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I'm in Ukraine and this is disgusting.
High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
101–110 of 524 posts
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#102My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…
You really have to be religious about enforcing a single source of truth for any information and this gets a lot better.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...
No not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output min…
I think that's a bit ungenerous to think that programmers are somehow different in this regard. Everyone hates attending boring meetings. And non-programmers also have heads down individual work they need to / would rather be doing.
However I agree that the extent of it is the key. I think most people actually hate running meetings (it's basically public speaking), but they hate writing documents even more. It's much easier to "voice over" something than to sit and write it out. It's also easier to enforce attendance than to police opening and actually reading documents. So meetings are the path of least resistance/effort.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#104I was recently introduced to www.Loom.com which is this fremium screen recording app and website (no affiliation). Being able to have a certain type of meeting asynchronously has been a boon to productivity. The async nature of texting is great and adding the same thing for audio and video/screen recording has been similarly great.
Personally, I do not like video recordings. I find them inferior to text communications in terms of maximum bandwidth and bandwidth to cost ratio (time to write and read). However, some people are much better at communicating or understanding material if its shown visually, which can be much more time efficient for both parties sometimes. Every format has a place.
Video recordings shouldn't necessarily replace written messages, they should replace video meetings.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#105My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…
It's actually hilarious how Google - a company famous for it's search engine - made Docs, who's search function cannot find anything.
I live and breathe using Google Docs search functionality. It's my main way of finding files scattered across 10 years of folder hierarchies. It works great.
What do you mean it can't find anything?
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#106I didn't see anything about the hiring process needed to get high-documentation culture to work. Many developers don't write well. Some don't empathize with the reader and so can't communicate complex ideas effectively. Others lack the ability to abstract their ideas. Many will be coming from the exact opposite of a high-documentation culture and so simply will not value good documentation.
Asking people with poor writing skills to work in the way described here seems like it could lead to problems without a selection process favoring good writers, or at least a training system to get new hires up to speed.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#107My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…
> Confluence There's your problem. The only use case for Confluence is when you want to hide information, but credibly claim that it's documented.
> The only use case for Confluence is when you want to hide information, but credibly claim that it's documented.
That describes Sharepoint more than Confluence.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...
No not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output min…
This is true. And the more meetings the better, because if a meeting starts to get serious, you can just drop for another meeting!
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd take confluence over google docs because of how bad Google Docs' search is surprisingly
Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.
They have no content excerpts in search results, so it doesn't provide any help for finding which result is the one you want.
It also weights titles incredibly heavy, which combined with the previous part led to me not even noticing it searched the document body for years.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we work for the same company? :P Confluence has been the bane of my attempts in finding any relevant docs. Which one is the source of truth? Which one was a draft written by an overly eager to make a first impression, new employee (who is no longer with the company)? Don't even get me started on saving meeting notes to confluence. These days, I maintain my own knowledge base on Obsidian. If there's ever any confus…
So you are now the gatekeeper?
If an individual employee is going to put all that work in without being asked to or being given scheduled time to work on it they should get something in return.