6 ms·

Oh man. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to work at an organisation that actually celebrated a few such improvements i made. There was a data ingestion

Oh man. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to work at an organisation that actually celebrated a few such improvements i made. There was a data ingestion job which inserted 4 million keys into Redis. It was awfully slow. I sped it up a lot using the Redis protocol format and redis-cli --pipe. They praised me for that. There was a dashboard which queried data from a MongoDB collection and calculated some counts. I changed the design so that the service itself would update the counts so as to avoid costly queries. I brought down build and deploy times for a service by removing unused gradle dependencies, structuring the build to allow using parallel builds and removing unnecessary configuration generation using templates and the entire team was glad that I solved a major pain for them. Sorry you had a bad experience but I think this is what we mean when we say company culture.

jpatokal 8y ago
It's not about the tech, it's about the politics. If everybody agrees Redis is the way to go, sure, go ahead and optimize it. But what if there's a VP who's been arguing that using Redis is a mistake and you should be switching to MongoDB?
- Aeolun 8y ago
  You kick the hornets nest.
  - JimmyAustin 8y ago
    "If you come at the king, you best not miss." If you criticize a seniors ideas, and they interpret it as you coming after them, you better destroy their reputation, or they'll destroy you. It's hard to destroy someones reputation within an organization, and most people get defensive when newcomers (especially juniors) come in with suggestions, so it's typically not worth kicking the nest.
    - Xcelerate 8y ago
      > most people get defensive when newcomers (especially juniors) come in with suggestions Reminds me of that quote "science progresses one funeral at a one". I had a good boss at a previous company. Shortly after I was hired, he scheduled a meeting with the rest of the team and said, "We want to get your opinion on this thing X we've been working on for over a year. Since you're new, you may have some fresh perspectives about what can be done." I generally think that's the right approach. Judging by the number of systems in different fields that have been overhauled by outsiders to the field, I imagine real innovation has less to de what thinking of new ideas and more to do with navigating the minefield of human psychology.
      - vezycash 8y ago
        "I want your opinion on...." for me is a potential landmine. Such questions can be used to detect potential troublemakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign In college 10 years+ ago, one of my roommates had a laptop with 500MB ram and took a 500MB ram chip from anther room mate's laptop to speed up a game he was playing. He did this without the knowledge or permission of the laptop's owner who was sleeping and forgot to put it back. Morning came, owner woke up to a laggy system. Discovered the cause and went straight to the culprit. Instead of an apology, he got insulted and reported to school authorities. Culprit panicked and threw his own ram into another room mate's locker - not knowing that rams have brand names and serial numbers. The owner refused the found chip and after a search, found it in the culprit's laptop. Case over right? Wrong! We all got called up to an office and asked, "Who do you think took it?" I naively answered with all the logical evidence. The "judge" accused me of slander. And warned me not to talk about it any longer or face disciplinary measures. I later discovered that the culprit's father visited the official and our meeting's true purpose was a coverup. In other words, be wary of higher-ups who ask for critique, advise, improvements, ideas...
        0db532a0 8y ago
        I’ve always been wary of one-to-ones with the manager for the same reason. Is it ever good to talk about problems with a manager, especially regarding other people? It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma. I still don’t know what’s best for me to talk about in this setting.

jpatokal 8y ago

It's not about the tech, it's about the politics. If everybody agrees Redis is the way to go, sure, go ahead and optimize it. But what if there's a VP who's been arguing that using Redis is a mistake and you should be switching to MongoDB?

Aeolun 8y ago
You kick the hornets nest.
- JimmyAustin 8y ago
  "If you come at the king, you best not miss." If you criticize a seniors ideas, and they interpret it as you coming after them, you better destroy their reputation, or they'll destroy you. It's hard to destroy someones reputation within an organization, and most people get defensive when newcomers (especially juniors) come in with suggestions, so it's typically not worth kicking the nest.
  - Xcelerate 8y ago
    > most people get defensive when newcomers (especially juniors) come in with suggestions Reminds me of that quote "science progresses one funeral at a one". I had a good boss at a previous company. Shortly after I was hired, he scheduled a meeting with the rest of the team and said, "We want to get your opinion on this thing X we've been working on for over a year. Since you're new, you may have some fresh perspectives about what can be done." I generally think that's the right approach. Judging by the number of systems in different fields that have been overhauled by outsiders to the field, I imagine real innovation has less to de what thinking of new ideas and more to do with navigating the minefield of human psychology.
    - vezycash 8y ago
      "I want your opinion on...." for me is a potential landmine. Such questions can be used to detect potential troublemakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign In college 10 years+ ago, one of my roommates had a laptop with 500MB ram and took a 500MB ram chip from anther room mate's laptop to speed up a game he was playing. He did this without the knowledge or permission of the laptop's owner who was sleeping and forgot to put it back. Morning came, owner woke up to a laggy system. Discovered the cause and went straight to the culprit. Instead of an apology, he got insulted and reported to school authorities. Culprit panicked and threw his own ram into another room mate's locker - not knowing that rams have brand names and serial numbers. The owner refused the found chip and after a search, found it in the culprit's laptop. Case over right? Wrong! We all got called up to an office and asked, "Who do you think took it?" I naively answered with all the logical evidence. The "judge" accused me of slander. And warned me not to talk about it any longer or face disciplinary measures. I later discovered that the culprit's father visited the official and our meeting's true purpose was a coverup. In other words, be wary of higher-ups who ask for critique, advise, improvements, ideas...
      - 0db532a0 8y ago
        I’ve always been wary of one-to-ones with the manager for the same reason. Is it ever good to talk about problems with a manager, especially regarding other people? It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma. I still don’t know what’s best for me to talk about in this setting.