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Fun Yet Effective Meetings

blog.pwkf.org

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Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#11

Post by jmartinpetersen »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

I guess for the author (and most other people who hasn't participated on usenet or the like), email is understood as "person to person communication through email". As in, not something that involves listserv.

It seems like you agree on the principles but have different favourite tools for the solution?

One upside of using a chat'ty tool is that you don't need to discuss top vs bottom posting ...

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#12

Post by jfcorbett »

This piece is a collection of disjointed claims and complaints. There is little in the way of argumentation to support any of them (and nothing in the way of evidence).

The existence of a valid opposing view on each of these claims isn't even acknowledged.

Then there's that the content is disjointed from the title. Clickbait is evil.

TBH I don't get why this post floated to HN top. Especially when there are so many better pieces about this topic out there. Off the top of my head: https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate Go read that; a much better use of time.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#13

Post by skrebbel »

Entirely offtopic, but I'm bothered to no end that this page appears to be using the LaTeX default font but the typesetting is shit (on my Edgium/Windows at least). Like an uncanny valley.

Apparently I've been trained to go "hey, Computer Modern! If anything this is gonna be nice on the eyes" and then when it isn't my stomach makes weird feelings.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#14

Post by StavrosK »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

I very much agree with you. Even without lists, I found email better because it lets you gather your thoughts and present them coherently.

Nowadays I prefer Zulip, as it's a great fusion of email/lists/IM with various very nice features and usability added.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#15

Post by boredumb »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

I find that slack channels generally can be less pedantic and people are more likely to ask "dumb" questions they would otherwise not bother with in an email.

Archives do the job, but being able to have a dedicated channel in a tool i'm using for ongoing communication is nice and I find it nice to pin certain posts to the channel for reference or newcomers.

With that said my only arguments for a slack or "async" IM client is generally predicated on it being internal communication.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#16

Post by rich_sasha »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

+1. Also, chats imply a semi-synchronous conversation, which IMHO is the worst of both worlds. Talking to people 1:1 is disruptive, but at least very efficient. E-mails are slow, but very non-disruptive. Chats are slow, inefficient _and_ almost as disruptive as talking.

You could use them in an async manner I guess, but Slack isn't really made for that, it's clumsy as an e-mail replacement.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#17

Post by darkerside »

I'm not sure if this satire is crude and poorly targeted, or if it's high brow to the point it's over my head.

I think it may be the latter, not because I "get it", but because it's hard to believe someone is really arguing for using Slack like a microservice over the monolith of meetings. I think author is skewering the "adopt everything" crowd that jumped all over microservices and likely the comprises the current wave of Slack adopters. Not that I'm against Slack, but pushing more there instead of into a well run meeting, particularly to make effective decisions as a team, is a laughable idea.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#18

Post by chrisweekly »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible."

You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the mechanisms for tagging users and other channels; "pinning" key attachments; all its 3rd party integrations (ie, it's viable as a "hub" for communications and record-keeping thereof)... Don't get me wrong; it's far from perfect, and email -- when used properly -- has substantial strengths. But so does Slack. An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#19

Post by Jedd »

Stratoscope wrote: post #6
elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

The problem with an email loop is it has no visibility to newcomers. If you create a channel for a particular topic, then when someone new joins the team, you can point them to that channel to catch up.

This is the same problem that TFA glosses over.

From the article:

> Having everything searchable makes it super easy for a) newcomers that can simply scroll back, and b) old timers such as me that forget and can also simply scroll back.

The (false) implication being that in the 40 years we've had email, no one's worked out how to archive and index it.

Worse, the disingenuous use of the word 'simply' here.

For some years I've put effort into my comms to avoid the words 'simply', 'just', and similar whenever describing a task I wish upon someone else.

It devalues the time, effort, and complexity that I'm demanding of someone else, by assuming the task I'm pushing onto them is trivial.

In this case, trying to comprehend context, let alone nuance, from an instant interruption log, is a massive cognitive load. Timing / pace is completely lost when reviewing a big wall of short and sharp exchanges between multiple people.

Compare and contrast reading an email thread where people aren't battling to be first / fast - but rather, to be coherent, concise, cogent, and considerate in their correspondence.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#20

Post by Jedd »

chrisweekly wrote: post #18
elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible." You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the m…

> An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

Are you suggesting that a non-free, expensive, SaaS, IRC/rocket/mattermost/element/etc clone is not where we should be aiming?

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