New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to help an engineering team come to a consensus on best practices?
Ask HN: How to help an engineering team come to a consensus on best practices?
2 by semicolonandson | 5 comments on Hacker News.
As my engineering team grows, there are naturally differences in opinion as to how things should be done - e.g. "Should a single X.js file contain both the React component and its styles OR should we create both an X.js (which contains only React and no css) and a linked-to X.css files?" - e.g. 2 "Should we use dash-case for CSS class or camelCase or snake_case?" I've scheduled a meeting next week where the goal is to reach some consensus. Seeing as I will be moderating this meeting, I wonder how I should approach things? Should we agree on some basic goods up-front (e.g. codebase consistency, standard community practice) and then proceed to rate each competing practice along these dimensions? How do I deal with nebulous goods - one I hear often is "this approach is cleaner". But many of these times I don't see a difference in cleanliness or any pragmatic value in that aspect of cleanliness. And then if consensus cannot be agreed informally, would it make sense to put it to vote anonymously and chose the most popular practice? One of the factors that makes this challenging is that many best practice candidates started as innovations by one individual, and human nature being what it is, that individual is going to fight tooth and nail so that their innovation is chosen -- even though someone else is fighting back every bit as intensely for their competing innovation. I am open for any ideas whatsoever here. I'm a long-time programmer but started managing programmers so don't have any good framework for dealing with issues. And big picture: I would rather have an engineering team that is passionate about the best way to do things rather than one that couldn't care less.
2 by semicolonandson | 5 comments on Hacker News.
As my engineering team grows, there are naturally differences in opinion as to how things should be done - e.g. "Should a single X.js file contain both the React component and its styles OR should we create both an X.js (which contains only React and no css) and a linked-to X.css files?" - e.g. 2 "Should we use dash-case for CSS class or camelCase or snake_case?" I've scheduled a meeting next week where the goal is to reach some consensus. Seeing as I will be moderating this meeting, I wonder how I should approach things? Should we agree on some basic goods up-front (e.g. codebase consistency, standard community practice) and then proceed to rate each competing practice along these dimensions? How do I deal with nebulous goods - one I hear often is "this approach is cleaner". But many of these times I don't see a difference in cleanliness or any pragmatic value in that aspect of cleanliness. And then if consensus cannot be agreed informally, would it make sense to put it to vote anonymously and chose the most popular practice? One of the factors that makes this challenging is that many best practice candidates started as innovations by one individual, and human nature being what it is, that individual is going to fight tooth and nail so that their innovation is chosen -- even though someone else is fighting back every bit as intensely for their competing innovation. I am open for any ideas whatsoever here. I'm a long-time programmer but started managing programmers so don't have any good framework for dealing with issues. And big picture: I would rather have an engineering team that is passionate about the best way to do things rather than one that couldn't care less.
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