10 ms·
How would you improve the company you work for?
If you could do one (or a few) things, what would you do to improve the company you work for?
- muzani 11y agoUnemployed 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.
- eecks 11y agoDid the company end up making millions because of your email?
- muzani 11y agoNo, 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.
- alexandrerond 11y agoIf 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.
- squiguy7 11y agoI 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.
- eecks 11y agoWhy do you have so many reverts?
- squiguy7 11y agoI 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.
- twunde 11y agoAutomated deployments are worth spending time on. A good deployment/release process frees up dev time, makes it easier to debug production issues and removes a whole class of bugs. Most languages/frameworks have some prebuilt tools to do deployments. This is one of the few things I would spend personal time on doing because I know how much time this frees up
- diezge 11y agoFlexible working hours, less rebasing, try to get others to adhere to coding standards, clearer/more detailed project specs/designs etc
- BooneJS 11y agoHrm, 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.
- tmaly 11y agobetter training systems. it takes a long time to get new hires up to speed. anything that can improve this is worth it
- eecks 11y agoThat's a good idea. Do you have idea for a generic strategy for training or is it case-by-case basis?
- tmaly 11y agomost 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.
- taprun 11y agoI'd have them focus on achieving strategic goals.
- eecks 11y agoWhat do they focus on at the moment if not strategic goals?
- askafriend 11y agoProbably tactical goals.
- taprun 11y agoI'd have them focus on achieving strategic goals.
- arnold_palmur 11y agoFewer meetings.
- twunde 11y agoHow 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.
- eecks 11y agoCutting 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.
- stevefeinstein 11y agoFewer meetings isn't the answer, fewer but more effective meetings is.
- mbfg 11y agoremove 80% of management
- a_lifters_life 11y agohallelujah !
- colund 11y agoI would remove management and replace them with new reasonable folks who understand software development and valuing customers. I would also create more interesting products.
- starshadowx2 11y ago1. Better inter-department communication. 2. More well-defined policies and procedures.
- eecks 11y agoHow would you do 1?
- starshadowx2 11y agoWell 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.