Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

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I guess I'm in the minority here as a SWE but I find all this ongoing documentation about engineering expectations, culture, processes, etc. exhausting. I would not be excited to be onboarded somewhere that spends so much time and energy thinking and talking about a _proposal_ to document best practices and industry standards.

Perhaps I'm missing context but it all sounds so vague and low-impact that I just can't imagine spending so much time and energy engaging in these thought experiments on documentation improvements.

I understand the repo is for developer documentation but it took a long time of poking around to figure out what the product even was. Eventually I stumbled upon this blog post which seemed to anticipate my confusion and flat-out said: "For those unfamiliar, Artsy is a fine art marketplace." All the meta analysis is striking me as very distracted. Maybe its just the nature of the content but it seems like an inordinate amount of engineering resources are spent on process management, planning, and iterating on documentation thereof.

I'm tentatively with you.

Reading this brings back some bad memories from working at a place that had something similar going, trying to be very open/transparent and deliberate about culture and processes. That culture and processes that existed on paper was about bottom-up power structures and so forth.

From that context, I can understand how people become very motivated to engage with these kinds of documents and have these kinds of discussions. It feels very empowering when suddenly you get to be a part of these conversations that are normally only had a few pay grades above yours. It's also a welcome change of scenery from the daily drudgery of a software engineering IC who lives breathes and works code, and nothing but code.

The problem, at the place where I worked, was that all of this amounted to nothing more than an "opium for the masses", and the informal/true power structures that lay behind all the decisions that actually mattered was very different from what existed "on paper".

So, all of this pretense of bottom-up-ness provides a motivation boost for new employees for maybe a year or two. But you can't hide the truth for longer than that. Afterwards, if you were naive enough to fall for it, you feel you've been manipulated and abused, and that's not a nice feeling. Also, the whole thing can take on a cult-like dynamic.

Artsy absolutely borrowed its cultural elements from the USSR, товарищ Стаханов! :)

The proof is in the pudding.

Artsy never had a large engineering team, and yet, it was deeply respected. (Maybe still is, I've not been an IC for a while.)

For me personally, the engineering team's reputation was a major draw for me to work there. And while I managed engineers at Artsy, I could see how much it helped immensely with recruiting.

And it's not just talk, we published many of our apps and libraries. Some of these, like Ezel and Fresnel, have been pretty influential. Many Artsy engineers also developed projects on the side, which were piloted in production within the company, like Danger/Peril.

No environment works for everyone, so if it sounds exhausting, maybe you wouldn't be into it. But for me, I found it nourishing, challenging, and productive.

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