111–120 of 290 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is a middle ground. if i walk past you and you make eye contact, i say hi. if you are focused on your screen ignoring me, then i remain silent
That doesn’t account for folks who fail to make eye contact (of which there are many in tech)
Anything less and you'll have people just enjoying a day at the park (without the laptop).
Have a company wiki.
Have anyone who can’t touch type learn to do so, on the clock, as priority 1, before anything else.
If you can’t type a lot and quickly, you will resort to speaking instead, which isn’t convenient to consume and isn’t indexable. Strongly discourage calls and synchronous communications in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree with the occasional relaxed "coffee chat", and having a repository full of good documentation, but... > If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. That seems excessive to me, especially if everyone is also staying connected via chat, emails, etc. Weekly meetings are about my limit, considering I also have work to do, meetings with external stakeholders, ad-hoc meetings, etc.
At least one video call a day is more about socialization than work; chat and email doesn't really strengthen psychological feelings of connection to the team. Regularly putting a face to the nickname is important. I consider small meetings (say <10 people) within the team, ad-hoc or otherwise, to count against the once a day minimum. It doesn't need to be a purely social call to be effective.
In any case, not having a daily meeting does not mean something is wrong, as the parent poster stated.
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
And as the currently top comment says: make your messages public by posting them in the right Slack channels. I had a former colleague literally sabotaging me -- he thought he was getting fired because I was hired, and quickly hated my guts apparently -- by not responding to my Slack DMs which I used to bring a bit more details that I felt could be too much for the channels (logs, error messages from CLI tools etc). I could not progress on important tasks for a few weeks because of him.
After he pulled this stunt twice, I simply started posting in our team's channel where executives are also present. He never dared to delay a response ever again for as long as I was there during the contract.
It's sad that it sometimes comes to this but work is work and I am paid to deliver, not to develop endless empathy towards childish insecurities that result in a literal sabotage of my work.
Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.
I’d want this as much as I used to enjoy open floor plan at the office… Discouraging 1:1 and private communication in my experience would actually have 100% opposite effect of what you are describing. This is equivalent to discouraging pair-programming which while may not be everyone’s cup of tea many find extremely productive