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How to rally engineering teams to build the internal tools you need

4 pointsby makaimcalmost 2 years ago

1 comment

fluxinflexalmost 2 years ago
I once worked at a company where I was responsible for exclusively doing this: building internal tools.<p>It was one of the most satisifying jobs I ever had. It was for a mobile games company with between 100 and 200 employees. Most developers worked on the mobile games and since these were very hit &amp; miss, developers got disenchanted working for months on a game that got canned because the numbers weren&#x27;t hit or management changed the focus. Few got to work on successful games - the envy of all developers in the company.<p>Instead I built these tools - mostly stuff that moved data between various third party products. But also built tools for company motivational purposes. All sorts of stuff including a weather aggregated to measure air quality within the office which sent slack alerts if conditions got unacceptable.<p>Part of the enjoyment was the immediate feedback from stakeholders and since these were &quot;only&quot; internal tools, there weren&#x27;t deadlines or hassle about hitting numbers or deadlines. Testing wasn&#x27;t that important, as long as the tool worked it was fine - a real hack-away until it works type of job!<p>I also began to see how people worked and whether there might be tooling to make their lives easier - most projects were initiated by a conversationn over a coffee (or other culinary delights)!<p>I can only recommend this to any company to have a team that exclusively works for the employees to make their lives easier. Simple scripts can sometimes help a long way to making non-tech people more efficient.