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When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

by yosheeck on 3/29/15, 6:09 AM with 28 comments

• by Toenex on 3/29/15, 10:39 AM

  > A big (2B+ $) company. The division in the middle of UK. They make Set Top Boxes - they are somehow good at that.

  So, despite what the author thinks about their methods and their technology choices and despite anecdotal intermediate performance indicators ("Solving bug takes ages") whatever they are doing is working.

  How many start-ups do we read about on HN that are using the latest and greatest language/framework/stack/methodology and yet don't yet have a business?

• by Spearchucker on 3/29/15, 9:27 AM

  There's this tendency I've started seeing more and more of in recent years. People pick an idea (be that a method, a technology or a philosophy) and make that their world. So you have people loudly proclaiming "We're agile", or "We're FOSS".

  This isn't necessarily bad. It does get bad when it's exclusive of anything else. When someone tells me they only ever do something one way, what they're really saying is "We're incapable of introspection. We like our self-imposed status quo, and have no interest in improving ourselves."

  Of course the other extreme is just as bad - change for the sake of change is just as destructive.

• by skrebbel on 3/29/15, 10:03 AM

  All hardware companies I've seen on the inside are like this. Philips, FEI, Cisco, ASML, Océ. Somehow, when software isn't the only part that matters, people stick their heads in the sand and pretend like the 1980's never ended. I've given up trying to figure out why or change it.

  It's the only reason I only do web stuff now. I like both domains, but the hardware / embedded software industries are just retarded.

• by hrktb on 3/29/15, 8:32 AM

  If a team with extensive experience in CVS is already dragging it's feets to move to SVN, trying to get it to git is a fool's errand.

  And SVN isn't the plague either, if they could be happy with, it should be good enough for a number of years. At least the migration path from CVS seems a lot more realistic.

  Moving legacy systems is always a pain, and more often than not it's a matter of having enough people fluent in the target technology. I guess the point of the rant here is to urge people to get new hammers when their current one is getting old.

• by emsy on 3/29/15, 8:39 AM

  I've been in a similar situation, though not nearly as dramatic. I've noticed the same effect: the talented people leave the company out of frustration. We talk about 3 people quitting in 6 months. In my opinion, it's a situation that happens when a B or C player manages to hire a B or even an A player.

  And here is how it happened: In my case, I was transfered to a company that worked in cooperation with my initial company, so I didn't really have a choice. One colleague was very talented, but coming from a foreign country he couldn't really judge the company. The second colleague started at the company after graduation but grew out of it by learning and doing side projects after work.

  I can understand the authors frustration, but I'd like to know how he got the job. If you knew the culture beforehand and joined with the naïvety that it would change for him, he should really be more modest.

• by caminante on 3/29/15, 7:50 AM

  I tried, but couldn't make any sense of this rant.

• by probablybroken on 3/29/15, 11:12 AM

  The situation described here looks to me like a team drowning in technical, product oriented difficulties that prevent anyone from having the available bandwidth to introduce new methodologies because of the chaos that doing this on the run would ( or would be perceived to ) introduce. In my experience, engineers need the headspace to learn new tools in a non impacting situation, which usually requires the introduction of low risk side projects to learn the new tools and techniques. In a way, this is actually a staffing / time related issue.

• by Puts on 3/29/15, 11:36 AM

  I used to cite this saying all the time. Now I'm more keen to think that this saying can be twisted to support just about any argument.

• by huuu on 3/29/15, 9:01 AM

  I think this is mostly a management issue. People dont like changes. So as long some changes are not forced nothing is going to happen.

  And if a company only uses rakes to dig holes imho you can either try to convince management that using a spade is better or stop complaining or just leave.

• by vacri on 3/29/15, 7:51 AM

  aytekin, your last three comments in your history are marked dead. I don't know why, they seem innocuous, but you may want to contact the mods.

• by chrisbennet on 3/31/15, 4:52 AM

  The actual phrase is "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

• by jkot on 3/29/15, 10:47 AM

  Any blacksmith will have different opinion.