31–40 of 153 posts
1:1s. WIPs. Asynchronous comms. That’s it. For people who want to, they develop a closer relationship and catch up more often. But it’s not expected. We trust our people, and expectations have been set and agreed upon. It’s enough.
- Meetings are remote first. If at least one person is remote then the whole team video calls in. There is nothing worse than being a person on the virtual end trying to understand a mic grabbing voice from a room full of people. - Schedule peer programming sessions, especially with less senior staff. Without the office environment they have less opportunities to grow. - All meetings should have a note listing all de…
Optional weekly gaming nights in Mario Kart.
> rituals have been helpful for your software development teams An interesting choice of word worth exploring. One could have said "activity" or "procedure", but ritual carries some connotations about the state of remote/hybrid working. What I think you're asking is - what ways we can connect/bond in human ways? Group dynamics, team identity, loyalty, non-monetary reward, focus and satisfaction, and much more, are de…
"Ritual", as well as "ceremony" as it's prescribed by some team methodologies, are both attempts to submit the team individual into a supposed greater order, where there's none. You may speak of ritual or ceremony when something has been instituted for generations or at least several years, for significant effects towards the group itself (not towards its output). When the form and content of your practices change ev…
I absolutely agree with you, and it's all around us, and becoming normative. We work in an industry, only 40 years old at most, that believes, with near religious fervour, that it's purpose is to radically redefine the very nature of life, work and society [1]. (I was given this super interesting link to the Barbrook Cameron essay by another HN poster [2].)
> When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary wildly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to
"Move fast and break things" isn't only about technology. It's also about breaking extant norms and transvaluation. One of the sinister sides of digital technology, in my opinion, is precisely this lie of omission with respect to "disruption". It's not just about "progressively replacing old and inefficient", a disruptor weapon can be turned on anything to gain the ends you want. That makes an even bigger nonsense of the already ridiculous notion of technological determinism, because at the very least you now have to ask "determined by who". Which gang of breathless neophytes will be telling me how to live my life today?
[1] http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...
- As some context, we use Basecamp's Shape Up to deliver features. This prioritises independence, async communication, and deep work. Engineers and designers are largely free to manage their active projects to how they see fit (managers provide context).
- Team social activities only happen on Mondays and Friday. Tuesday -> Thursday are reserved for deep work.
- We found that mixing social and work meetings didn't work (i.e. a weekly kick-off where people both talk about their weekend and their priorities). Instead, we have a 100% social coffee video call on Monday mornings with some jazz. Weekly work updates happen async and are project-dependent.
- On Fridays afternoons we have a quiz or a board game. We like doing it later afternoon on Friday, where deep work is less likely to happen. We also have an async social check-in with a different prompt each week, where you can share some experiences, pictures of a holiday, etc.
- Quarterly retreats where we get the team together. We do a morning session and an afternoon session every day, with the rest of the time unstructured/fun.
Things are avoid:
- We avoid stand-ups which devolve into people listing out what they did yesterday - instead, we encourage async self-organization
- We try and back to back meetings to avoid context switching and 30m-2hr deadzones
- We discourage arranging calls just to organize thoughts (I was bad at this myself). In our experience, communication is higher fidelity if it is written up in message threads on Basecamp. Video calls are really only used for 1:1s, social meetings, demos, or regrouping in the context of an active project.
- We got rid of Slack. Active projects have their own chat rooms, but the rule of thumb is: presume anything not in a forum thread or document is ephemeral and will be lost forever.
We have started putting together a lot of our rituals and culture together in our handbook (https://handbook.datapane.com), so would love any feedback.
Blood sacrifices and invocations to see who can summon the cutest and fiercest beast. You show your demon to the camera and get votes on it and on the chants you did to bring it from the depths. At the end of each sprint. Remote orgies to appease the gods of nature and ensure a good deployment. Everyone wears traditional handmade masks for anonymity and we only do it if all tests are green, obviously. Every three mon…
> everyone on the team writing up weekly summaries. Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them. > record every video conference Don’t do this shit. It’s a great way to have everyone reserved rather than relaxed with free flowing ideas.
> Waste of time unless you’re an obsessive micromanager. Other team members either don’t read these entirely or just skim them. This is probably true if you work in complete isolation. If, however, you are a part of a larger team or organization a lot of value can come out of this type of transparency - it removes the need for a lot of meetings and is a great tool in an asynchronous work environment. Just two minutes…
I receive around 50 to 70 mails per day (on a slow day). Most of them corporate noise from the mother ship. I still need to at least skim them as sometimes parts or single mails are relevant.
Also there is a barrage of mails from the different projects I am onboarded onto as an expert for specific topics.
So I need to take a close look at these and see if there are action items for me included.
Then the regular mails from within the team I need to skim if anything is expected of me.
On top of that there is Slack and MS Teams. And a few different Jira Instances I need to stay on top of.
Over the last 16 months I have seen my team in person exactly once for an afternoon at a working offsite.
When Corona started I did a daily stand-up post in our team channel in Slack. I stopped a few weeks ago as except for one colleague nobody had participated for over a year. So why add to the noise for them I asked myself.
How would you expect me to read additional prose about what my colleagues have done. I just wouldn't get enough out of it. Because the things I would profit from in terms of synergies would be nitty-gritty technical details that would be omitted in a weekly summary.
It would just be additional noise to me.
If I have a question I ask in Slack and receive great substantial replies within very short time. If I can contribute I answer questions in Slack.
Else I do my work and try to ignore as much of the corporate noise as possible. At least it is email noise. Not open space office noise. The latter is harder to ignore.