Ask HN: What are some dev culture tricks you have in your company?

4 points·funerr··3 comments

- How do you maintain teams? - Tech debt? - Motivation? Or any other trick others may not know?

Socially, the easiest improvement you can make is to banish the word "just" from your vocabulary. It's very easy to fall victim to: in code review, technical discussions, retrospectives. "Why don't we just X instead of Y?" as opposed to "Is there a reason why we X instead of Y?". "Just" leaves a lot of room to come across as condescending or aggressive, to be misunderstood, and more. There are many things you can do to foster a fruitful professional environment, but this change has a huge payoff for the effort made.

I kinda agree, but because most of the times I've seen using that form ("why don't we just do/use X instead?") It was from somebody that had read that $bigcompany has done/used X for their use case, but they had no direct experience themselves -- meaning that they had no idea about the kind of problems that X would bring and/or ACTUALLY solve.

HEY, WHY DON'T WE JUST END WORLD HUNGER?

Hmm it reminds me of the culture of fostering changes that are wise" in a company, but on the other hand not being arrogant.

I always wrote in a notebook the things that we're weird or off in a new place and then after 3-4 months I would bring the issues that I still saw relevant. That criticism was much more welcomed.

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