Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

It'd be great to read about all the things this internal DevX org has been able to improve after some time.

Internal developer experience is extremely important. One codebase I worked on used to have a 24-hour, nondeterministic CI run. A teammate brought that time down to ~45 minutes (it's a big codebase with a ton of tests) and made it deterministic. Everything got better:

* Faster turnaround time for external contributions (it's OSS)

* Ability to be relied on to get a critical fix in and tested in under an hour

* Much faster local build times

* Removed reliance on some old busted internal infrastructure so we could use much better, different infrastructure, and make the build/test runs the same across any OS rather than rely on windows so much

* Everyone was happier in general

If we could have gotten a full CI run down from 45 minutes to 15 minutes, that'd be great. And there was still quite a lot of technical debt in the tests themselves, since they should be able to run a lot faster than they did. But even with that in mind, the difference was night and day.

I would love to find a full-time position of just doing this kind of work. Nearly every place I've worked had some hacked together system that mostly worked, but wasn't enough of a pain for management to dedicate time to. I'd have to steal time away from the feature mill to make some little improvement, and everyone would agree that, yes, it did make things a easier for the devs, but no, we can't just have you out there working on things willy-nilly when there are features to churn out!

We carved a role for that at my current startup (dev team ~10 people). We maintain a technical roadmap, which includes platform improvements, dev tooling, infra, etc. Other team members jump in to help out if there's something they're particularly excited about or can do well, but one person is dedicated to this work.

Most large companies have teams for this. I've found that the earlier in a company's life you add someone dedicated to this the better.

Are you hiring? ;)

We're hiring for this role in the UK and parts of the EU: https://boards.greenhouse.io/griffin/jobs/5252742003

PE at Meta is a bit like this. When people ask what it is, my best description is "SWE that focuses on non-functional requirements" (called 'better engineering' internally)

What does PE stand for?

Production Engineer https://engineering.fb.com/category/production-engineering/

A lot of companies have this role! EngProd at Google, Eng Efficiency at Roblox (let me know if you're interested), and I'm sure plenty of others as well.

I'm certainly interested! If you wouldn't mind emailing me at iam@zachgarwood.com, I'd love to learn more about this type of position.

Just sent you an email. :)

I created this role at my current firm. While I don't know your circumstances, here's what I did to get it funded:

* Got buy-in from my coworkers

* Collected data on how much wasted dev time there was

* Collected data on what we would gain (be specific: time to live, faster release cadence, more releases, whatever is real and appropriate)

* Collected data on what clients would gain (errors more likely to be caught before release, more features, etc)

* Present to boss, refine message, keep going up the ladder

MVP for a PoC, in my opinion:

* Come up with project goals as a team

* Sane branching strategy. Can be done at the team level if needed by making a team-level "main"

* Standalone (meaning no-deploy, "devops" framework independent) unit testing system. Use the one that comes with your language if it doesn't stink. Add unit tests to new code.

* Basic build & test system. TeamCity is easy to deploy, configure, and maintain on-prem, Jenkins supports complex use cases. Automatically run on commit to the team-level main. Allow devs to run on-demand for their feature branches. Use other systems (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, etc) if you have the budget.

Keep it simple. Don't worry about pull requests and approval chains at this point. Automatically build it, test it, and put it someplace it could be deployed.

This kind of stuff is right my ally and I'd love to connect with someone at Amazon about how they're tackling these problems. Does anyone know someone that would like to grab coffee to chat about it?

Your note is unlikely to yield a result. It does end with a call to action but doesn’t explain why someone should respond.

It’s nice and short but needs one more sentence in the middle. This is up your alley — great! But do you want to compare notes? Do you want to get hired? What’s in it for someone from Amazon to respond (or harder, since you’re asking for an intro: why would someone send this to a friend?)

I get a lot of messages like this and usually ignore them because they lack any reason to respond.

At almost every company I’ve worked for I would estimate that if I worked on or made changes like you have described the benefit to cost ratio would be multiples larger than any of the actual features I worked on. This was always perplexing until I realized my assumption that managers were given a pool of money and were judged on the ROI they generated on that money was false.

Hmm the title made me believe this was to fix the use-and-throw-workers culture. Didn't realise it was about fixing tooling. Wonder if anything else was done to fix the disregard for wellbeing and safety?

Orthogonal concerns I think. The pessimist in me says they won't be doing much, but I think they did announce something about making working conditions better for the bulk of their workforce in warehouses, but I won't be holding my breath.

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