241–250 of 326 posts
This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating). Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confi…
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There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
> leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]" You forgot the part where the call is scheduled for next week even though today is Wednesday. And any attempt to discuss further in text is met with "let's leave that for the call".
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> One company drove me insane with random “Hows it going” messages throughout the day so I just left for another company and let them know why on the way out. But this is ideal right? Their culture is asking "how's it going" throughout the day and it's not a culture you wanted to be part of so you left. Asking "how's it going?" throughout the day isn't objectively good or bad – it's just not for everyone.
Asking "how it's going?" without following up about a specific task is objectively bad.
You may not like it, but the idea that’s objectively bad is your opinion not a fact.
What’s wrong with a company’s employees deciding they like checking in with each other and not having it tied to a specific task?
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That's true, but I don't see how this relates to pandemic or being remote? Also not reaching out when getting totally stuck is a bad thing, but again unrelated?
There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than there was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk and didn’t look obviously busy. Solve that, and you probably solve a lot of low-grade communication challenges that are made worse by being remote as compared to in-same-office.
> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective commu…
There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
> Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being an effective commu…
Even well done, this kind of communication doesn't substitute for more free-form 1:1s that in-person allows. The latter are key to building trust. I'm finding this to be one of the key drawbacks of remote work - some decisions require cross team trust and I've yet to see anything besides more frequent ad-hoc conversations that builds it. The problem is that the most trust building conversations tend to be "off-topic"…
It may FEEL like it because those people chatting get energy from it. But it doesn't. If you need energy from people like this it's 100% a good idea. Go nuts. Personally I think people over index on this because they have no idea how to structure async team comms.
– Videos – Longform content – Team agreements to respond to things async without x-hours – Team collaboration spaces – Good sprint ceremonies like refinement – Team QA-type exercises
Ad hoc conversations also contribute immensely to what I call "comms debt". The jolt of energy you get from water cooler talk last 3 minutes, and excluded anyone not in direct proximity. If the best idea was in the head of somebody 3 rooms away you have no way of knowing it. Add dozens of these micro-interactions throughout the day and it's a recipe for comms breakdown and kliqish behaviour.
I see this a lot in User Research. Let's "get out of the building" and talk to people. A good idea in practice, but without actual goals or hypothesis product leaders mistake the first 5 opinions they collected as fact — often cherry picking sound bytes that fit right in with their own biases (and I've seen this A LOT in older leaders). This is mistaken as research. But they love it because it has that face to face energy. The feeling makes it right, regardless of the evidence.
Trust in a team is based on good communication — and an agreement on what you expect from it. If someone posts a video to Slack do people respond? Do you have ceremonies to build togetherness and understanding? All of these things are somewhat easier when you just have to deal with Zoom logistics.
Anyone who has to clean up and index the deluge of Design Sprint whiteboard stickies knows what I'm talking about. Put that shit in Miro, thanks.
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There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
Additionally, they refuse to answer the question that’s put to them. I am very careful with my words. I say exactly what I mean in as few words as necessary, but I find myself copying and pasting the same sentences into the chat box because the person or people reading seem to want to answer a completely different question.
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There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4 timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks' ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]". Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-ma…
> leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]" You forgot the part where the call is scheduled for next week even though today is Wednesday. And any attempt to discuss further in text is met with "let's leave that for the call".
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Work != socializing. Quality work requires deep concentration over long stretches of time, not tapping on a shoulder at random intervals. Both IRL and virtually.
> Work != socializing. That's plain unhealthy. > Quality work requires deep concentration over long stretches of time, not tapping on a shoulder at random intervals. Both IRL and virtually. This has little to do with socializing or not.
> That's plain unhealthy.
Why? I have friends and people I socialize with, I don't have to socialize with my coworkers. I am friends with people I've met along the way, but with everyone else I keep a distance and remain professional. Why is it unhealthy to have boundaries around work relationships?
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I think it can work great for some people. I did it for a few weeks at one point, and found it thoroughly unproductive. 90% of my time was spent waiting for somebody else to type something, or trying to verbally communicate something that would be better done in writing/code. Even now I find it incredibly off-putting to have somebody looking over my shoulder when I'm trying to work, to the point that I basically just…
> waiting for somebody else to type > trying to verbally communicate something that would be better done in writing/code > somebody looking over my shoulder At the risk of sounding flippant, none of these activities comprise pair programming. What's better written should be, and the simplest way might be "can I just show you?" or, from a particularly well-atuned pair, "would you mind showing me?" "Waiting for someone…
Also the way I tend to code is never linear in a way that anybody else could follow. I write something, edit it, throw it away, put it back, rename it, hack out something I _know_ is buggy so I can see how it looks, and basically "thrash" my way to a solution that I like. That makes it essentially impossible for anybody to follow in real time, and having them try to point out errors would be counterproductive. In the later stages someone could help polish it, but even then I think it'd mostly be a waste of time.
That's before we even get to things like dealing with interruptions, or answering other questions quickly. Ideally interruptions don't happen, but in practice they do, and I don't want to be wasting someone else's time.
There's a lot I liked about XP, but I still think that (for some people) it's just a great way to make two devs produce the output of one intern.