
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company? - kalimatas
Hi! I work at a mid-sized tech company as a Software Engineer. There are, probably, tons of things we can improve in our processes, infrastructure, technologies, etc. But sometimes it&#x27;s hard to see the place with most impact from within, especially if you are pretty long in the company. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m looking for some inspiration.<p>So, how did you improve your company? By that I mean: processes, tech stack, optimization, etc.
======
kempbellt
I left.

The people were decent and the product fine, but my personal interest in the
company went from "eh, sounds kind of interesting" to "why am I here...?" very
quickly, and every day felt like an uphill battle to not rub my disinterest
off on my coworkers.

 _Looking_ for inspiration is a mind trap that is best avoided. Inspiration
comes when you are silent and you listen to yourself (and those around you).
Keep an open mind. What you feel inspired to do may take you in a very
different direction than you expect. Maybe the company doesn't need a new tech
stack optimization, but would benefit greatly from a BBQ in the park - also no
better time to get to know the people you work with better than when they are
not sitting at a desk.

If you want to improve your company, _listen_. That's all there is to it.
Listen to the needs of the people you work along side and then answer those
needs. You are a part of a small tribe and that tribe values and benefits from
active listeners and naturally inspired contributors.

Forceful inspiration typically has an opposite effect, so be mindful of your
underlying drive.

~~~
pmiller2
> I left.

You know, this is one thing I need to learn: when to bail out on a situation
that's beyond repair. I have a bit of a mental block about quitting without
anything lined up, and job searching is just annoying enough for me to not
want to do it without the incentive of needing to replace a paycheck. But,
there are definitely a couple times in my career that I should have left long
before I did, and I believe things would have worked out much better for me if
I had.

I'm interested on anyone's thoughts on "when it's time to leave."

~~~
mdifrgechd
It's a good question and probably depends more on your personal circumstances
than the job. I have often felt like leaving when I didn't agree with some
core aspect of my org (product, culture) but I try to be pragmatic and accept
that I am paid to be there and although globally I want to do something more
fulfilling, it is better to lo cally tough it out and wait until I'm well
positioned to make the next move. So maybe one thought is to ask yourself what
is missing for you to be able to make a move, and try and work on that.

Incidentally, at my last job, I realized that what I was lacking to land the
next job I wanted was also what I was lacking to be successful in my then
current job. In the end I made progress towards remedying that, moved to a new
job but also left on a high note as a result of my personal improvement.

------
notdonspaulding
My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is
looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is:

Take out the garbage.

By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like
to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any
way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your
management or your peers. Take that task off of their plate (most folks will
gladly give it to you) and do it for a while, and then see if there's a way to
eliminate it, automate it, or otherwise improve the experience of doing the
job.

Especially as a software person, the amount of power you have to take little
parts of the business that are rough and make them smooth is tremendous.
Taking out the garbage is just an easy way to get started helping out.

I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase.
Find the little problems that everyone else is ignoring because they have
bigger things to worry about and tackle those for them. Beyond being helpful
to the team, it helps you learn the territory of the codebase more quickly
than you otherwise would.

~~~
dominotw
> Take out the garbage.

I don't agree. You don't get promotions/pay hikes/bonuses for taking garbage
out. Those are given to ppl who ship products directly bringing in tthe
revenue.

> I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase.

I agree with this.

~~~
pmiller2
I'm on a project right now that's essentially all "taking out the garbage." I
sort of feel like a garden gnome, fixing minor little issues here and there,
but, this is all being done with institutional support, from my manager on up,
so I have no doubt that I'll be rewarded appropriately for it. One of the
bigger components of the project is going to end up saving one of our client
teams about 9 man hours a day. In the end, I think that's a good enough result
to justify a little garbage hauling.

~~~
dominotw
> this is all being done with institutional support, from my manager on up,

I would be very careful with this. I made many mistakes like this. Unless you
know this personally, I wouldn't trust this if its coming only from your
manager and one level up.

People who control purse strings just don't care about garbage collection.

Even CEO should understand and value the project you are working on.

------
DavidPeiffer
Little different swing on things, but I'm an industrial engineer focused on
improving factory performance. And a lot of that is simply building and
refreshing reports. Often Excel, sometimes Access SQL, and occasionally R
scripts. It's not particularly glamorous, but it truly does drive business
decisions which neat to see.

Every time I start a new role, I write up detailed standard work for the
processes and make notes of what can be improved. As time allows, I make those
improvements. I also keep rough track of how long each update takes, so if I
have 20 minutes before a meeting I can start and finish a task. This helps me
on performance reviews because I can objectively say "I removed 1 FTE worth of
report updating, creating ongoing cost savings".

The productivity gains are amazing. Over time, reports become fully automated.
Logging improves, helping trace down errors. What used to be 8 hours per week
of report updating becomes 20 minutes of validating data.

It's 10x easier to take a week off if your tasks are documented. I routinely
write up a process then make another team member do it, so I can find the
weakesses and fix them. This helps the bus number, and makes it easy for
someone to cover for me if needed.

------
Breefield
Prior to my joining the team, our homemade migration tool used sequential
versioning numbers for filenames, i.e. 001_migration_name.sql,
002_migration_name.sql.

As our team was grew, it was very common to publish a PR, and right before
merging realizing you had a conflict with someone else who'd merged to master
ahead of you, using your sequence number.

I made a small change to the system, replacing the sequence numbers with unix
timestamps and added some previously non-existant tests to cover the migration
utility.

Unfortunately the subsequent PR took weeks to be approved by the team/eng
leads because there was a lot of hand-wringing about this change. Once it was
merged though we never thought about it again, it worked exactly as I'd hoped
and nobody ever had to make a final "fix migration name" commit again.

~~~
eloff
I used to lose so much time to that, imagine coupling it with multi week code
reviews (another process that needed to be fixed). I'm actually building a
migration tool as part of a web framework (free time project). I'm going to
"steal" this idea of yours if you don't mind.

To play devil's advocate, probably part of the reason for the sequence number
approach is so if that PR that merged ahead of you conflicts with your
migration you're more likely to notice if you have to rename it. I don't think
that's particularly common though, and the problem should surface when the CI
build runs your migrations prior to permitting the merge to master ( a good CI
setup requires you to pull master into your PR if it's out of date, which
ensures the combination didn't break things.)

------
heymijo
Listened to people.

The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of
complaining. No leadership from people in management positions.

A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to
build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective.

Then, we started talking to colleagues.

"What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?"

Listening alone, letting these people know their voices were heard by anyone,
went a long way in building relationships, alignment, and getting things done.

Then we took what we were hearing, developed an initiative, pitched it to
leadership. They rubber stamped it without really paying attention or asking
questions.

We executed.

People were shocked. Their voices had been heard, and something had been done
to address common concerns they had. I don't know how to measure or describe
this impact, but it's the most significant thing I have ever accomplished.

~~~
awinder
What was the after story, if you don't mind going further? This is super
interesting, I'm curious what happened with you/the company afterwards or on a
longer horizon

~~~
heymijo
Sure. This was a school/school district. We thought big, and started small.
Our initial initiative was for K-6 only. In the following years, this spread
to both the middle school, and then the high school. Driven by demand from the
teachers themselves.

The modern era of education reform goes back to the Soviets launching Sputnik,
so 60 years. It has been omnipresent reform efforts in K-12 education since
then. Lots of change, little improvement.

We created not only a durable change, but a positive one that is still pointed
in the same direction five years after we got this off the ground.

There's more detail about what we did in a reply below you.

------
cpitman
My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy
changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for
some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves
coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a
few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off
of work and reduce errors/surprises.

Another example is really basic automation. You probably have people/teams
around you that are not developers. They probably are spending time doing
really basic repetitive tasks. One team I work with regularly would take a
spreadsheet, then for each row create a folder and docs in Google Drive. I
wrote them a Google Apps script that could do the task with a click. Not quite
as impactful as the checklists, but each script like that saves someone a
couple days a year.

~~~
ravedave5
I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I
think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip
the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one
as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.

~~~
atulatul
The primary benefit of automating small/ (mundane?) things is that it gets rid
of a some of the cognitive load.

For example, I wrote some shell scripts, gradle/TC plugins, when my company
moved to kubernetes/openshift. We did not have devops, paas standardization
then. The scripts are now getting used in many projects in a couple of
departments. And it was just word of mouth adaption. It is as not very fancy
stuff nor is it a company wide standard. But it is useful and it hides/gets
rid of complexity which new projects/developers no longer have to worry about.
Danger area: trying to be too generic, parameterize everything, you end up
with frameworks and processes. As a senior dev, I generally aim at solving my
problem and if possible making the solution usable in the immediate vicinity.
Keeping it minimal and simple makes it usable for others when the problem is
not exact match.

------
ticmasta
I'm a Dev Manager but started as a mid-senior developer at my current company
(now about 350 people). We grew a lot by acquisition and one thing I noticed
was many "cultural silos" that made it hard to build a shared, unifying
identity. Myself and another developer worked to try and address this with a
lot of small things focused on cutting across teams & groups: a book club-
style bi-weekly discussion, "Tech Talks" from across the teams to diverse
audiences, some hackathons and making online conferences (MS, AWS, Google,
Etc) into company events. Literally things that "make people spend time with
people outside their direct team". It's been pretty successful and pushed lots
of new initiatives in some unexpected areas.

So my advice would be to look for a broader area where you see a gap or
failing, and then look for ways to address this that don't need a huge
investment of people or resources; guerilla activities FTW! If you can show
some success, you can then pursue as appropriate/desired...

~~~
mtippett
I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found
the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving
about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were
so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the
engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try
a new iteration next time.

What made your attempt successful, in your opinion.

~~~
ipnon
I don't get paid to give tech presentations. Preparing for them would affect
the work that I am responsible for. So giving tech presentations would
ultimately make me look worse at my company. This explains the passiveness at
my company.

~~~
troycarlson
This is my observation across several companies/teams. The options seem to be
either sacrifice "real work" time to make a good presentation or make a half-
ass presentation and have people criticize the low quality.

Do people here think "no prep" presentations could work? Where it's agreed
that nobody will do any prep but simply talk about something they're
knowledgeable about? Or share their screen and walk through their current
project? Everyone in the audience knows that the presenter wasn't "allowed" to
prepare so the expectations are lower, but people still get exposed to other
engineers' work.

~~~
user5994461
In medium-large companies, work and promotion are about showing off. Even if
you do real work it's more important to be noticed than to do it.

In that light, I don't understand how you and the OP could consider that it's
preventing to do real work. Powerpoint is the real work. And it shouldn't be
difficult to justify spending 1-2 days on it, with 100 people assisting to the
presentation as witnesses, unless your manager really doesn't want you to give
presentations (it's showing off your team so it's good for your manager too).

I get it that it's not part of the engineer mindset of course. If I have to
give some advice to strong engineers who do good work, that would be to take
credit for your work.

~~~
mtippett
That captures a lot of what I was trying to capture. However, the intent was
for people to cover work that they are doing (lowering prep time, immediate
understanding), tech they are researching (again lower prep time, immediate
understanding).

A lot of technical presentations we did are _no_ different than what you would
do explaining tech within your team. A few diagrams, and understanding of the
core of the tech. Scaling to more than the safety of the team is really where
I think people would rather have 3 meetings with 3 different teams to do a
knowledge transfer than take the risk of being in front of collecting 5-10
teams worth of engineers.

Looking over the comments, the real gap I expect is the lack of peer
management support and encouragement. And expectation that mentoring and
teaching peers should be part of the leadership expectations. My view are is
the the strongest engineers are the ones that accelerate and multiple the work
of themselves and their peers, but there are a lot people who subscribe to the
"army of one" 10x engineer philosophy.

------
nicbou
I implement a few changes wherever I work:

\- Commit messages must include a ticket number (or a keyword like "hotfix").
This is enforced by a commit hook that's bundled with the project.

\- Ticket templates that encourage clear tickets. A ticket should always
explain why it must be done. It should also contain enough information for any
team member to judge its priority, or start work on it.

\- Any relevant discussion about a ticket should be in the ticket.

Just enforcing this makes a world of difference. It ties every bit of code to
a justification. This way, if you decide to rewrite the project, you won't end
up losing years of discussions and important lessons. You'll also have a much
easier time prioritising and assigning tasks, since everyone knows what they
mean.

Aside from that:

\- My first pull request at a company is usually an update to the README file.
It rarely matches how you actually use the project.

\- I write "recipes" for common tasks (lint, deploy, test...). This way, you
know that the CI system and every developer in the team performs those tasks
in the same way. You can change the recipes, but they are always called with
the same command. "scripts/clear-cache" is also easier to memorise than
"docker-compose exec backend rm -rf /var/cache...".

\- Add :party_parrot: to Slack

~~~
snypox
Are you me?! Even the party parrot emoji.

~~~
nicbou
Maybe? Do you get a weird feeling in your right elbow when you apply cold
water to it?

------
axegon_
1\. Simplify - as a rule of thumb, if something looks too complicated it
probably is. If you think there are too much "ifs" in the code, there
certainly are.

2\. Remove any "shiny-new-toy". A perfect example would be my bank, which
operates in ~15-20 countries: Their interface isn't a shiny web interface with
pretty animations to cover up a slow response time. The interface all
employees use is built with ncurses. That speaks volumes.

3\. Profiling the code and by doing so find unnecessary bottlenecks.

4\. Never blindly reinvent the wheel. If a solution looks absurd but is highly
used, chances are the solution is there to cover an edge case. Ask before you
decide to "fix" it.

~~~
gmadsen
i feel like there is an appropriate middle ground somewhere between "shiny-
new-toy" and ncurses...

~~~
grandinj
It's probably a 15+ year old application, which, if it was web-based, would be
built on 2-3 out-of-date webstacks, badly joined together, with who knows how
many security flaws.

Compared to maintaining that, ncurses doesn't sound too bad.

------
maremmano
I recently read this book and found it very interesting and useful. I think it
might be for you.

The book is: High Output Management by Andrew Grove.

It is a dated book but many of the procedures described are still valid today
(obviously using real digital tools).

I highly recommend you to read it. Improving a company often means improving
the way people in the company work and interact while also increasing the
quality of life of these people.

I think many of the practices described in this book are about these very
things.

Good luck improving your business and sorry for my English (I'm Italian).

~~~
plasma
Thanks for the recommendation - and your English was perfect, I wouldn’t have
known it was not your primary language.

------
jedberg
At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code
deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

Cutting deployment time makes a huge impact because it makes everything go
faster. You can iterate faster, which means getting bugs fixed faster, getting
data to product managers faster, etc.

It also has an effect on reliability. The faster you can make changes, the
faster you can fix errors (as long as you aren't introducing them faster
too!).

It's always the first thing I focus on.

~~~
Elixyrs
> At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the
> code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

We have the exact same issue in my company. Could you explain how you managed
this?

~~~
jedberg
The way I did it then probably wouldn't work now. I literally just wrote a
perl script to automate pushing copies out to all the servers. They were doing
all by hand before I got there.

If I had to do it today, I'd be looking at GitHub actions or some other
similar CI/CD tool. If you're already using those, then I'd ask what is the
slowest part of the process, and how can we speed it up?

To answer that question you obviously first need telemetry and monitoring to
track each step of deployment. That telemetry will be useful in not only
finding slow spots but tracking your improvement, which will help you both in
operating as well as justifying your work to others.

------
Nowyouknow
Not me, but a "startup" I'm consulting for today that's pivoted many times
over the last 13 years. They spun out a different website focused on a single
offering about a year and a half ago that led to them developing a focus
(sales and tech both) on a specific market and has led to a crazy uptick in
business. I can share the URLs if the HN community is curious to see the
difference between the two.

Editing to include URLs: \- Original site: www.devhub.com \- Spin-off:
www.rallymind.com

~~~
tmbkr
Yes please.

~~~
Nowyouknow
I edited my comment to include the URLs. Interested in what you think, let me
know when you have a chance to review.

------
OliverJones
I joined a small SaaS company when it was 15 years old, in the role of
developer. I was the third developer on the team.

I dragged them, kicking and screaming, away from CVS into git for source
control.

I did a LOT of documentation of their ancient and honorable :-) SQL schema.

I converted a lot of old legacy code to more modern languages.

I converted a lot of old legacy SQL embedded in their code to use prepared
statements and stored procedures, and developed a tiny little framework to
make it easy for other developers to do the same.

I came in early one summer morning and washed the windows in the office.
Seriously. They hadn't been washed for 15 years, and were disgusting.

I helped talk them into replacing their low end home brew bug tracking system.

I pushed, hard, to get them to gradually discontinue using FreeBSD in favor of
standardized Linux cloud distros.

I developed a way for sales, dev, and ops to communicate to do capacity
planning BEFORE bringing on new gigantic enterprise customers, not after.

I failed to get them to adopt CI/CD.

I retired.

My working principle: always work myself out of any job. Do all my work so
somebody else can take it over.

------
rootsudo
Document, host meetings, buy food, drinks and invite co-workers to have "time
off" during a "work meeting" every now and then, but really documentation and
generate good excuses that necessarily does not blame other departments.

Document pain points is a big one, everyone says them, but not always are they
fixed or prioritized. Something to fix those will work - like creating,
documentation, sigh.

People skills and politics, not even technical. :(

~~~
MatekCopatek
That's nothing to be sad about, quite the opposite. The longer you work in
this field, the more you'll realize skills that make people "senior" are not
technical most of the time.

------
BitwiseFool
I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection
onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO
and FIFO.

It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of
user data.

~~~
jodrellblank
Windows 10 has that built in (search for "save multiple clipboard items" in
the start menu), and third party ones have been available for at least 19
years (ArsClip -
[http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/](http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/) )

Surely they have also been available on mac and Linux for as long? Can it
possibly have been a good investment to write your own?

~~~
BitwiseFool
I had no idea this existed, thank you for sharing. As far as an investment of
time goes, I just saw this as a challenge and I enjoyed working on it.

------
swanson
\- Helped push for a shift in invoicing hourly to daily/weekly and then to
"flat-rate for the whole team every month"

\- Organized a professional development group to promote book clubs, meetups,
etc within the company

\- Helped marketing/sales folks update web pages to fix errors or "generic
business language"

\- Encourage and lead efforts to use off-the-shelf tools instead of homegrown
internal tools

\- Took meeting notes for all-hands meetings and published them internally

\- Build relationships with non-technical staff so that you can later give
them feedback about processes they control

These are some things I've done over 10 years at my company, so it's a long
process!

------
jlengrand
There are as many ways to improve your org as there are people working there
:). Focus on what gives you energy, focuses your positivity and piggyback on
it to create impact.

I love tech communities, and started internal and external meetup groups,
found ways to stream online, managed to get the tech blog running. All things
that I love doing : making other tech people more brilliant than I am
successful.

Keep doing it, be consistent.

After a while, it will be seen, recognized and you will be followed :). The
cool thing is that because it's something you like, it doesn't sound like
work!

Good luck and let us know what you've found in a while !

------
leipert
I build visualizations and dashboards from time to time, mostly to scratch my
own itch / answer questions, but sometimes people have found them to be
useful.

For example there are dashboards to track the progress of certain tech debt we
are resolving, like replacing icons (oh god that looks horrible on mobile
[0]). On the process side of things, we have a lot of people reviewing code
and I built this dashboard where you can see the availability of reviewers and
how much reviews they have done in the past days. This might help distribute
load and also allow reviewers to see when they are doing too much [1].

When we were hiring more last year, we actively looked into improving our
hiring experience. That was a group effort, but Training other folks to do
technical interviews was very insightful and contributed back to our process.

Tech stack wise there are a few skeletons in the closet. Generally once you
start digging, you find a lot of weird things. We work together to define
metrics in order to assert which improvements have the highest impact. Always
important to go in the right direction, little steps, and verify that you are
going in the right direction. For example we focused on decreasing our
JavaScript that is loading on every page, until we realized CSS cruft was
blocking Rendering more than the JavaScript. Then we switched focus to that.
Now after we identified what to fix, we focus on the JS again.

[0]: [https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/is-gitlab-pretty-
yet/icon...](https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/is-gitlab-pretty-yet/icons/)

[1]: [https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/maintainer-
workload/](https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/maintainer-workload/)

------
spacemanmatt
I replaced our aging infra with AWS, oversaw replacement of a mishmash of C#,
C++, PHP, and Java1.4 by a concise Java 11 based app, and I'm about to deploy
our first PWA with a Postgres/Vert.x/OIDC backend. Legacy is still running
Apache2/PHP5+MySQL.

I would describe the tech stack I've inherited charitably as "nearly pure
opportunity."

~~~
_jjkk
Good on you for being able to focus on the opportunity.

Too many developers are discouraged when inheriting a legacy app. Nobody wants
to be a turd polisher, but like you said, that just means there's even more
opportunity for improvement.

------
idlewords
I raised productivity, morale, and the average skill level on my team by
quitting my job.

~~~
theonething
Why do you think that was the case?

------
ncphillips
After reading Shape Up by Ryan Singer we decided to try it out. It's been
incredible improvement. We are now able to focus deeply on hard problems, take
guilt-free time to rest and sharpen our skills, and regularly think long term
about the direction of our work. I just wrote about about it in-depth on my
blog:

[https://ncphi.dev/blog/implementing-shape-
up](https://ncphi.dev/blog/implementing-shape-up)

------
gorgoiler
Encourage a culture of yes-ness and helpfulness. It’s so easy for people to
say why something cannot or should not be done.

It’s so much healthier to say “yes, I trust that you need what you say you
need but I need more information to be able to help you.”

------
aprdm
I have done two big devops transformations so far in two different companies..
from manual deployments and no CI to CI/CD + infrastructure as code.

For me it usually goes with:

1\. Have people trust you by usually executing a big project. For me it went
by executing very well small projects and getting bigger projects until you're
implementing a very big and critical project with a team.

2\. Once you have executed (1) people usually trust or know you. Then you can
start talking with people across the entire organization asking what hurts the
most, make some list of things that are interesting to tackle and who would be
the stakeholders

3\. Choose one from the list of (2) and do it (or try to sell the need for
it)! More often than not it involves a lot of conversation, empathy,
teaching.. for example, if you want to implement CI/CD then be ready to:

a. Sell the value of tests

b. Teach best practices for testing

c. Have a skeleton project that people can easily copy

d. Have some tools to easily set up a Ci/CD for a project following the
structure of (c)

e. Adjust notifications and workflows

And.. you have Ci/CD for a group. Now do the same for all other groups. Now
your company has CI/CD, yey! Pick another item from (2)

------
brailsafe
I advocated at my own risk to try and improve our working conditions. Being
honest and carrying out my work in the way I was most comfortable doing,
directly and assertively asking for better physical and social conditions to
perform our duties, and using my own equipment where theirs was a hindrance.
The tech stack was relatively ancient, but I accepted that as part of the
role, because it wouldn't have improved much of anything to swap YUI for
another. Anyway, I learned after I was fired that our group cubes were
replaced by something less soul crushing and more configurable, the sales guy
who screamed on his bluetooth headset every hour while typing on his
mechanical keyboard was moved, and the guy in charge of the failed project I
was assigned to was promoted. So honestly idgaf about improving whatever
company I'm at anymore. I just try and pick one that will not suck so bad and
plan to stick around for 6 months.

------
giantg2
I've created scripts to automate some repetitive or complex tasks. I've done
this for two teams. I think it was an improvement since it eliminated human
errors and freed up developer time. Some of the other developers appreciated
it, but most people didn't really care.

I also came up with an architectural improvement not used anywhere else in the
company that allowed us to close a security vulnerability related to a file
copy process. I think the tech lead and the manager who owned the
vulnerability were happy. Nobody else cared.

I think these types of improvements are fairly common and add up to great
things, especially when multiple people have this mindset. Unfortunately in my
experience most people don't have that mindset because it's not part of the
culture where I work. Don't hold your breath for recognition or appreciation.
The only way to achieve that is by improving something for the 'business
people'.

------
jasonlotito
Helped build, grow, and maintain a hackathon. Over the course of 8 years,
we've held 21 hackathons. Some have been more successful than others. One of
the things I've always done is protect the underlying goal: that it's 2-days
the company gives for people to work on whatever they want. People have used
this time to make furniture, work on games, learn new technology, and of
course, work on new products or tools for the company. You do _NOT_ have to
present.

While not all hackathons have produce production level ideas, many have. One
hackathon resulted in the initial iteration of the biggest product shift in
our company. One that I'm incredibly proud of.

This might not be what you were asking for, but I know for a fact that doing
this literally had the most impact on the company.

------
ojciecczas
I decreased required HDDs size by 20% in CI system by adding "-ntp" switch to
all maven commands. It makes the maven stop printing "Downloading..." when it
downloads artifacts. How I did it? I added alias mvn=mvn -ntp in .bashrc.

------
christophilus
Saved about $100k / year by switching to our own video transcoder service
rather than outsourcing it to SaaS.

~~~
cwxm
how many dev hours did it take to build it and how many dev hours / year does
it currently take to maintain/update it?

~~~
christophilus
One person, maybe two weeks to build it. Not sure yet on maintenance. But
certainly not $100k.

------
odshoifsdhfs
I left.

~~~
icedchai
So did it actually improve? Or did it continue to go down hill?

------
sokoloff
From 2003-2005: Co-created our database release process, integrated it with
our code release process, developed our production problem management process,
and built a bunch of our production monitoring tools.

Many of those things have since been superseded in the intervening 15 years,
but it still pleases me to walk by the NOC and see tools of mine that I wrote
10-15 years ago _still running_ (now maintained by others, but still running).

One of the most useful and longest-lived tools is one of the simplest (I
literally built the essence of it in 4 hours, 6-10 PM one evening). It graphs
a timeline, 1 second per pixel in X, logarithmic dollar value in Y, plot every
order. That was the first version.

It's since evolved to have a bunch of per-minute summary data on the screen
(AOV, CR%, errors/info/warning/404s, total bookings, paid vs unpaid orders,
database connections in use, idle connections available, long-running
transactions, long-running pages, etc per minute), records to a database, so
you can "playback" outages or go exploring, etc. It's not the best tool for
deep digging, but when you want a fast-reacting, "quick check" that the entire
site is working post-release or post-outage, it's unambiguous that people are
getting all the way through checkout (or not). You might be surprised what you
can learn from such a simplistic tool.

------
rsync
We simplified our offering.

From the beginning, rsync.net offered standard ftp service along with ssh
tools. It pleased me to offer an old fashioned standard that "just worked" and
allowed some weird corner cases to function for people.

Simultaneously, I wanted a "clean" nmap. I wanted to see port 22 and nothing
else. So, we disabled ftp (and with it, inetd on all of our FreeBSD storage
arrays) and reduced our attack surface as well as the number of processes we
need to run and audit.

We made this change about 18 months ago...

------
takinola
There are a couple ways to approach this problem. One of them is to examine
the outcomes that are crucial to the business and recursively working
backwards to the components that drive that outcome for the business. Once you
get to the root inputs, you will be able to identify which changes will create
the greatest increase in your desired outcome.

For example, let's say your company is a SaaS business that is number 4 or 5
in its market and is looking to move up to number 1 or 2 position, then you
may find that the key strategy to get there (just spitballing here) is to get
to feature parity with the market leaders. If so, then you would need to
launch more features faster.

How do you launch features faster? Well, could be improving the code quality
so there is less rework, building better tools, hiring more devs, etc? So lets
take one of those, eg improving code quality. How do you improve code quality?
Well, maybe hire better devs, train the devs you have or improve your QA
processes? If your devs are all rockstars, then it must be QA that sucks. So
let's look into how to improve QA.... (etc)

Keeping working down this logical path and you will arrive at the most
impactful changes you can make in your organization.

------
laughingpine
I am lucky in that fact that I am a position where my opinions are listened to
and respected. I have spent the last few years trying to improve a number of
our processes. If I wasn't in this position, then chances are I would have
moved on to greener pastures almost immediately.

Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have
worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place
where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would
constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices
disciplined code management.

When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no
one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard
for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features
completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the
code.

Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were
scattered on different people's PCs.

After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices.
There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our
team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.

------
muzani
C1: I was the person with attention to detail. One guy built the system and
led things. I spotted cracks in it, and patched it to be stable, then proposed
a better system when they needed one.

C2: I was the "living documentation" for the entire system. There was plenty
of docs, gigabytes of it in fact. Too much for most developers to know by
heart. My job was to actually read it all and answer questions. I'd bring up
things like how this portion is not optimized according to this specification
here, or that portion is missing error handling N, which happens frequently,
or this other server fallback is not being used. The system has millions of
daily active users, so every time an API is called twice, that costs serious
money. I'd also spot things like unstable hacks that were hidden in the code
by some old programmers.

C3: Whole code was a mess. I spent half my time refactoring it, which also
meant a few late nights sometimes, and chopping out thousands of lines of code
a week. It cut down maintenance and bugs drastically. Where one thing would
require 4 hours to do, it then required 10 minutes.

------
laudable-logic
I make sure I'm up for _anything_. Give me that thing that has been the thorn
in everyone's side. Yes, some rather daunting (read: frought-with-peril) tasks
present themselves, but... if done well, usually yield a better 'next
assignment'.

------
bschne
Not necessarily limited to development roles, I feel like in every
team/company, there are these pesky sources of friction that everyone has sort
of learnt to live with because in the short run, taking the few extra steps to
work around something is usually quicker than facing the actual problem.
Actively push to remedy these, whether it's something you can take care of
yourself in a few hours/days, or you need to campaign to get someone's buy-in.
It goes a long way - not only in time saved, but also in mental capacity freed
up.

This can be code, build systems (or lack thereof), missing automation, or even
lack of clarity between various stakeholders.

------
spondyl
At a previous employer, we had an incident management bot that was pretty
widely used by product teams but for whatever reason, the actual data just sat
in a Redis instance (the default Hubot adaptor out of the box) and was never
looked at

The data was mostly a mess as the bot had interfaced with Flowdock at one
point and later Slack, but even then Slack had undergone a few changes to the
message schema. All up, there were about 4 different distinct schemas.

To be clear, what was stored was the representation of an incident that also
included data about the person who commanded the incident. Generally the
commander data was just a copy of their profile data, and that was the thing
that mostly changed over time.

Anyway, one of my first tasks when I joined was to throw together a small web
API to expose that data so we could generate reports and what not.

Perhaps the most important thing to note is that nothing I did actually drove
any particular change. I just got lucky because when our new CTO joined and
started asking product teams how many incidents they often had, product teams
started asking our group for reports.

Seeing how much time my manager was spending generating these things, I took
the next logical step of throwing together a basic UI (filtering, sorting,
exporting to CSV) so that it inverted the overhead onto the teams themselves
rather than it being bottlenecked by one or two people doing reports.

Anyway, there's more to it than that, and funnily enough no one in our wider
team was really aware of what I put together. Having said that, it was a fun
experience and kinda nice getting a little bit of attention for a while. It
was more or less a side project so I got to field customer requests (and treat
users like customers), balance priorities and so on

I guess the theme here would be a mix of visibility and automating toil?

\---

I've often thought about doing a New Old Thing style postmortem on that bot.
It was rewritten a little while ago now but the first version, using the
default hubot adaptor, made me really appreciate Redis. It was doing some
highly uestionable stuff under the hood but as a testament to Redis, it never
missed a beat.

------
ryaan_anthony
I organized a cookie swap. There are dozens of process improvements and
internal efforts that I've had success with but the cookie swap is my favorite
story. Without some culture, work is work.

~~~
unspecified
I would love to exchange browser state with my coworkers and act as them for a
few hours. I think I could really clean up our ticketing system if I was
logged in as someone who could outright delete tickets instead of merely
marking them as closed.

------
atlantageek
Worked for a SaaS that took in sales data and generated customer surveys.
There were a few things I did 1\. Create an easy way for support to login as a
different user so that they could see what the customer sees. 2\. Created a
report that figured out how often each customer sends data and noticed when
they were 2 standard deviations away from their average data send. We went
from customers calling upset that their data is not up to date to us calling
them and letting them know that they stopped sending us data.

------
darthrupert
Convinced the CEO to fire the founders.

------
cdnsteve
Take ownership and fix issues, make this a habbit and do it often, not a one-
time situation. Depending on your role this can be code level, architecture,
people related, hiring, manual processes, etc.

The best signal is the thing most people are frustrated with but never seem to
find time to get to.

As you move up in your career you will be faced with more difficult problems
and challenges, especially those with no clear answers or path to follow.

------
r0s
I'm primarily focused on automated testing. Which is great but all revolves
around test data "fixtures", standardized test data that is integrated with
the system under test to be sure all the tests are using correct data.

My company is large, and coordinating all this data was typically done over
email or jira.

I designed and built a test data API service with a web UI, now in heavy use
across many departments and three business units.

------
ricardonunez
Increased pricing. Making more money per customer helped reduced the load and
which helped provide a better service and it also helped get better customers.

------
anamax
A long time ago, I convinced a company to put floor-to-ceiling white boards on
every wall of a conference room.

A not so long time ago, I convinced developers to use the automated QA system
as part of their development process. The QA folks had automated almost
everything, so it was much faster to test by submitting a QA job. Moreover, QA
owned the metrics around performance goals, so developing to the test meant
fewer surprises.

------
btgeekboy
When I started at a previous company, we scored almost 0 on the Joel Test.
(Remember that?) By the time I left, we were at close to 100%.

~~~
Lordarminius
Its only one google search away but ...

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-
test-12-s...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-
test-12-steps-to-better-code/)

You're welcome.

------
time0ut
Pushed for everything to be code checked into source control. The application
code, scripts, tools, migrations, documentation, alerts, tests are all code
artifacts that get versioned, reviewed, scanned, deployed, executed
automatically. Working on infrastructure still.

------
staysaasy
Decide and communicate the metrics that matter for your business, then
constantly educate and remind engineers of how they can help to reach those
goals. Increases the number of good ideas from people with the best context
and reduces the bridges-to-nowhere.

~~~
mdorazio
Be careful on this one. When not done well it quickly leads to people
optimizing for metrics rather than outcomes. It's also a quick path to dark
patterns.

~~~
staysaasy
Yes, it has to be done extremely carefully. Picking metrics well is one of the
most important jobs of company leadership.

------
MattGaiser
Figuring out where the most time is wasted. About 1/5 of my job is chasing SQL
queries that didn't get run in some environment. I keep pushing for active
tracking of which queries have been run where to try and eliminate that.

~~~
faceruler
I was in the same boat about 10 years ago. I wasted time confirming that sql
scripts were deployed to different production databases. I needed to chase
down logs and contact dba's through email, etc... It was a big time-waster.

My team created a standard adhoc script template to help with this. The goal
of the template was:

1) confirm script is deployed to the correct database 2) inserts record into
log table (start date, end date, description, etc...) 3) updates log table
when script completes / fails

We asked the script runners / dba's to reject any script that doesn't use the
standard template. They reviewed and contributed to the template and were
totally onboard.

The majority of our script writers use sql prompt, which allows for sql
snippets - so everyone is used to starting out with this standard template as
they write these scripts.

No issues since we implemented this. And I can confirm when and where scripts
ran quickly.

------
sowhat_alex
Improve the culture. Processes, tech stack, productivity, these are just
tasks. If there is a culture of continuous improvement then those tasks are
always being improved. Better is not a destination, it is the journey.

------
lame88
Specifically, performance optimizations and reliability improvements. More
generally, applying my most unique and valuable skill set compared to the
people I work with and advocating for good design decisions toward those ends.

------
sys_64738
I resigned.

~~~
ISL
A note of sympathy here, as people in sibling posts seem to be seeing this
choice in a negative light regarding the resign-er's self-worth or competence.
Leaving can be a powerful expression of "I have tried my best, hung on as long
as I can. I love this place, and I love what we do, but I cannot stay.
Something is broken."

It can be a hard choice, but one that sets an example for your colleagues:
there are some situations which a person cannot abide _ad infinitum_.

If the situation pushed you so far as to resign, then you made an important
choice.

------
cvaidya1986
Everyone is in charge of ONE thing at a time. That thing being the most
important thing that will make everything else easier. The One Thing is a good
book.

------
aj_nikhil
We implemented a customer support software, it was a game changer. It resolved
most of the chaos.

~~~
ultrarunner
Could you say more about this? Is this an initial screening flow that
formalizes customer support requests, a self-discovery tool, etc?

~~~
aj_nikhil
We used a tool called Freshdesk in which sending an email to a particular
email id creates a support ticket. Also you can reply from it's dashboard. We
had b2b customers who used to send a lot of queries everyday. This tool helped
in distributing queries among the team. Earlier it was only one person mostly
who was handling all queries, thus was overwhelmed. Also it has auto rules
which can be used to set priority to the tickets. Very useful tool when you
have a sizeable number of customers. It helps in providing better customer
service also as very few tickets go unanswered .

~~~
ziyadb
would love to learn more about how you're using Freshdesk and the types of
queries you're responding to! I'm building a customer support app that uses
openAI's GPT3 to generate automated responses and it's been working great so
far!

How can I reach you?

------
fuzzfactor
I do something every day that no one else is doing for the clients.

------
cjvirtucio
Fully automated a process that I had zero domain knowledge on.

------
lsb
Introduced async Slack stand-ups, introduced containerized artifact-based
deploys, massively reduced scope and time of several engineering projects by
relaxing constraints (uptime, generality, etc)

------
oyebenny
Gain a lot of capital.

------
mierzwin
I left.

------
contingencies
Fire early, fire often.

------
known
It's risky unless you can protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness
to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession),
Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of
others)

~~~
bluejellybean
Well duh, literally everything has risk though. Your comment is effectively
useless in my opinion as it adds nothing to the conversation of improving a
company, you're just stating it's risky. It's risky to even get out of bed to
get a coffee as you are required to manipulate people to do so! Even worse
than that, you have to manipulate an entire logistics chain to get that fresh
cup of joe. Just ignore that these are all free exchanges and that those poor
manipulated people get paid for the work they choose to do and can tell you to
piss off at any time they please.

~~~
Ecstatify
Pot. Kettle. Black.

