What about the low doc, low meeting culture
High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
11–20 of 524 posts
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#12Sounds 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 eventually becomes untenable. More and more meetings get scheduled to cover topics that are not well documented, which causes people to have less time/inclination to create or consume high quality documents, and it becomes a feedback loop.
(Edited to make it clear that I am not against the idea, just curious to see how it evolves)
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#13This reminds me of Alan work culture [1], Alan is a startup with a zero meeting policy and a very strong culture of writing. They check the quality of one's writing during their interview process. Alan leaders also have other strong ethos like "no managers" and "complete transparency". I really wonder if these companies are exceptions or if this organisationel model could be replicated more widely. I guess it caters…
To me, some of the benefits of having the occasional meeting is to create a shared understanding of what's going on and also to enable a vigorous group discussion. I'm not sure I would know how to replicate that with writing alone.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#14High-Documentation is so out of fashion, for all the wrong reasons. If you are designing anything that is intended to last longer than 6 months, documentation is a critical part of the system.
Meetings are great for communicating with people here and now, but only writing can communicate with people from the future. When you meet with your current colleagues, spare a thought for your future colleagues who haven’t yet joined, and do them a favor by writing things down.
Ability to use written communication is a major differentiator between junior and senior engineer.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#15Sounds 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.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#16I wanted to read this article but the sluggish scrolling on the page made me leave the site. I appreciate the approach in the first few paragraphs I read, though. haha
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#17"High-documentation" isn't the cure, either. Just write quality software with well-defined interfaces, minimal dependencies and smooth building processes. I want to be able to build the thing without frustration, to start playing with it in order to learn its internals and debug it. Only then can I be comfortable enough to start implementing features and changes.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#18Sounds 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.
As someone who has to use Amazon's external documentation: it's absolutely terrible. Worst docs of any company we have to interact with at the API level.
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#19Sounds 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…
It works if you hire for people who are good at communicating and reward documentation writing in performance reviews
Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture
#20My 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 specific, obscurely named document in Google Drive, Confluence, or Github. We've tried a bunch of search tools which successfully surface the million product documents, design documents, PM reports, planning docs, retro docs and standup and oncall notes related to any feature, none of which are up to date.