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High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

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Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#121

My 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 What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software.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 should have searched for a specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github

Are people at the same job telling you to check 3 different sources for internal docs? Maybe that is the main issue. Put knowledge in one place.

More specifically: One place that is not Sharepoint.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#123
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this a lot. "Managers" are under pressure to make sure their teams are meeting goals/deadlines/whatever, so they are anxious, so they make efforts to observe and oversee "performance". Seeing people in meetings and diligently "working" makes them feel better about their teams' performance. But what really matters is outcome...which is very difficult to measure for a lot of software teams, and even harde…

On the other hand, thirty minutes a week seems like a small overhead to pay if you’re concerned a team might otherwise lose focus & direction entirely. Not, to be clear, that they are lazy, but instead that they could be diligently working… on the wrong thing. I can understand it both ways.

It's certainly a spectrum. 11s and vision alignment meetings are super important. Standups too, if that's your thing (I like them, but they must be run well). A lot of other stuff can start to get noisy in my opinion.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the lack of "meetings" offset by pair-coding, dragging out synchronous conversations in Slack, or otherwise controlling engineering time and schedule?

No, (currently) fully async as long as deliverables are met. The extent of 'controlled' engineering time is requiring 1x code review from a different SWE to merge a PR which is also async via GitHub comments.

Ahh nice! I was recently on the market and had nearly no luck finding a culture like that which matched my skill-set. I am envious.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#125
Many in this thread seem to conflate documentation with code documentation, while I use it as a means to communicate requirements to the developers. Some mockups here, some data description there, it makes all the difference. Our stories/tickets increasingly consist of only a title, a wiki link and some acceptance criterions. Works great for me as a PO, devs like it and provides a lot more context than fragmented tickets do.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#126
+1 for all docs being public-by-default. But these are all sophisticated skills. And the broader industry does not reliably teach them.

ctrl-F "Training" 0 hits. ctrl-F "Hiring"

> But we take great care during the hiring process to choose people that thrive under these conditions.

Is the interview by post? There's a story here, but I don't know what it is.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#127
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well people say they hate attending boring meetings, but when you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings. Other job roles, at least in my experience, tend to jump to a meeting as the first reaction. Developers will say: let's discuss it over email. Others say: let's hop on a call / grab a room. The number of meetings I've been in where there are multiple participants who don't have any obvious reason to be there, and who don't say anything throughout the entire meeting, is uncountable.

Now you're right it's obviously not that black and white, I'm generalizing. But I think devs often under-estimate how many people in a typical company perceive meeting other internal employees as amongst their primary outputs, as an end in and of itself, not just a means.

A good way to observe this in action is to try and enforce a rule that meetings must have pre-published agendas. Good luck with that! People will just work around it or write useless non-agendas because often a meeting is not to get something specific done, but is used more like a sort of coffee break to split up the day and give people something to look forward to between desk time.

Something else worth remarking on - a lot of people in sales or marketing roles never seem to use word processors. They communicate ideas by sending PowerPoint decks around, often with a density of words in the slides too high to actually project (only readable on hi-dpi screens). Where I last worked there were people whose working hours boiled down to meetings and PowerPoints. They could spend a whole week making a deck, which would only be seen by their colleagues in a meeting. I found it odd but maybe the slide templates help them structure their thoughts.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#128

My 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…

I would suggest introducing two things. First, introduce The Diataxis framework ( https://diataxis.fr/ ) for documentation. It makes people think about documentation in a more structured way, and allows you to be more specific in the types of missing documentation. (High documentation cultures are often good with explanation but not tutorials, for example.) Second, I would introduct the idea of a Documentation Portfo…

I'm sure these are great technological answers but this problem can be solved simply and quickly by a human.

Not every issue needs to be solved by a butter robot.

Why not employ a technical writer/documenter/whatever job title you like, even as a temp, whose sole job is to sort out the mess of documentation you have and then to write new documentation as you move forward?

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What I find is that it's very "dumb", almost "... WHERE filename LIKE '%query%'" dumb. Example might be searching for " Technical Spec".

- Can't find "Technical Specification" in the "" folder.

- Can't find "Tech Spec" (and vice versa)

- Can't find ""

Is there some "enable real search functionality" checkbox I've missed, or am I just doing it wrong?

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