101–110 of 113 posts
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Is working with GitLab as nice as it sounds? Every time I read the employee documentation I get the feeling working there would be a great experience.
Doesn’t Gitlab blatantly discriminate in salaries?
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I think one of the things COVID and the subsequent WFH discussion highlighted for me is how much there's a certain kind of person, often managers, who have a lot of meetings and use them for socialization. The irrelevant minutes of chatting about last night's football or whatever is an important thing for them. And some of that is important! I'm not going to go full robot and say that all comms must be professional-o…
>I think one of the things COVID and the subsequent WFH discussion highlighted for me is how much there's a certain kind of person, often managers, who have a lot of meetings and use them for socialization. I constantly say that the push against WFH is all coming from extroverts that are mad that they can't steal energy from the rest of us.
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Okay, this may sound nuts but I think the only issue with your proposal is that it doesn’t address the reason that this doesn’t happen. Our colleagues do not or do not want to read business communications for the purpose of comprehension for the content of their own work or communication with their colleagues. I genuinely propose a three strike policy where professional employees are to be fired after three occasions…
People not reading emails hasn't really been a problem pretty much anywhere I worked for the last 10 years or more. People not writing them has been a problem though. Maybe this was caused by people not reading them, but I've always suspected that a lot of people just don't like writing, and/or aren't very good at it. So it's easier for them to do an in-person meeting. And when no or very few emails get sent, no on r…
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>I think one of the things COVID and the subsequent WFH discussion highlighted for me is how much there's a certain kind of person, often managers, who have a lot of meetings and use them for socialization. I constantly say that the push against WFH is all coming from extroverts that are mad that they can't steal energy from the rest of us.
They do it anyway, with excess meetings and increased amounts of BS. Example: How many "check-ins" can you possibly need for a 3 person project? It is mentally draining for people trying to get real work done.
> if the goal is instead to deliver info to the attendees, your meeting should be an email If we just stuck to this rule I would have hours of more time to do actual work. So many “meetings,” are listening to folks um-and-ah their way through their slides. They read the exact text they wrote. Slowly. It’s painful. Just send an email. If this happens in recurring meetings, make an email digest.
For the meeting class of employees it would take them longer to write the half page memo than to have the hour long meeting.
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Hey, keep complaining and I’ll give you (ⅲ), (四), (〥), (༦), (٧), (๘) and (᥏).
Not in this thread yet, not talking down to you, apologies if tone comes across that way: jokes aside, noticed you're OP, and I'm very curious what the intent was here.
I don't even know who to blame for this. It's really not much better than it was in person. In person meetings sucked more, as you had to be physically present to be talked at, and at least with a remote meeting I can just minimize the meeting and try to get back to work.
I would estimate 90% of my meetings are useless. 50% of the 10% remaining could be emails, and 50% are probably worth it. Why can't I just build software? Perhaps PMs and management should get their own meeting where they can just listen to themselves talk.
I just have a policy of as few meetings (remote or FTF), as possible. No repeating, scheduled ones. All meetings should be ad hoc (so no daily standups or weekly roundups). As I worked for a Japanese company, these ideas found stony soil, but now that I'm on my own, I try to keep this policy.
I agree completely. If a meeting is being held so that one person can present information to the group, that can be an email. If a meeting is held so each person can update a leader with his/her status, those updates can also be emails. If the whole group needs to see those updates, it can be a wiki or a shared document. A meeting should only be called when that group of people needs to discuss a topic together and r…
For example, if I am presenting information for a group, and this is going to cause stress or discord, I need to know quickly how the group reacts so that I can either adjust the plan, clarify the communication, or know I have work to do to manage the relationship. Latency matters here because these delays can cause people's lives to be worse because I wasn't able to monitor body language.
Status meetings seem like something that can be replaced by an email, but it turns a manager's job from coordination to task assignment. Example: "Who can help?" versus "Jane, go help John, and Ted, go review this code, and Jane, after that redirect to this customer support request." It may be that Ted already knows the answer, and that John knows how to quickly handle the customer support request, but that's not going to be resolved via email. And unless you have everyone wired to slack, it's going to waste everyone's time. (Wiring everyone to slack is the worst of both worlds.)
The goal should be that the team is organizing around the problem, but that means that the team is talking in low-latency methods. Email does not get there. Latency matters. (So does bandwidth, but time spent on the wrong thing doesn't help anyone.)
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I agree completely. If a meeting is being held so that one person can present information to the group, that can be an email. If a meeting is held so each person can update a leader with his/her status, those updates can also be emails. If the whole group needs to see those updates, it can be a wiki or a shared document. A meeting should only be called when that group of people needs to discuss a topic together and r…
I think the key problem is that you optimize for bandwidth over latency, and it ignores that a manager is often looking for symmetric, real-time information. For example, if I am presenting information for a group, and this is going to cause stress or discord, I need to know quickly how the group reacts so that I can either adjust the plan, clarify the communication, or know I have work to do to manage the relationsh…
Well explained.
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> ... (a) covid and (2) one ... > ... because we (a) ... and (2) actually Why are you (consistently) follow "(a)" with "(2)"? Is this an AI thing?
I think it’s a quirky thing
Apologise, now.