[HN Gopher] The tools you'd miss if you left a company
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The tools you'd miss if you left a company
Author : kogir
Score : 30 points
Date : 2020-02-08 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| analog31 wrote:
| I'd miss the engineering machine shop. Those facilities only get
| developed by accident, for instance if a company gets rid of its
| professional machinist but keeps the equipment, or something like
| that. The machines and collections of tooling take a long time to
| curate. Any modern manager would refuse to allow that much stuff
| to be purchased if they were asked, and believe in the magic of
| outsourcing everything.
| [deleted]
| jackie_treehorn wrote:
| I just joined apple and I miss all the Linux tools
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Yeah but you have Radar. Didn't realize how much I liked it
| until after I left
| i386 wrote:
| I suspect only people at Apple like Radar ;)
| i386 wrote:
| If you're not building complicated new systems and just gluing
| things together, you're not doing engineering? 1) definitely gate
| keeping 2) good engineering is about what not to build as much as
| it is what to build.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
|
| The view that such work just constitutes writing "glue" is
| super reductive. So much time is also spent empathizing with
| others: talking to stakeholders, understanding existing
| processes, determining requirements, and simplifying. So if we
| can reduce the solution to glue instead of needing to write a
| complicated system, that's hands down a win.
| i386 wrote:
| Any engineer who comes up with a solution that requires less
| new code being written is a more valuable engineer IMO. Less
| code is less time spent on building then maintaining code for
| all eternity.
|
| If you go through the build/buy/partner decision, and decide
| to buy or partner with development comprising of glue code -
| then that's probably the optimal solution for your org. And
| you made the right engineering choice.
| patrec wrote:
| > Any engineer who comes up with a solution that requires
| less new code being written is a more valuable engineer IMO
|
| Of course less code is good, all things being equal.
|
| But taking that idea literally, basically no tooling code
| gets ever written and people develop some sort of learned
| helplessness around dysfunctional workflows that are just
| about feasible but fantastically wasteful of engineering
| time. This tends to happen a lot, also because tooling is
| often perceived by management as an unnecessary luxury.
| patrec wrote:
| Just because you're not doing much (any?) interesting
| engineering doesn't mean you're not creating a lot of value.
| But it probably does mean that _if_ you really deeply care
| about engineering in itself you should reconsider your
| employment options. But learning when you can just glue and
| how is a super-valuable skill, even if some of your work
| involves pushing the envelope.
|
| The worst engineers are not those who just glue stuff
| together, it's the people who cv-drivenly develop 100x too
| slow, resource intensive and broken buzzword bingo
| clusterfucks that could be solved, correctly and cheaply,
| with a page of shell script.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I agree - shouldn't you feel most proud of the _products_ you
| 've built that help actual people who pay you, rather than your
| coworkers for which those internal tools wouldn't need to exist
| if not for your customers.
|
| I'd rather have engineers working on products that customers
| would miss.
| stereolambda wrote:
| I don't agree without reservations but like how against the grain
| this currently is. Outsourcing everything does seem like a sign
| of immediate hyperoptimization missing building a more lasting
| engineering value. Do as little as possible to extract _some_
| margin. There is business wisdom in this but indeed such
| companies would seem more brittle. Sometimes it 's like there's
| an ecosystem of plumbing companies selling to other plumbing
| companies without much visible external cash intake.
|
| That being said, I think most of the things she mentions are not
| customer facing but still pretty differentiating to the
| businesses.
|
| Another perspective is that the first crop of truly successful
| Internet companies were in the position to solve the big backend
| problems with running big Internet companies in-house. Nowadays
| getting to the scale while building some fundamental in-house
| stuff makes less economic sense (you'd lose to someone who
| doesn't). It's probably better to have some unique technology but
| more closely related to the specific business.
| crispinb wrote:
| _If you can 't come up with anything, it's possible you're just
| beyond repair and too snarky to think reasonably_
|
| Or perhaps that we've mostly worked in crap dev jobs/companies?
| There are easily enough of them around to encompass a career.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I don't know. Having an "80% solution" but not needing to support
| or fix it is not such a bad price to pay. Also this seems to be a
| bit skewed towards large networked solutions.
| Insanity wrote:
| At one of the places I worked, a relatively large university-
| hospital, there was an entire Java-UI framework build based on
| C#s XAML. But it could also experimentally be compiled to
| html/css/js.
|
| Writing any type of UI in Swing is just painful - but this system
| made it so much nicer. It also had a WYSIWYG editor that you
| could interop with actually writing the code. Plus you could
| write either the 'markup language' or the "Java" flavour
| directly.
|
| Making complex responsive UIs was a breeze. It's a shame it did
| not get open sourced - but it was tied into a great amount of
| internal tooling. (The entire codebase was 28+ million lines of
| code when I left).
|
| It's one of the few non-open source libraries I've worked with
| that really impressed me.
| wpeterson wrote:
| This article is dangerous in romanticizing the "not invented
| here" culture at many big tech companies and seems rooted more in
| the 90s than present day.
|
| The world of open source tooling and easily re-usable SAAS
| offerings means everyone has access to the best tools, whether
| you're a small startup or a big company.
|
| Anyone who longs for internal, corporate tooling baffles me when
| they can use things that actually have polish, user experience
| and likely better implementations under the hood.
|
| Companies should spend their time/energy building things unique
| to their problem domain, not weak also-ran corporate tooling.
| thesehands wrote:
| Wanted to see what Facebook Scuba was, and found this comment
| thread that really highlights the point of this blog.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463016
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