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No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

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Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#161

Post by sebtron »

philbo wrote: post #122
quacksilver wrote: post #102

As a junior i often wrote "Hi, do you have a moment? (ok if not)" in slack (or lync at the time) to senior people when I had questions. I then didn't expect a reply unless the senior person was not busy or bored. If no reply within 5 mins I would ask the next person. I did this when I had a question that perhaps 20 people who I knew could answer, though I had no way of telling who (if anyone) was free to chat somethi…

The optimal approach is to ask your question in a public channel . Then all 20 people get to see it at once, they can see if someone else already responded and other people on the team who may have been wondering about something similar also get to see the question and the answer(s).

In my experience, writing in a public channel gets slower responses, if any. Especially if nobody knows the exact solution to your problem. Some people don't have notifications enabled for group chats / public channels, and even if they see the message they may think "someone else will reply".

Asking someone directly almost always results in a quick response, even if it is a "I don't know" answer. And an "I don't know" from a senior colleague can mean a lot, for example that the problem is much harder than you initially thought.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#162

Post by [deleted] »

daghamm wrote: post #33

This may sound reasonable, but the world is not black and white. If we turn every quick question into a complete meeting with agenda and whatnot, the organisation will become extremly bureaucratic. And at some point people will start making guesses instead of reaching out to experts because it is just too much work. So in my opinion, the author is a little bit selfish too. The company cannot 100% align with what best…

[deleted]

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#163

Post by repeekad »

cdrini wrote: post #95
ctm92 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no problem with socializing, but this can also be a special appointment where everyone is free to join and can talk about stuff that is not related so a specific issue. We do a weekly fixed appointment where we gather together and smalltalk about whatever is on our minds.

I've had trouble implementing this in the past. We have biweekly social calls with my team, but a lot of people don't take part! And even when they do, when we have the full team (~12 ppl), usually maybe like 3-4 people dominate the convo and it's not super satisfying. Have you found any tricks/ideas from the implementation at your org that has made it more successful for you?

I was one of those 3-4 people who felt compelled to drag the conversation forward just to avoid awkward silence and fill the time slot, ugh how I hated that period of time with remote work

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#164

Post by thyristan »

onion2k wrote: post #146

The way to stop these distractions is not to set a bunch of rules, but to document things in clear and discoverable ways that people can search to find what they need. No one wants to interrupt; people do that because it's the quickest and easiest way to find an answer. If you make something else the quickest way they'll use that instead.

No, they won't. For example: Tickets are easier to discover, don't suffer from bus-factor=1, act as searchable documentation, can easily be handed over to another team if misrouted, can be queued and prioritized, all those nice things. But people are too lazy to search the ticket system and documentation, then open a ticket and ask incomplete time-wasting questions in chat instead.

It is actually normal for individuals to be lazy, and searching docs is more work (for the asker) than just asking a quick question. This is why rules are necessary, otherwise every asker will just waste someone else's time. It shouldn't just be on the two parties in this interaction to enforce structured communication as a rule, it should also be on the company hierarchy to do so. Because in the end, the whole company will suffer if e.g. the knowledge about fixing problem X died with Bob who always just answered inquiries about problem X in private chat.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#166

Post by alluro2 »

bruce511 wrote: post #19

Open a jira ticket for every meeting you attend. (And close it). When asked about productivity treat meetings as the most productive use of your time. "I had a fantastic day yesterday, attended 5 meetings and closed 5+n tickets. I'm so productive I deserve a raise." Managers treat meetings as the most important thing you do. (Its the most important thing they do.) The disconnect is that we don't see them the same. On…

Exactly - in my experience, it seems like many managers often have a notion of engineers' work being done somewhere/sometime else, isolated in another dimension from the meetings, and hence meetings not having much effect on that "actual work".

Once you start adding tickets for every meeting and ad-hoc call, and from that it becomes obvious that these are now taking 70% of your time and what little remains is not nearly enough for the "real work", you'll find how the attitude shifts and those managers start protecting your time...

Interestingly, managers often don't seem to consider meetings "real work" for engineers, but it's almost the only type of work they do, and take credit for...

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#167

Post by [deleted] »

space_oddity wrote: post #112
rethab wrote: post #29

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office. By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating you…

Does it really foster collaboration and innovation?

[deleted]

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#168

Post by altacc »

rethab wrote: post #29

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office. By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating you…

People are fixating on the mention of a water cooler but I think the key point is:

> it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review

In my team we work mostly remotely and have a lot of ad hoc calls about issues, after an initial exchange of messages introducing the problem so that it can be loaded into memory. In my experience talking about a problem on a call is almost always better than text tennis. You're focused, our minds work better and are more engaged when we're talking and it's quicker easier to summarize then question ad hoc ideas, etc...

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#169

Post by jstimpfle »

nottorp wrote: post #68
jstimpfle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Below a certain threshold, "quick calls" are the best thing to do. Some of the most inspiring discussions come from someone bringing up an issue they have right there and then. Good discussions often start from something that doesn't seem so important, that doesn't have a clear outline from the start. If there isn't the possibility to start a discussion instantly once in a little while, there is a good chance it won'…

Pray tell, why can't you do this discussion async in writing?

Not engaging enough. I write a couple lines, expect a couple lines some 1 to 180 minutes later that might miss half the point, etc. Totally different dynamic.

Having to cache in the previous state of the discussion whenever I receive a reply is exhausting. So some things are just not brought up.

And whenever it's actually an interactive synchronous live-chat, why not just hop on a call then?

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#170

Post by nicbou »

Quick calls are super important. Sometimes they'll settle a matter immediately, in a few minutes, instead of dragging the decision to a 15 minutes time slot the next week.

One of my first bosses would constantly push me to make phone calls instead of firing emails, and even though I didn't enjoy it, it undeniably worked. Things got done much faster, with far less effort from everyone.

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