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William Pietri
Personal blog · williampietri.com/writing · on HN as wpietricareerprogramming
William Pietri's personal blog at williampietri.com covers career and programming. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Slightly Less Awful Hiring”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
48mentions?
7HN people?
2012–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked posts appear to cover software development practice, such as weekly retrospectives and story-point tracking. The comments cite them without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Slightly Less Awful Hiring3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-09-09
- Slightly Less Awful Hiring (2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-09-09
- Mainstream adoption and Agile's second chasm2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-26
- /writing/2004/teamroom/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-19
What Hacker News says?
Personally, I hate it because it is too functional. It has eight zillion features, all of them overlapping. It has so many fields, dimensions, views, and reports that I despair of ever getting a setup that usefully matches an actual workflow. The point of a work tracking system is to bring everybody together, but I regularly see people dealing with Jira by having their own separate tracking methods: docs, emails, sp…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M”Submitted Slightly Less Awful Hiring (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem I would say building a good one is an impossible problem, because of conflicting needs both across and within companies. The primary job of Jira isn't to help work get done. It's to give managers and executives feelings of knowledge and control even when that makes everything worse. You don't need fancy planning systems to…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “I fucking hate Jira”Submitted Slightly Less Awful Hiring as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived. I've built products just fine using verbal communication nearly exclusively. [1] We don't need to create some sort of panoptic archive of every conversation ever had to get things done. If people miss things, they miss things. We c…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room”Submitted Mainstream adoption and Agile's second chasm as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI personally recommend physical boards when possible, especially for people just getting started. E.g., my startup-sized kanban board is here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ You can happily use, e.g., sticky notes on a wall by your desk or inside a cabinet door. If you really can't do that, software can be ok, but it's easier to develop bad habits with software. With a physical system, certain…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?”Submitted Slightly Less Awful Hiring as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis sounds too simple, but you just don't let people go days without checking in. I wrote about once simple process here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2014/simple-planning-for-st... The key points to keep things on the rails: 1) it's a work queue for the whole team, and the whole team is responsible for every work item, 2) the units of work are small, so they should generally be finished in a day or two, and 3)…
Comment linking /writing/2014/simple-planning-for-startups/
on “Don’t Do This in Production”Yeah, I think trying to perfectly describe the work in advance is Waterfall thinking. Most of what gets sold as "Agile" these days is Waterfall dressed up in Agile terms. But as an example of early Agile intent, here is how we worked in 2004: http://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/ You'll note that we never did detailed planning more than a week in advance. We could have, but it would have been a waste, beca…
Comment linking /writing/2004/teamroom/
on “Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die”I'm a firm kanban person, and I think it might help you. I happen to use the tool KanbanFlow for this. [1] But I also have done it with index cards on a wall [2], and Trello's ok, too. Boiling it down, Kanban approaches require you to 1) break big things down into small deliverables, 2) describe your workflow in columns, placing the units of work in the correct columns, and 3) setting strong work-in-process limits o…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?”He's not wrong. Having been involved in the Agile movement since before the term Agile was coined, I think of Scrum as the least interesting of Agile processes, but also the most successful in terms of adoption. I used to think that was a contradiction. Now I think it's almost inevitable. I wrote more about it elsewhere [1], but the basic deal is that most companies have other priorities than being effective, so the…
Comment linking /writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/
on “Scrum is fragile, not Agile”The panic shifting thing is real, and for me way too many companies operate in permanent panic. I'm fine with responding to actual crises. But so much "urgent" work is really just managerial failure. Fake deadlines used to "motivate" people. Broken processes that people work around. Executives urgently need to look like they're doing something. Easily solvable problems festering until they become crises. Managers ru…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “There Are No Bugs, Just TODOs”Basically instead of giving them a sense of control, it's to give them actual control. What I promise to do is release a new version of whatever they want at least once a week, and hopefully more often. If every week (or every day) they get to decide what that is, they stop caring about estimates. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071374 And I also wrote something up in response to a previous HN disc…
Comment linking /writing/2014/simple-planning-for-startups/
on “We are clueless about how long things should take”I probably wouldn't be surprised, having set up hiring processes before. E.g.: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi... Anybody spending 6 hours per candidate on site can afford to test them on some real work. I'll typically do 2 hours for pair programming, and/or 1 hour for reviewing some existing code. 1-2 hours is also a good amount of time for a joint design session on some real problem. Y…
Comment linking /writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hiring/
on “Python coding interview challenges”No, I've built entire products without a spec: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ It's fine.
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “The not so hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android”Exactly. Computers having infinite capacity is sometimes harmful. One of the things I like best about kanban approaches, especially with physical cards is that they discourage putting in too much. When I look back on previous boards (e.g., [1]), my main thought is we still had too much room. We wrote up and carried along so many cards we never got to. But even so, that's way better than something like Jira, because…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Why Jira Sucks”I'm 100% in favor of your view of DevOps, and its devolution from movement to dubious agglomeration of vendors and consultants is something I've seen before. Like DevOps, the Agile movement started out as a bunch of smart, dedicated people seeking a new way to work. But once the excitement spread out of that passionate early-adopter group, it changed radically for the worse. I think that's because once you get to ma…
Comment linking /writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/
on “A developer goes to a DevOps conference”Estimation is only valuable in narrow circumstances. One has to know the expected return with a fair bit of precision to do ROI calculations; generally business revenues projections are highly imprecise, so estimation is often a waste. Reliable estimation requires a fair bit of information. The technologies have to be well understood. The team has to have worked together sufficiently. The business needs user impact…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake”There's a conflict in what you say. If people don't read documents and will ask when they need something, why invest in creating heavy tickets filled with the text they don't want? My team (and many XP teams) gets by just fine organizing things with cards that have a modest number of words on them (5-10, normally). When we need something, we ask. It works fine for us. We're a distributed team that has never met in p…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “No, we won’t have a video call for that”Yes, exactly. Ease of applying is one of the things sustaining the problem. It makes companies feel overwhelmed with resume spam. A few years back when I was hiring at Code for America, I redid things so that it was harder for the lazy applicant but easier for the serious one. I asked people to send me something resume-like (LinkedIn was fine), but to skip the cover letter and instead write a short answer to 1 of 5…
Comment linking /writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hiring/
on “My Amazon Interview Horror Story”Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy. The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Softw…
Comment linking /writing/2004/teamroom/
on “Pivotal Tracker will shut down”The notion with information radiators not that you tell them to look up. The notion is that people naturally look at things while walking around or when idle, so it's valuable to make important things visible. It also serves as a way to trigger and focus discussions. For example, consider the Kanban board. Here's one I built a while back: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ We loved having a physica…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Show HN: Monitoror – Unified monitoring wallboard”Right? For those who want to check, the four values: https://agilemanifesto.org/ And the 12 principles: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html But to my dismay, the Agile world quickly got colonized by certification schemes and consultants targeting large companies, so it rapidly turned into something that a lot of the early people were very disappointed with. I wrote about the dynamic some years back: https://w…
Comment linking /writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/
on “Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners”> these technical interviews are skills that you don't really gain on the job I believe that's definitely the case. That's why I shifted my interviews to be as much like the work as possible. First round was a pair programming interview plus a bit of technical discussion. Second round was kicking around a feature and its implementation with the team. My goal was also to see people at their best, so I did as much as…
Comment linking /writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hiring/
on “You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview”Hey, would you be willing to be interviewed about this experience? Anonymously, if you like? I'm thinking about doing a book, and this would fit well into the sample chapter I'm writing right now. If so, you can find contact details at http://williampietri.com/
Comment linking /
on “Nobody’s going to steal your idea”I think of kanban mainly as an analytical model for things represented in sticky notes or trello cards. The main things I think you'd find useful are a) making sure you represent your actual workflow, and b) setting WIP limits. You can see a (team) implementation of this using index cards here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “Personal Kanban 101”For what it's worth, one of the things I did with my interview process was to make all the coding involve an actual computer. I gave the interviewee their choice of editor, and was happy to let them use their own computer. My theory was that in an interview I wanted to see people at their best. I wasn't hiring them to code on whiteboards or learn how to use new text editors; I was hiring them to spend a lot of time…
Comment linking /writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hiring/
on “People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance”I'm also a big fan of index cards for planning. I just took another first-time entrepreneur through a planning session and it went very well. My starting advice here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2014/simple-planning-for-st... And here's how we used them to run a startup for ~2 years: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/ You're not alone in being bothered by finality. If I sense any of that, one…
Comment linking /writing/2015/the-big-board/
on “The joy of index cards (2009)”I think that's pretty close except for the joke part. The early-days problem with the Agile movement was that it promised actual change by empowering the line workers to actually get things done for users by shipping early and often. That was an intolerable threat to industrial-age managerial power structures, to which waterfall is an ideal that justifies lots of management control. But since then it's been graduall…
Comment linking /writing/2011/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/
on “How to distort Scrum until it no longer works”
