131–140 of 194 posts
When you have the constant pressure from management to do X instead of writing on Y in a limited time, then you have no chance to write beautiful, centralised information. And so, the company itself accumulates technical debt, looses history and precious information that might be speed up people in the future.
Real-time, spoken communication is on-site work super power. When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enfor…
I agree with you partially. I found something interesting, with this everyone work from home: I'm able to communicate with certain people more effectively via zoom. I think it boils down to with zoom, you are literally in someone's face, and it's very obvious when you aren't fully focused on them. Perhaps the new way, with zoom, gave some people an opportunity to reset their manners? Not clear what the real reason be…
Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the…
I get what you're saying here, but can't we replace writing and reading with speaking and listening, and claim somewhat the same thing for synchronous communications?
To me, if you have employees who can't write or read effectively, that's as bad as employees who can't speak or listen effectively. If you have those kinds of people, you have hired sub-standard people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullets 2 and 3 combined are actually recommended for spoken communications as well. As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you. Probably over half of the communications problems I've seen at work are because people don't follow this basic practice. They respond based…
> As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you. I find a practice like this is also helpful for following up after a meeting. For meetings that warrant my taking notes, I like to type them up immediately afterwards, send them out to the other attendees, and solicit corre…
The problem that I found with it, is that a recurring receiver (let's say a client) will eventually start trusting your minutes so much that they don't even bother to read them and just answer with 'Looks good' and basically you lose the power of minutes.
To counter this, recently I've been trying to insert one wrong bullet point from the beginning, making the receiver pay more attention down the line. I don't have yet enough data points to see if this approach works.
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Recently, I was so frustrated with some folks poor reading comprehension that I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules: - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high. - The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing). - The r…
Oh man, I hear you. The amount of sad encounters (especially lately) that I've had as a result of people not understanding what I'm saying because they don't actually read what I wrote are enraging. I almost quit one client over it because their IT guy is the worst. He will decide ahead of time what your email probably says, and that's what he reads into it even if I wrote the opposite. I try to blame myself first fo…
My main problem with clients has always been 1) They don't really know what they want, beyond "a website", and 2) The reading comprehension of pretty much everyone I interact with is surprisingly low. I've mostly dealt with small-business owners, whose personalities seem to veer towards the eccentric.
With my current client, I'll send out emails requesting clarification for certain features that need to be implemented on the site. If I'm lucky, I'll get an email back with at least one of the issues having been addressed. There's been emails where the response was in no way relevant. At one point I even got a photo of someone's backyard sent to me as a response.
I've learned to only send him a single line of text if it requires a response, to increase my chances of getting something I can act on.
I really like making web sites, and programming in general... It's just the frustration of poor communication that makes the job so frustrating. I think if I were more of a salesman/people-person, I would probably be better about figuring out what they really need, and offering solutions to them... rather then just getting upset that they don't what they want.
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> I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules: > [...] > - The reader has to retype the original communication themselves before they can respond.... In email (not following Outlook/conversation style) and newsgroups, people would trim the original quoted material down to what they were responding to and then type their responses inline. Whil…
Yeah, it's really unfortunate that inline replying effectively died out, replaced by top-posting. I think inline replies, while lending themselves to the selective quotation problem you mention, nevertheless force more careful consideration of the original text.
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I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working…
That’s an interesting idea regarding rotating external request handling. Do the team members not currently on call forward requests to those on call? How do you manage continuity of communication once the rotation has shifted?
Usually there's nothing (in almost 4 years I think less than 5) that goes across weeks that's still in progress. We have a very low volume of actual incidents, and external requests that are sizeable enough get turned into actual prioritised stories by the next planning.
This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment. One of the reasons I d…
> It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. This is indeed intensely frustrating. It is so ridiculous that when you just don’t respond, you’ll end up with a person just saying only ‘hello’ to you three days in a row...
Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the…
> participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. I get what you're saying here, but can't we replace writing and reading with speaking and listening, and claim somewhat the same thing for synchronous communications? To me, if you have employees who can't write or…
> If you have those kinds of people, you have hired sub-standard people.
I used to think so as well, but from my work experience I'm leaning towards being good at written communication is not the norm.
next question.
/me: an expert writer who sees no change on the horizon