Oh my god, that font.
High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
361–370 of 524 posts
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#362Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of. However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventua…
doesn't Amazon have a similar structure, tho? i don't know what it's actually like to work there (anyone who does feel free to chime in) but i've interviewed and from what I can tell they put a heavy emphasis on documentation. it's tough to find a bigger and more siloed company than Amazon, and it seems to work for them.
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Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#363My 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 What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software.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…
Having multiple systems for docs and Slack for follow-up questions is a major red flag. What you’re describing is a billion dollar search product opportunity though. Most orgs don’t have the discipline to have a single source of truth. So you end up with this mess. Run! Or … fix it and then create a company to fix it for all the other orgs with similar data/docs siloes.
I don’t understand why more companies don’t just go all in on Slack as the interface to their knowledge base. There’s tons of integrations to enable it. Every place I’ve worked at with Slack has the standard 90 day retention policy in place which makes it impossible.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#364I'm convinced that documentation, even for large companies, should just be an Obsidian vault of markdown files maintained via git which is just rendered on the web either using a simple static site generator or using Obsidian Publish. When I brought this up at my last company it got dismissed as being 'too technical'. I know git can be tricky but it cannot be that difficult to teach people from non technical departme…
> I know git can be tricky but it cannot be that difficult to teach people from non technical departments This is far more difficult than you're suggesting. Git still confuses a lot of junior and mid level devs the second anything deviates from their memorized command workflow. If you're expecting non-technical people to have to learn git just to edit the documentation, they're just not going to use it at all. Writin…
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Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Why not employ a technical writer/documenter/whatever job title you like Primarily because it's a far, far more complicated job than that and you can't really hire someone off the street to do it effectively. Typically in a tech company a tech writer is going to know almost as much or more (after years of experience diving into every detail) about a given technology or application or API, and so that begs the quest…
> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)
Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#366Moving to America from France, one of my biggest surprises was how poor the average engineer (person really, but engineers affect me directly at work) is at summarizing concepts clearly.
I learned a little later that "summary" exercises are not a thing taught in school here, which surprised me. In France, "le résumé" is an exercise that they constantly drill into students (particularly technical ones), in which you take a 3 page paper and condense it into 100 words. I really hated doing it back in the day, but as an adult I now am very grateful I did and wished other countries made this more prevalent.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#367I love companies that can actually thrive with this way of working but it only works at a certain size. This only works in a senior heavy, relatively flat engineering org. Once process ramps up due to new compliance demands or HR wants more of a mixed skill level in engineering, rapid fire product delivery and async culture dies out. I think this could be sustained in a software company in the right context, but orgs eyeing unicorn valuations or headline exits only leverage this way of working until they need to recalibrate.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#368Moving to America from France, one of my biggest surprises was how poor the average engineer (person really, but engineers affect me directly at work) is at summarizing concepts clearly. I learned a little later that "summary" exercises are not a thing taught in school here, which surprised me. In France, "le résumé" is an exercise that they constantly drill into students (particularly technical ones), in which you t…
Teaching how to write summaries in the US would be a good idea. To make things even worse, in the US most essays are assigned a minimum length so students learn to pad their writing with lots of fluff and circumlocutions.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's shocking how many people don't have the ability to organize their thoughts. I'm ashamed that I was completely guilty of this myself. At some degree of professional development in software, you start to verbalize things, so as to 'explain them to yourself' and it helps clear things up. This helped me understand that 'writing skills' (in this context) are frankly more matter of being able to organize concepts more…
> It's shocking how many people don't have the ability to organize their thoughts. It's organized for them, but not for others. This skill is not intuitive to learn, so it shouldn't be shocking.
I think if someone takes the effort to make information widely known and notice whether people understand it and adjust, they will make progress.
The real problem is that for those with authority, it seems to pay off that their disorganization affects other people. It makes others artificially reliant on them, which establishes their position even further, and there’s not really any consequences.
Imo, this is cheating at life and the authority someone gets from being disorganized isn’t real success. Real success comes from having true influence and respect from others due to helping them a lot. This is a lot more difficult though.
Oh well. All the people who rule molehills don’t stop anyone else from achieving real success, so they’re only holding themselves back at the end of the day.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#370Here is my summary of the content of this piece: "We only hire introverts who like working in introvert ways. But we like to pretend that we are just normal people who have stumbled on a better way of working that has mysteriously eluded all the other smart people in the world."