was in government or a F50 where chains of approvals for the slightest changes were cursed by all, including those doing the approving. But, there are some organisational things I miss:

Having someone/a team to ensure network uptime is fantastic and that have the scale and experience to anticipate and mitigate potential trouble before it comes up. Likewise all infra in general. Having a legal department to ask "Can I do this?" where often the answer may be "We don't know" but that's still an answer. A security force, property, accounting, providing peace of mind. Someone making sure the projector's setup, tiny things that add up quickly.

There are downsides to this, such 'organisation' often grinds things to a glacial pace, hence why I'm breaking out by myself now, but... not tooling, I can take care of that myself and I'm incredibly thankful for the SaaS ecosystem that would have made this impossible even a decade ago, or at least very inconvenient with 3rd party consultants providing such services for high fees and little more. There are a lot of things an organisation provides that we can take for granted, and having that experience provides a great bonus in expectations of robustness not only in technology but in all processes of a business. Tooling is, in the end, in the mind.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#83

Post by pjmlp »

The only thing I miss are teammates and some of the office moments we had together, but those luckily survive employers and we get to meet in other contexts.

I never been attached to work tools, or technology fads, things are ephemeral, best practices of today are the legacy codebase that no one wants to work on tomorrow.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#84

Post by pjmlp »

tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

In most European countries you have a probation time from 3 to 6 months, depending on the country, until your permanent contract is considered effective.

It is expected that a new employee takes that much to actually be part of company culture.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#85

Post by idclip »

tmpz22 wrote: post #53

Doesn't it take months to train new developers in these mystical internal tools? I remember hearing specifically that Google expects 5+ months of training until a developer is productive. How many companies can afford to spend ~50k+/hire on on-boarding ((100k/yr * 5 months) + benefits)? What is the opportunity cost of holding so many people in training mode for this time period? Different companies have different pro…

Its amortised - and well underpaid considering how much rott profit bigCorp makes which is in the Billions which even if you had 50,000 employees and gave each one a 10,000 bonus for that year it wouldn’t dent your bottom line that badly to make you sweatZ

Dont under estimate the profitability of a dev. I-make my employer three times as much as he pays to keep me, the industry really misses that.

Let them train the juniors, and solve their issues. Its worth it.

I think the main issue is fad-tooling. It is annoying and often not needed. Its also a complex issue really... what about saving educational costs ?

Say my devs want k8s. Dows my scale allow me to send them to confs, or do we go and shred our monilith? Maybe start a new project? Stuff like that. Its not an easy problem to solve.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#86

Post by lifeisstillgood »

hashhar wrote: post #76
paulie_a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be an elitism when it comes to working for faang. there are a ton of people that have zero interest in building advertising engines or living in the Bay area. Quite frankly my min salary for having to live there sacrifice working on something interesting with be mid to high 6 figures so I could save and move the hell away after a few years. I'd consider it a life sacrifice to endure the bay area and cu…

I agree with your points but just want to add my anecdotal experience here from India that not all companies with great internal tooling are unicorns. They generally tend to be the slow but steadily moving companies who take their time and think about sustainability rather than 10x growth.

Yes. And I might suggest that the unicorns with great tooling just lucked out and has engineers who built great stuff irrespective of management

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#87

Post by bullen »

I solved this problem 10 years ago by building my own open-source stack and only working with that stack: https://github.com/tinspin

You should build your own tools, that you bring with you, that is what all artisans have done for all time.

No reason to change that just because you can use the newest buss-word every week.

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#88

Post by zepolen »

bgdnyxbjx wrote: post #66

This topic is one of the primary reasons I enjoy working at MS these days. The tech stack is full of OSS or industry standard tools, not a bunch of internal NIH things. My current stack is: React, Node, Kubernetes, Linux (for dev and deploy), Git for sc, GitHub, vs code. I can’t even think of some internal tool that I depend on at the moment.

Github is open source?

Re: Tools you’d miss if you left a company

#90

Post by wink »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #58
wink wrote: post #45

This whole premise falls completely flat if you've only ever worked at small and/or young companies: > but which didn't exist on the outside world. > You're not allowed to include things you or your friends built If you work for a service provider, you probably have zero to not much internal tooling, because you're usually solving the customer's problems, not your company's. When I did, we open sourced everything coo…

Counterpoint: Rackspace. The line internally was "service, not servers". They developed CORE which was their customer tracking and computer provisioning system. When RightNowWeb stopped working for them, they built the CATS ticketing system on top of that. Those were nice tools which worked quite well most of the time. They worked in any browser on any OS, unlike some of the ActiveX-only stuff they tried to replace i…

Point taken. Rackspace at least seems to be technical enough to be able to put engineers first. :)

I've not had so many jobs at product companies, but I've never seen this even when I was doing consulting-type work and came around a bit, and many companies (at least here in Germany) being decades old are simply not digital-first. Maybe the mechanical engineers building the (non-computer) hardware have enough clout, but software is really often not more than a cost factor. I guess the bigger and older the company the more likely that everyone hates internal tooling, and you were focusing on the exceptions, whereas my life was the opposite. Waiting for an internal server just to deploy your shiny new thing could take months.

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