Ask HN: Which companies have great software engineering practices? - mdlm
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cdbattags
Yikes at these answers so far.

Here's my list as a computer science geek always attempting to look top down
at the industry:

\- Cloudflare

\- Datadog

\- GitLab

\- DistroKid

\- Spotify

\- TransferWise

\- Typeform

\- Okta (maybe)

This being my short list off the top of my head. Hopefully I can edit with
some more later.

\---

Also, a note that I'm currently hiring:

I lead an international role for AB InBev called Z-Tech which is modernizing
the last-mile supply chain for all of AB InBev's massive network of subsidiary
suppliers.

That said, I'm attempting to model our engineering practices based on some
learnings from the above list of companies.

Feel free to reach out at:

christian.battaglia at ab-inbev dot com

~~~
DrScump
Christian, I took a quick look at the Careers page for ab-inbev, and the vast
majority of listed positions in the U.S. are internships and blue-collar jobs.

I was impressed, however, to see that your corporate website cookie settings
_default_ to maximum privacy!

~~~
cdbattags
You are correct, good DrScump. I pointed that out to the team immediately. I
started Monday and this being a static site without user interaction we deemed
it a non-business critical item and it's in the backlog for the next couple
weeks .

For those unaware, we're talking about the lack of an SSL cert on our new
company website.

Edit: Or did I completely misjudge that as sarcasm?

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starchild_3001
Google will definitely be on this list.

Great tooling. Great SW development culture. Strict requirements on code
quality. Mandatory testing. Mentorship and continuous reviews for writing good
code.

~~~
Nextgrid
And a culture that encourages every single engineer to make yet another chat
app.

------
cbanek
I'm not sure which angle this question is asked from, but I can think of two:

1 - you're looking for great software engineering practices to model based on
other companies, which is good.

2 - you're looking for a company to work at, and you really value software
engineering practices, which is also good.

I feel like these are two different answers though. Many companies that have
great practices do them because they are large, and have resources to
implement them, think FAANG. It is financially worth it to have great software
engineering practices to reduce friction and increase quality. These can be
really interesting and have great papers written about their sometimes open
sourced technology. The Google SRE program comes to mind.

If you're looking for a company with great software engineering practices to
work at, I think that's a lot trickier. It honestly depends on team and
culture, and I've found it varies widely, even between different leads. Even
at big companies where I've worked, some teams just have bad engineering
practices, either due to bad team culture or practical problems like lack of
time or resources. Also be careful because a lot of software engineering
practices aren't about writing code, committing code, or writing papers about
tools and frameworks - they're about personal interactions and problem solving
together. Even great software engineering practices can be perverted in a
toxic culture.

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rahulpyd1
Microsoft. I read their books. They have more principled approach towards SW.
Their languages and libraries are well designed.

~~~
thepiratesailor
Seriously, creator of well-know shitty operating system with shady business
practices?

~~~
2rsf
Yes them, in general they have a serious approach to software engineering
(though YMMV per team)

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jmeister
Goldman Sachs quants, Jane Street

~~~
rmrfstar
OCaml shops, both of them.

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ashconnor
I hear good things about Pivotal. They take pair programming seriously.

~~~
Huggernaut
I worked at Pivotal for 4 years. I think it had a great engineering culture,
with a very principled approach to XP. This may not be for everyone of course.
I learnt a lot there, it was a collection of people all wanting to become
better, rather than simply delivering software.

After the VMWare acquisition, we'll have to wait and see how much of the
culture remains.

------
probinso
nasa

