It's still kind of crazy to me how cutting edge modern commutation in 2022 is basically just IRC from the 1990s.
We have threads and GIFs now
Why public chats are better than direct messages
121–130 of 139 posts
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the “cause” is deeper than your influence can reach? What if addressing the “cause” is a multi-year endeavor? Do you send the idiosyncratic team member home and forgo what they’d otherwise bring, or do you adapt your process to make the most of the team you have? It’s great to have ideals to reference, but you miss a lot when you hold onto them as rules.
You really taking a strawman extreme example I've never met in 30 years as a counter-point to "discussion should be in public as much as possible"? The article even mention that /some/ communication can still be private, but the default rule is to be public. Your counter-point is "there are a miniscule contigent of people who can't function at all in a team". Weak.
For my part, all I’m saying is that I’m sick of people coming up with golden hammers.
“The problems in your team can be solved with this ONE STUPID TRICK”
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#123I feel I disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article, even if its a little shallow and short. For starters, he's talking about communications within a team , not the whole company. Should all work conversation happen in a single #general channel on slack (or whatever the equivalent is wherever)? Absolutely not. For a long time my boss was a big proponent of this, and I was against it. However,…
I don’t think the OP at any point advocated for using one channel. That’s a horrible approach IMO. Public vs DM just means (to me at least) “put all comms in the relevant channel, never in a DM”. I’d go so far as to advocate temporary channels for individual projects but not everyone buys into that. At least have team and working-group/functional channels. Basically it’s analogous to email (point-to-point) vs. archiv…
I have come to the very same realization as you in the "temp channel for a project" thing.
Before this, the devs would make a private channel without product and management people, to discuss technical things openly or just to complain. But product/management was unhappy to be left out of this communication channel.
Eventually we, devs, decided on our own to end the private channel and "banalize" the main team channel, by that I mean that we were going to try to make the main channel less "official" looking and more casual, like sending memes, talking outside of threads and so on. With the intention of making people mor comfortable in using it.
This had mixed to low effectiveness, some people were more comfortable speaking entirely on the main channel, some other people pretty much just started only using private conversations and never used the main channel.
So my solution was to create a temporary project channel, open, but only with devs explicitly invited (but communicated at the main channel that the channel existed). This channel is implied to be a dev channel, but whoever wants to join in can, or they can also just peek in without joining, being a public channel.
So far this has been working well, as long as you are in a reasonably long running project. I have archived more then one of these channels as the projects ended, and I'm thinking of maybe not even achieving the current one and just rename it after the project, let's see.
So, keep of trying to make this fly with your team, it did worked somewhat with mine.
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#124As I read this, I got the sinking feeling that I'd read it all before. But then I realised, it's just another case of someone thinking that their specific solution is best, solely on the basis that it worked for them, in their specific circumstances. But here's the thing: every group is different, has different needs, and will respond differently to different styles of communication. Some people (especially people no…
>>every group is different, has different needs, and will respond differently to different styles of communication
YUP!!
Especially when some parts of the group are working with Controlled Unclassified Information (even more so for classified); it's a legal requirement that people access it only on a need-to-know basis. Even without that, companies that rely on trade secret protection (Apple, SpaceX come to mind) must also compartmentalize their information both to prevent leaks and to protect it's legal status as a secret (you must treat a secret as exactly that, or risk it being declared public domain)
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but so is which is best for which situation still the question? Presuming that information asymmetry will hold over time is a bad assumption, regardless of cost of information security controls. Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? Instead of Chat or IM, hopefully working on Issues with checkbox Tasks an…
> Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? The new tools we have at our disposal are amazing. Of course they are better. But they are just tools. They don’t solve any problems relating to interpersonal communication any more than a hammer solves building a house. > What style of communication is appropriate for a…
Well, our societies value these communication businesses as among the most valuable corporations on Earth, so I think that there's probably some value in the tools that people suffer ads on to get for free.
"Traits of good remote leaders" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24432088 :
"From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" (2009) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2... :
> "Table 4 – Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008) tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming, Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages.
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. It's just like when people say, "Well, if that's your problem, you need to fix your hiring process." It's amazing how many theories require perfect hiring.
I didn't mention hiring, but if you can't build trust in your teams as a manager you failed your first job. This is not like choosing kanban vs scrum, if your team members can't even speak comfortably you're not running a team, you're telling individuals what to do, which might be what you want to do, but then don't call it a team.
On the one hand you've said explicitly in another comment that there is only one way to do things. On the other hand, you're saying a manager needs to build trust. But in my experience, trust doesn't get built by treating everyone as identical, fungible developer-units who must do things exactly the way you tell them, and nothing else?
A team is a bunch of individuals, and working out how best to motivate everyone on your team is the manager's job. And not everyone is going to be optimally motivated by being told they have to do everything in public.
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what sorts of groups/contexts working together wouldn't benefit from this. I'm having a hard time coming up with examples. If we're assuming that group activity means people that are all working on the same product, I can't see an argument for DM's and private conversations.
Speaking in public can invite unwanted opinions. There’s always someone who wants to argue, seemingly for sport. Closed channels for teams are good but not everything is a democracy. I let my team make decisions but I can veto any of them, if needed.
Exactly. There is a goal to be achieved - building some feature, say - and we need to find the best way to achieve that goal with the people on hand.
If forcing all communication to be done in public makes the goal harder to achieve, then ffs do something else. Don't just force people to be inefficient because of some dogma.
The goal is not "make all communication public". The goal is to get the job done.
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#128Make the work visible. Transparency enables others to help.
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#129I feel I disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article, even if its a little shallow and short. For starters, he's talking about communications within a team , not the whole company. Should all work conversation happen in a single #general channel on slack (or whatever the equivalent is wherever)? Absolutely not. For a long time my boss was a big proponent of this, and I was against it. However,…
> For starters, he's talking about communications within a team, not the whole company. Should all work conversation happen in a single #general channel on slack (or whatever the equivalent is wherever)? Absolutely not.
If we can agree that not all conversations in a company happen inside of one big channel, we've already agreed to subdivide the company's conversations into smaller subgroups (teams). Why then do we dismiss the idea of subdividing a team's conversation into smaller subgroups? Why is a team the smallest unit?
Is there not also times where you share information to your entire team, but then realize you need to add in other people from not in your team? How is this different from the example where half the team had a discussion? Why is the entire concept of subdividing conversation lower discarded in an attempt to fix an issue that doesn't even end up fixed?
Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages
#130There is a third option. When ever there is a private or out of band discussion, summarize it in the public discussion. Done well, this makes for the best of both worlds in part because it reduces the text that others need to read. However, it requires discipline and extra effort on the part of those having the private conversation.
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