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

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squiguy7
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.

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eecks
Why do you have so many reverts?

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squiguy7
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.

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colund
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.

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BooneJS
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.

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eecks
What about your customers?

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

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muzani
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.

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

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muzani
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.

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mbfg
remove 80% of management

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a_lifters_life
hallelujah !

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starshadowx2
1\. Better inter-department communication.

2\. More well-defined policies and procedures.

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eecks
How would you do 1?

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starshadowx2
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.

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

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

Is this not standard?

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

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eecks
Then who are the "others"?

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taprun
I'd have them focus on achieving strategic goals.

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

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askafriend
Probably tactical goals.

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

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

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tmaly
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.

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arnold_palmur
Fewer meetings.

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twunde
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.

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eecks
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.

