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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Code Reviews, Code Stories

Code reviews are a tool that incites a lot of strong emotions from developers. Those who love them write tweets like 
Code review is hard - both reviewing and being reviewed make people cranky. But I know of no better way to make great software. -- @yminsky
This tweet, even in its adoration, still captures some of what people hate about code reviews. They make people cranky, to put it mildly. I personally don't like code reviews very much. In my experience, they are just as likely used to bully, score points, or waste time on pedantic style notes as they are to produce great software. In fact, I think code reviews are absolutely necessary only in three kinds of situations:

1) You don't have good automated testing practices in place to catch most errors at or before checkin.
2) You work on a big project with a very geographically distant team of developers (most open source).
3) You work in a company of many developers and huge code bases where strict style conformity is very important.

In my company, we have one team that falls into slot number 1, and they do code reviews for all checkins. The rest of the team does ad-hoc code reviews and occasional code walkthroughs, and we rely on the heavy use of testing to ensure quality. In general I feel that this enables a good mix of code correctness and checkin velocity.

The one thing this misses, though, is the required opportunity for developers to learn from each other. I like pair programming, and encourage my developers to do it when they are first starting projects or figuring out tricky bugs. But a lot of the time my developers are working in parallel on different code bases, and I felt that we were missing that learning moment that code reviews and pairing can provide. So I started asking people in interviews how they encouraged their team to work together and learn from each other, and I got a great suggestion: encourage the developers to show off work that they're proud of to other team members. Thus the Power Hour was born.

"Power Hour" is an hour that we do every Friday morning with my team and our sister team of warehouse developers. In that hour every developer pairs up with someone else and they take turns sharing something they did that week. Show off something you're proud of, ask for help with a problem you're stuck on, or get feedback on the way something was or is being designed. The power and choice of what to show lies in the hands of the person showing it, which takes away the punitive nature of code reviews; all they are required to do is to share some code. Show off, get help/feedback, and then switch. It's not about code review, that line-by-line analysis and search for errors big and small. It's about code stories, whether they are war stories, success stories, or stories still being written.

There are a lot of features of code review that this Power Hour doesn't satisfy. It's not a quiet opportunity to evaluate someone else's code without them looking over your shoulder. It's driven by the person that wrote the code and they are encouraged to highlight the good parts and maybe even completely bypass the ugly parts. It's not possible for the other person to fully judge the quality of what they're seeing, because judging isn't the point at all. Power Hour is a learning and sharing opportunity, and it is explicitly not an occasion for judging.

This has turned out to be a smashing success. It's amazing how much you can teach and learn in a concentrated hour of working with another person. Last week I showed off a new Redis-based caching implementation I wrote, and got to see all the code and a demo of a new Shiro authentication and entitlement system. I caught a few things I still needed to clean up in the process of explaining my work, and so did my partner. If you, like me, shun formal code reviews, I encourage you to try out a weekly turn at code stories. It's a great way to build up teamwork, encourage excellence, and produce great software, without the crankiness.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

There Is No Number

Is it time to quit your longtime job? It's pretty easy to tell. Have you gone out and interviewed? Gotten job offers? Seriously considered them? Then you should quit. It's that simple. Not quitting now is delaying the inevitable and robbing yourself of the opportunity to grow.

I've seen this time and again, and gone through it myself. It's hard to leave a longtime job, especially when you are treated holistically well. Great perks, good pay, a big network, lots of friends. You may hate how things are done but you know how to get them done. It's scary to think about leaving that comfort zone. And when you bring up the possibility of leaving, either speculatively or actively trying to resign, it's likely that your boss will promise you up and down that they will move mountains for you. A new project! More responsibility! Leadership opportunities! Your pick of teams! Maybe even the biggest enticement out there: more money.

Take a lesson from Peggy Olsen. For those Mad Men fans out there, you know that Don will never change. What made him a great boss for her, a mentor, a leader, was also keeping her boxed in. He wasn't changing, and she needed to grow. Your Don could be your actual manager, but more likely it's the company culture and dynamics that are beyond the ability for one person to change. Be real: will more money make you excited to get out of bed in the morning? Will it make you feel like your contributions are truly important? Will it make you feel like you're actually growing and learning new things?



Sometimes, there is no number.

If that isn't enough to get you moving, here's one more the thing about leaving a long-time job, especially one at a big company: if you are leaving on good terms, there's a very good chance you can go back if things don't work out. A friend of mine recently did just that. After leaving her job at a larger tech company due to malaise with the work and a bad fit with her team, she went to a very small startup to do mobile development in a related genre. When she realized that the startup was just not managed well enough to succeed she reached out to her old employer and was hired back, happier than ever having both learned some new tricks and gotten into a new team.

Throw back your drink, and do the deed. It will probably feel like breaking up with a long-term partner, and it may be one of the most stressful things you've ever done, but it's also a good bet that you will end up better off in the long run. If nothing else, when the deed is done, I bet you will leave with a smile.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Corporate culture: A lesson in unintended consequences

It's been a little more than six months since I left finance to join Rent the Runway. Upon hearing that I moved from a big investment bank to a small startup, many people comment on how different it must be. And it is, but in ways than you might not expect.

The day-to-day aspects of the job are not that different. On the technical front, I'm designing SOA-structured systems, thinking about building a messaging-based data bus, worrying about how to model business workflow into software and making sure we can process everything we need to process in time. I have more freedom to choose the technologies I want to use but I'm also more constrained by limited resources to manage the complexity of additional systems. The giant internal infrastructural support organization I had for hardware and level one support is replaced by a giant cloud vendor that does pretty much the same thing but with crappier hardware and faster turnaround. The people-related work is mostly unchanged. I still use the skills I learned for building consensus across teams, coaching people in their careers, and managing up, down, and laterally. I run plenty of meetings, make plenty of schedules, and continue my struggle balancing management and organization with architecture and coding. My schedule starts and ends slightly later in the day, but even my hours are not much different.

Unlike some that have left finance, I don't hold any major grudges against it. I learned a lot in my six plus years working there, about technology, leadership, and working with people. So given that the work is similar, why leave the better paycheck and general stability for the uncertainty of startup life? I'm much happier now than I was in my last years in finance, and the reason for that is not technical, but cultural. When I started in finance, the culture was surprisingly startup-like. It was more formal, but each team was dedicated to the business they served and we were able to work fairly autonomously in support of that business. Over time, though, the culture changed to become more centralized and thus bureaucratic. Instead of picking the right thing for your business area, you had to get approval from people that had nothing but a vested interest in seeing their pet technology promoted in order to get themselves promoted. That of course led to politically-driven technology which is an absolute nightmare for a person that cares deeply about building great systems.

Ironically, I believe this happened at least partly because the company was concerned with building a formal technical career path in order to promote and retain technical talent. At first, this resulted in senior technical people getting much-deserved recognition and it was great. I wanted nothing more than to reach that highest level myself. But soon the highest-level title ("technology fellow") had been awarded to the backlog of people that truly deserved it, and it became something that was expected to be awarded to more people every year; each group needed to have one, and it was a cheap way to recognize and retain people in years when salaries were stagnant since it didn't necessarily confer any increase in compensation. This growing group of people, many qualified by deep work in one small area, were now expected to help guide the technology decisions of the whole company. And so a bureaucracy was born. Decisions that would have been made via influence within a group and business area started to be dictated by committees far away from that group. The fellows started, unintentionally, to squash creativity of those below them on that same technical track they were supposed to be growing.

As bad as that was, in my opinion the biggest problem with this role was that it was not equivalent to the same level title for managers, "Managing Director". Because the role of fellow became more of an honorary recognition than an actual promotion, it came to pass that the savviest fellows would also get themselves promoted to Managing Director (MD), and thus become first among equals. No longer did the mere tech fellow have the strongest voice in the technical decision making; everyone started striving to become more than just a fellow, and in order to get that MD promotion they needed the backing of the other tech fellows that were also Managing Directors. As we all know, the best technologists are not necessarily the best politicians and decisions started being guided more and more by those better at politics than technology. In this way, an effort to promote and retain technologists ended up building a technical culture of decision making driven by politics and bureaucracy.

At the end of the day, finance is an industry that cares first about money (duh), and secondly about power, and that is true for every successful person that works there in any capacity. Technical qualifications will only ever be rewarded as they make or save money. If you don't find finance fascinating, or care about money above all other things, this cultural friction may grind you down. I've discovered the truth in the wisdom that you enjoy your job more when you're working on a product that you use and enjoy. Rent the Runway has a different goal than my old investment bank; yes, we want to make money, but we want to make it by delivering a great experience to our customer, an experience that I participate in and really love. And that is a goal that I know I can build a great technical culture around.