How would you improve the company you work for? | Hacker News Reader

How would you improve the company you work for?

13 pointseecks33 comments

If you could do one (or a few) things, what would you do to improve the company you work for?

If you wanna really help, write documentation and remove legacy. At the same time push for processes and ways of working which ensure this happens timely.

I would automate our deployments as they take up a lot of my time ensuring things went smoothly. Also, our git workflow leaves something to be desired. We have way too many "revert revert revert" commits.

Why do you have so many reverts?

I luckily have not fallen into that habit. I am saying that our cross-team repositories have many of those commits because we don't value feature branches enough.

Automated deployments are worth spending time on. A good deployment/release process frees up dev time, makes it easier to debug production issues and removes a whole class of bugs. Most languages/frameworks have some prebuilt tools to do deployments. This is one of the few things I would spend personal time on doing because I know how much time this frees up

I would remove management and replace them with new reasonable folks who understand software development and valuing customers.

I would also create more interesting products.

Hrm, tough question. I heard this advice many years ago, though:

What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

What about your customers?

Some other company can start up to handle them, or they can move to competitors.

Unemployed now.

But normally I just tell the senior guys what's wrong. As a month-old employee, I once emailed the COO at 2 AM telling them we could use the technology to rate sites and make millions.

COO was not impressed but he liked employees speaking up and encouraged me to email him more.

Did the company end up making millions because of your email?

No, the company never made millions.

I did quit the company and did a startup based around one of those ideas. I didn't make millions either.

However, some of the ideas we brought up, like news aggregation and recipe aggregation were done by startups valued at millions.

remove 80% of management

hallelujah !

1. Better inter-department communication.

2. More well-defined policies and procedures.

How would you do 1?

Well for some background, I'm an IT guy at a public library.

We often get requests, but no/little reasoning behind them. We also don't get to meet (officially) with other departments and discuss what they want/need from us, other than maybe a few minutes to chat here and there. There's also no interdepartmental "suggestions box" sort of idea. I'd love to share ideas with and from other staff members. Connecting that with point #2 above, we have a committee that controls all policy and procedures, it's not the departments themselves that get to make it. As an IT department we have no onboarding/offboarding policy+procedure or a well defined updated policy for our public computers.

I've been trying to push something like Slack to my manager but he's fairly apathetic to the idea. Even just more of an ability to suggest and get suggestions would be awesome.

Flexible working hours, less rebasing, try to get others to adhere to coding standards, clearer/more detailed project specs/designs etc

> try to get others to adhere to coding standards, clearer/more detailed project specs/designs

Is this not standard?

It should be, but tight deadlines/changing requirements etc seem to justify the 'as long as it works' mentality for some.

If by "standard" you mean "something every software developer on the planet wishes for" then I'd say so!

Then who are the "others"?

> less rebasing

As in git rebase? What problems are you having with that?

I'd have them focus on achieving strategic goals.

What do they focus on at the moment if not strategic goals?

Probably tactical goals.

better training systems. it takes a long time to get new hires up to speed. anything that can improve this is worth it

That's a good idea. Do you have idea for a generic strategy for training or is it case-by-case basis?

most of the time it is as simple as having an internal twiki with a writeup that includes an overview and how to do some particular process.

Other times you need a screen video with voice overlay.

It comes down to the amount of complexity involved.

Even having a dictionary of terms specific to the product or a simple legend that maps out where things are helps.

Fewer meetings.

How many meetings do you have a day and do you feel that you need to be in all of them? And does this include only formal meetings or informal ones as well? I've started to limit my meetings to a maximum of 3 a day and usually 1-2. I've also cut daily standups to 2 days a week, although I suspect that 3x a week may be better fit.

Cutting standups to twice a week would be ideal but it was a big thing to bring in agile in my place so it seems like it would undo a lot of good work.

Fewer meetings isn't the answer, fewer but more effective meetings is.

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