[HN Gopher] Devex: What actually drives productivity
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Devex: What actually drives productivity
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-05-19 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (queue.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (queue.acm.org)
| endtime wrote:
| I ran a couple developer experience teams at Google over a period
| of a few years. The motto was "easy, fast, and fun". Too much
| software development isn't.
| analog31 wrote:
| I love Python, and Arduino too. ;-)
| freddref wrote:
| How do you maintain that as things grow?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| excellent modularity, ownership, fast tooling, and effortless
| communication?
| Bellend wrote:
| Give me a life altering kickback as a fat cheque each April or
| get the minimum possible work I can do to keep my job whilst
| management tries to figure out what that is and if I am viable.
|
| I do maybe 20% a week of my total.
|
| To be clear, I have been through the stress. ESPECIALLY in the
| games industry where a specific corner/corner collision had me
| crying and wished I was dead coz it was on me. I solved it, I got
| nothing.
| rektide wrote:
| > _I solved it, I got nothing._
|
| Alas one of the most defining aspects of business seems to be
| an entire lack of rewards for being the Johnny On The Spot, for
| tackling shit. It's absurd how little benefit there is to being
| good or caring or taking on the hard shit.
| esafak wrote:
| Move to greener pastures and let the competition eat their
| lunch. Voting with your feet is how we have nice things.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't know if this is even solvable in principle. There's
| just little to no correlation between the tough parts of this
| job, and the outcomes visible to stakeholders (even technical
| managers).
|
| Spent two days dealing with memory corruption caused by a
| badly-written third-party library (proprietary, binary-only
| distributed)? I may have felt like I own the universe when I
| finally found the problem, but what does my manager see? Me
| having promised the feature today, and now saying it'll be
| next week.
| Bellend wrote:
| I'd personally solve it asap but I would never declare it
| until it was absolutely critical and then look like a
| superstar at day0.
| jdbernard wrote:
| One of the many ways management benefits from having hands-
| on experience prior.
| esafak wrote:
| Options including selling your accomplishment, not doing
| thankless work, moving to a better-run company, and
| starting your own. I made my choice.
| rektide wrote:
| > _The Three Dimensions of DevEx Our framework distills developer
| experience to its three core dimensions: feedback loops,
| cognitive load, and flow state . These dimensions emerged from
| real-world application of our prior research, which identified 25
| sociotechnical factors affecting DevEx._
|
| IMO, solid groundwork for analyzing development. These feel like
| good core principal components.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It's missing "soul crushing corporate culture"
|
| IMO that's the single most important factor in developer
| experience. The rest is an effect of that.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Seems like a fine description/analysis. What it amounts to seems
| to simply be to listen to what developers complain about, in
| addition to other metrics. A problem is of course that sometimes
| developers complain that they can't build their grand vision,
| regardless of how unproductive it is to customers. Also managers
| don't first-hand understand the importance of developers gripes.
| A pragmatic approach where an aspect/complaint is worked on to
| reduce friction etc and measure/survey improvements should inform
| them what's worked and what hasn't.
|
| > To improve DevEx, teams and organizations should focus on
| creating the optimal conditions for flow state. Disruptions
| should be minimized by clustering meetings, avoiding unplanned
| work, and batching help requests. Leaders should also recognize
| that flow state depends on creating positive team cultures that
| give developers autonomy and opportunities to work on fulfilling
| challenges.
|
| Some things that address this: no meeting Wednesdays, large
| meeting block Thursdays, rotating ATC (air traffic controller)
| for one person to handle interruptions to save the team. One
| thing that still happens is swiss-cheese meeting schedules
| starting on the hour (or half hour) and rounding up to same,
| which waste arbitrary-sized small gaps.
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