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Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of. However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Pe
by tqi 4y ago
Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of.
However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventually becomes untenable. More and more meetings get scheduled to cover topics that are not well documented, which causes people to have less time/inclination to create or consume high quality documents, and it becomes a feedback loop.
(Edited to make it clear that I am not against the idea, just curious to see how it evolves)
- cateblanchett 4y agodoesn't Amazon have a similar structure, tho? i don't know what it's actually like to work there (anyone who does feel free to chime in) but i've interviewed and from what I can tell they put a heavy emphasis on documentation. it's tough to find a bigger and more siloed company than Amazon, and it seems to work for them.
- erichocean 4y agoAs someone who has to use Amazon's external documentation: it's absolutely terrible. Worst docs of any company we have to interact with at the API level.
- MikeMaven 4y ago
- fumar 4y agoAmazon is high documentation, high meetings culture. The documentation is reviewed by peers, bar raisers, and leaders in a process called document read before being official. Edit: Someone asked for more detail on high meeting culture. There are constant meetings between cross-functional teams, various leadership stakeholders, and ongoing operational planning. That is not including your day to day meetings within your sub team or the follow up meetings from doc reads or the new team launch meetings, etc. Amazon tech is a high meeting culture.
- cateblanchett 4y agoso the worst of both worlds
- xenonite 4y agoWhy? I think this sounds great.
- gregoriol 4y agoIf you are writing for reviews, you are not writing for your peers. The question is: who will be using the documents?
- htrp 4y agoRead an amazon 6 pager... then try to write one, about anything. and then invite all of your co-workers to pick apart every single line of your document.
- fumar 4y agoCorrect. Be careful about sharing a document in progress, notes, or just simple thoughts in text. People will pick it apart word by word. Why? It is the culture Amazon created. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it's a waste of everyone's time.
- von_lohengramm 4y agoSure, but oftentimes technical documentation is severely lacking. PRFAQs, initial design docs, etc. are thoughtfully created and thoroughly reviewed, but the actual implementation lacks the documentation required to make onboarding (be it new team members or new dependent teams) as smooth as it could be. My favorite is finding an out of date Wiki page from 6 years ago that contains a partial list of API method names, descriptions if you're lucky, and then nothing else, not even a link to the service's AAA page/etc. or a high-level summary of what the service _does_ or _why_. With how many moving parts there are and how inaccessible non-platform-level documentation is, the new hire experience at Amazon can be rather daunting. Even SDE1/2s that are a year in often have a very incomplete picture of what's going on in their own domain space. Too much tribal knowledge.
- dehrmann 4y agoThey need high documentation to support their employee churn.
- jcparkyn 4y ago> feel free to chime in Pun intended?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mlazos 4y agoIt works if you hire for people who are good at communicating and reward documentation writing in performance reviews
- seltzerboys 4y agohiring is probably the main thing. giving some kind of documentation exercise to all prospective devs seems to alleviate concerns about communication
- tqi 4y agoAgree that hiring is sure important, but I think as long as hiring is competitive, and most candidates are bad at writing, then compromises are almost inevitable?
- layer8 4y agoIf FAANGs started putting more weight on technical-writing skills in their hiring, we would get Leetwriting and technical-writing bootcamps. Meaning, it’s just an education issue to some extent, and there’s currently too little motivation to train writing as a skill.
- whatshisface 4y agoLeetcode doesn't raise people's IQs, it gives them practice effect on tech's favorite IQ test. So I don't think leetwriting would work for anything except getting practice effect on the new verbal IQ tests.
- aiisjustanif 4y agoWe already struggle finding people good at everything else lol
- throwawaysleep 4y agoAlso the problem of incentives. I can write well. Why should I bother to do so when I am not rewarded for that? So I just write crap as well.
- closeparen 4y agoMost people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...
- origin_path 4y agoNo not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output minimal. Compared to sitting at a desk and focusing on a single task, it's far inferior for most people, who find that quite exhausting or demotivating.
- tqi 4y agoI think that's a bit ungenerous to think that programmers are somehow different in this regard. Everyone hates attending boring meetings. And non-programmers also have heads down individual work they need to / would rather be doing. However I agree that the extent of it is the key. I think most people actually hate running meetings (it's basically public speaking), but they hate writing documents even more. It's much easier to "voice over" something than to sit and write it out. It's also easier to enforce attendance than to police opening and actually reading documents. So meetings are the path of least resistance/effort.
- origin_path 4y agoWell people say they hate attending boring meetings, but when you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings. Other job roles, at least in my experience, tend to jump to a meeting as the first reaction. Developers will say: let's discuss it over email. Others say: let's hop on a call / grab a room. The number of meetings I've been in where there are multiple participants who don't have any obvious reason to be there, and who don't say anything throughout the entire meeting, is uncountable. Now you're right it's obviously not that black and white, I'm generalizing. But I think devs often under-estimate how many people in a typical company perceive meeting other internal employees as amongst their primary outputs, as an end in and of itself, not just a means. A good way to observe this in action is to try and enforce a rule that meetings must have pre-published agendas. Good luck with that! People will just work around it or write useless non-agendas because often a meeting is not to get something specific done, but is used more like a sort of coffee break to split up the day and give people something to look forward to between desk time. Something else worth remarking on - a lot of people in sales or marketing roles never seem to use word processors. They communicate ideas by sending PowerPoint decks around, often with a density of words in the slides too high to actually project (only readable on hi-dpi screens). Where I last worked there were people whose working hours boiled down to meetings and PowerPoints. They could spend a whole week making a deck, which would only be seen by their colleagues in a meeting. I found it odd but maybe the slide templates help them structure their thoughts.
- hinkley 4y agoPeople hate reading bad writing. As someone who dabbled in creative writing before discovering my vocation, I see a lot of problems caused by people not bothering to explain themselves clearly. As my time in the industry grew I begin to see people who were confused about their own ideas and came to see how many things we don’t even explain to ourselves. Which likely plays a role in how defensive people get about some of their ideas. They hadn’t considered these things and now they feel out of their element.
- jasmer 4y agoIt's shocking how many people don't have the ability to organize their thoughts. I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself. At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up. This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more than anything else. A dev who can articulate is literally worth at least 50% more than one who cannot. And to your point, yes, it's funny and scary when someone can't describe something they ought to be able to. If someone can't explain something they are actually a risk to the code.
- civilized 4y agoIt's funny how AI and humans struggle with similar issues of doing things intuitively and being unable to explain themselves.
- dsjoerg 4y agoYes! What's threatening about AI isn't that it's smarter than humans, but that it's cheaper and more scalable. And sometimes smarter. But usually a whole lot dumber. You reminded me of a fun idea that I'll probably never do anything with: Train an AI which is judged on its ability to quickly teach/train _another_ AI how to do the task. So, optimizing for ability to explain.
- 4y ago
- epolanski 4y ago> a) bad at writing and b) hate reading Why does everyone else has to pay the insane price for that?