Ask HN: Which companies have great software engineering practices?

26 points by mdlm 6 years ago | 19 comments

cdbattags 6 years ago |

Yikes at these answers so far.

Here's my list as a computer science geek always attempting to look top down at the industry:

- Cloudflare

- Datadog

- GitLab

- DistroKid

- Spotify

- TransferWise

- Typeform

- Okta (maybe)

This being my short list off the top of my head. Hopefully I can edit with some more later.

---

Also, a note that I'm currently hiring:

I lead an international role for AB InBev called Z-Tech which is modernizing the last-mile supply chain for all of AB InBev's massive network of subsidiary suppliers.

That said, I'm attempting to model our engineering practices based on some learnings from the above list of companies.

Feel free to reach out at:

christian.battaglia at ab-inbev dot com

DrScump 6 years ago | |

Christian, I took a quick look at the Careers page for ab-inbev, and the vast majority of listed positions in the U.S. are internships and blue-collar jobs.

I was impressed, however, to see that your corporate website cookie settings default to maximum privacy!

cdbattags 6 years ago | | |

You are correct, good DrScump. I pointed that out to the team immediately. I started Monday and this being a static site without user interaction we deemed it a non-business critical item and it's in the backlog for the next couple weeks .

For those unaware, we're talking about the lack of an SSL cert on our new company website.

Edit: Or did I completely misjudge that as sarcasm?

enchiridion 6 years ago | |

Curious why Spotify is on this list. As a user, I've found their clients to be buggy.

cdbattags 6 years ago | | |

From a UX perspective, they do a little too much "experimentation" which equates to buggy clients but the actual tech is insanely complicated but universally controlled.

They have a C++ layer for each client that binds into Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, etc.

And as for audio and their upcoming video hand in hand with Joe Rogan podcast being an exlusive now, the way they operate in guilds/pods is one of the first examples of this democratized workflow.

starchild_3001 6 years ago |

Google will definitely be on this list.

Great tooling. Great SW development culture. Strict requirements on code quality. Mandatory testing. Mentorship and continuous reviews for writing good code.

Nextgrid 6 years ago | |

And a culture that encourages every single engineer to make yet another chat app.

mav3rick 6 years ago | |

Agreed.

cbanek 6 years ago |

I'm not sure which angle this question is asked from, but I can think of two:

1 - you're looking for great software engineering practices to model based on other companies, which is good.

2 - you're looking for a company to work at, and you really value software engineering practices, which is also good.

I feel like these are two different answers though. Many companies that have great practices do them because they are large, and have resources to implement them, think FAANG. It is financially worth it to have great software engineering practices to reduce friction and increase quality. These can be really interesting and have great papers written about their sometimes open sourced technology. The Google SRE program comes to mind.

If you're looking for a company with great software engineering practices to work at, I think that's a lot trickier. It honestly depends on team and culture, and I've found it varies widely, even between different leads. Even at big companies where I've worked, some teams just have bad engineering practices, either due to bad team culture or practical problems like lack of time or resources. Also be careful because a lot of software engineering practices aren't about writing code, committing code, or writing papers about tools and frameworks - they're about personal interactions and problem solving together. Even great software engineering practices can be perverted in a toxic culture.

rahulpyd1 6 years ago |

Microsoft. I read their books. They have more principled approach towards SW. Their languages and libraries are well designed.

mav3rick 6 years ago | |

I have worked there and it's too big to make a general statement. Different orgs / different teams have different standards.

thepiratesailor 6 years ago | |

Seriously, creator of well-know shitty operating system with shady business practices?

2rsf 6 years ago | | |

Yes them, in general they have a serious approach to software engineering (though YMMV per team)

jmeister 6 years ago |

Goldman Sachs quants, Jane Street

rmrfstar 6 years ago | |

OCaml shops, both of them.

ashconnor 6 years ago |

I hear good things about Pivotal. They take pair programming seriously.

Huggernaut 6 years ago | |

I worked at Pivotal for 4 years. I think it had a great engineering culture, with a very principled approach to XP. This may not be for everyone of course. I learnt a lot there, it was a collection of people all wanting to become better, rather than simply delivering software.

After the VMWare acquisition, we'll have to wait and see how much of the culture remains.

cdbattags 6 years ago | |

As the NYC alumni "liaison" for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, I've heard mixed reviews of Pivotal as a dev shop (not a flex; just trying to convey context).

Usually it's very great but in certain cases people feel like they spin their wheels on projects.

probinso 6 years ago |

nasa