Re:Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new co...
by JBReefer on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @10:57AM
(#17355993)
How long did you last? I worked somewhere like that, most engineers lasted 3 months, I managed to squeeze out 4!
Places with issues like that tend to have TONS of other very serious issues.
Re:Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new co...
by ryandrake on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @11:57AM
(#17356548)
You guessed right. Turnover was a huge problem too. I lasted just over a year, and only because it was during the depth of dot.com recession 2.0 and there weren’t exactly jobs available on every street corner.
The technical problems were merely symptoms of structural and leadership problems.
Re:Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new co...
by tty89 on Friday June 22, 2018 @01:24AM
(#17371566)
That is still the issues in some of the projects that I work in.
Team not knowing any version control properly is one of the most common issue that I find. Nobody knows about unit tests. Build systems and checklists would be something too alien to comprehend.
Re:Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new co...
by marcodave on Thursday June 21, 2018 @11:55AM
(#17366275)
Basically you just described the situation at my first workplace in 2007. To be fair it wasn't a software company, and most of the software was for internal use.
Still. The first proper installation of SVN happened only in 2010...
1. No source control system
2. No bug/issue tracker (or formal software QA)
3. No build automation
4. No dedicated build system
5. No pre-launch checklists
Basically, the latest release was whatever happened to be on one of the engineer's hard drives whenever someone frantically ran in and said "we needed to release!" You can imagine how fun it was to repro when customers reported bugs. And they did, Gandalf, they DID...
Those were the first things to address because they were obvious gaping wounds and I could implement them myself without really having to convince anyone. The CEO thought they were a waste of my time (I hired you to write codes) but didn't actually stop me from setting them up. The next things lacking would take more effort to fix because they were people/process dependent: like no code reviews, no software development process, no bug triage process, etc.