Yishan Wong

I think Yishan Wong's thoughts on this really hits the mark:
http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-tools-are-top-priority.html

It is incredibly important to get your tools right so you can operate as efficiently as possible. At my company we didn't get around to this till much later, partly due to the dilemma you mentioned abt focusing on customer-facing software vs. internal tools, and partly due to the fact that the people who would benefit the most from automation (e.g. finance folks, inventory managers, etc) don't have the same obsession with automating away mundane tasks like us engineers do.

This lack of tools hurt us quite a bit once we started scaling, in ways that impacted some customer relationships (because occasionally we didn't invoice or ship correctly, etc). We have since invested significantly in tools, but we should've done this to begin with.

To make the customer vs. internal tools compromise easier, you may even want to get some basic tools in place via contract work/offshoring and then revisit these later once you have the time/resources. The hard part really is determining what to automate, and how much, and those are decisions that you should make. The development itself can be done by someone else.

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Of all the "big companies" I've seen, Facebook has the best internal IT. A lot of those policies were set by Yishan Wong; basically, if something can be done more efficiently by an individual employee than by using IT, the process is broken. (http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/) Facebook IT is basically a cache, but if something is faster to get from the Apple Store or whatever, that's how they did it -- not sure how it is done now.

It's hilarious how in big companies it takes weeks+ to get things done in IT which could be trivially accomplished with a credit card and web browser, for less money. Yes, there are security policies (which should be enforced in the infrastructure and by user policy, not by end user hardware alone, and it should be carrot vs. stick for common builds), but things like ordering keyboards and chairs shouldn't be bottlenecked.

Which version took longer to write? Which version has fewer SLOC (I'm using SLOC here as a proxy for code complexity)? Weigh those two factors, then choose the winning language accordingly.

I'm oversimplifying, but I believe the point is an extremely important one. We've all heard the startup lore that David-sized startups beat industry Goliaths by being much more nimble than the lumbering giants they're competing against. If you're a software startup, your engineering tools are your sling and stone: if your tools are good and you can wield them with expert precision, you'll be able to iterate more quickly, make your users happier, and outpace the competition sooner.

Yishan Wong has written an excellent essay about the importance of tools:

http://www.algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-tools-are-top-priority.html

Looks great! But, here is the problem.

Medium to large companies, they need some sort of calendaring and meeting room booking system. This is where outlook (more importantly exchange) comes into the picture. I don't think it's the best solution out there, but it's a solution that works reasonably well.

I also don't really like that email and calendaring are tied together, I'd love to see a robust solution that works across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Yishan Wong wrote about this a few years ago.[1]

So, this would work great for personal email and small companies, but I don't see it replacing the email client of the larger ones. I'd love to see gmail and microsoft give some of these search/indexing features.

[1] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-computer-science.html

I have searched, but found nothing which verifies your statement that they were looking for positions as senior managers. Or as software engineers, for that matter. Only that Koum was turned down by Facebook, and Acton by Twitter and Facebook.

For what it's worth, FB had 200 engineers at the time, says http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html . According to the FB IPO prospectus, they had a 81% growth in 2010 and 57% growth 2011, in engineering headcount. That's about 600-800 engineers at IPO.

Isn't what you're suggesting still a subtle aspect of ageism? If the only positions are for low-level engineers, with little in the way of management advancement, then there's a preference for those with little experience or those with little desire to take on more management roles.