Item — HN Reader

I read number 2 more as being ready with your own agenda items. For example, if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself.

If you have something prepared and then there’s a site speed, SEO, or series of bug complaints you might be able to pitch your minimal ideas as part of that solution.

I like the concept but I don’t know how well it would work in practice or how I would document my preparations for some point in the future. I do often wonder if I should run my work a bit like I run my blog though, generating documents about why and how. Maybe keeping them in wait for that opportunity.

That could be a lot of extra work that never sees the light, but we probably do a lot of that anyway?

2 comments

To flesh out things to where you could actually make a reasonable pitch with things like realistic time estimates and documents that would be useful to read then you'd have to have already done it, it'd be trivial, or you apparently have plenty of spare time to do serious spikes in your day to day. You'd also have to have the spare time to update these project ideas as the months pass, the product and codebase changes, etc.

I'm often convinced people extrapolate their insane luck with teams+companies and assume every other company/team can replicate their results. I have a hard time finding people in high level positions who give the slightest of fucks about engineering focused tasks but I am someone who works on product teams. The target goal is always about making money - not saving money or improving velocity.

> if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself.

Why would you want to do that? You will not get the cream for such work. From experience, you'll never get recognition for these things, you will never get paid more and most certainly they may dump more work at you.

Taking initiative and improving something never pays off to you.

Unless you are the type of person that looks out of the window at the company car park and sees board member in a branch new Lambo and then say to yourself proudly "I did that".

And this is the reason that at one point, Google has 4 different messaging apps and presented 3 at one presentation. No one gets promoted by improving an existing service