Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When to Overcommunicate

blog.glowforge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#41

Post by dasil003 »

bartread wrote: post #31
throwaway713 wrote: post #3

I personally find overcommunication annoying and don't like to hear constant status updates from people; just handle the work and let me know when it's done unless you have any blockers. That said, I've received feedback from multiple people that they never know how my work is progressing, are surprised when it's completed, and would like more status updates along the way, so I think it's safe to say that my preferen…

I don't know that your preferences are that much of an anomaly. For example, I would say I get too much email so I really don't want more: likewise IMs or other forms of interruption. Like everyone else, I have things I actually need to get done, so constantly fielding incoming communication can become pretty frustrating. What I do need are timely and relevant updates, not constant updates and over-communication. I p…

Managers should definitely be structured, however the more senior you get the more random curveballs you get. Ultimately the single broadest trait that makes someone suited for senior leadership is judgement: When to be structured vs reactive, when to step in quickly vs when to let subordinates figure things out, what people’s strengths, weaknesses and preferences are, and ultimately how orchestrate all these things to maximize business success. Ultimately at the executive level these things are extremely contextual and rules of thumb won’t get you far if they’re not backed by relevant experience.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#42

Post by twoquestions »

luord wrote: post #39

The example given for negative feedback is kind of at odds with the point of the article itself. Seems like, in that case, the managers themselves didn't communicate until they had to, and even though they were seeing a problem, they didn't communicate earlier. Now it's in the onus of the employee to give constant updates else he risks losing his job, even though he wasn't given constant updates from the other direct…

> I thought one of the responsibilities of management was making work easier for the employees.

Every place I've worked, it's management's job to enforce status hierarchies on their subordinates, and making people's jobs easier is directly in conflict with that primary objective.

You may work in a different culture than I do though, the vast majority of work here no matter the industry is of the "no excuses" variety stated in the article.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#43

Post by thrower123 »

specialist wrote: post #21

I wish there were more articles like this about communications, organizational psychology, effective coordination, etc. But mostly, I wish there were ways to recognize, navigate, negotiate people's different styles. TMI from recent my turn at the woodshed: Noob manager (Jane) is unhappy with my communication. Wants more detail. Her prerogative, so I try. So in addition to adjacent desks, always on Skype, standups, st…

Good lord. I couldn't imagine that level of communication; it strikes me as horrifyingly unprofessional. More like the way I texted my wife when we had just started dating than anything I would ever consider in the office.

If that's what was really wanted by management, I'd have to spend a half day writing some git hooks or toss in a notification rule on the CI server to auto-generate cutesy micro-status updates.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#44

Post by luord »

twoquestions wrote: post #42
luord wrote: post #39

The example given for negative feedback is kind of at odds with the point of the article itself. Seems like, in that case, the managers themselves didn't communicate until they had to, and even though they were seeing a problem, they didn't communicate earlier. Now it's in the onus of the employee to give constant updates else he risks losing his job, even though he wasn't given constant updates from the other direct…

> I thought one of the responsibilities of management was making work easier for the employees. Every place I've worked, it's management's job to enforce status hierarchies on their subordinates, and making people's jobs easier is directly in conflict with that primary objective. You may work in a different culture than I do though, the vast majority of work here no matter the industry is of the "no excuses" variety…

I've worked in pretty much the same kind of companies as you have and I completely agree with you.

I was being deliberately overly idealistic in my first comment (and it was perhaps a bit of a reassertion of how I would handle management in my hypothetical own company).

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#45

Post by terom »

I do a lot of ops-ish work, and in addition to all the nice declarative configuration-as-code things where infrastructure changes are reviewed and applied in pull-request form, there's a lot of ad-hoc debugging/diagnosing and one-off changes that get done.

I totally over-communicate on everything where I'm debugging or mutating the actual shared infrastructure. In some places, this is literally in the form of displaying all `sudo` logs in-line in the IRC channel. If I'm debugging some issue, I'll be copy-pasting links to google results, screenshots of the the monitoring graphs and any diagnostic command output into that slack thread. Once I figure it out and either run some one-off commands or make a PR to fix it, I'll include those in the the chat. If I typo some command and (almost) make a mistake, I'll certainly mention that as well.

It's a real-time log/diary of the investigative process and any changes. These slack threads are typically solo threads, with just me replying to myself. This is fine. Occasionally other people will comment on something, occasionally I'll be searching for and referring to those threads later on.

Stuff that I'm working on solo and isn't leaving my laptop outside of a `git push`? Not necessarily worth mentioning before it hits GitHub, but please spend some time and write a useful PR summary.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#46

Post by war1025 »

> The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

I've found that usually when a conversation is going on, particularly in text format, much less information is conveyed than you think at the time.

An interesting thing I've done before is to go back through old conversations where I thought I really "bared my soul" about a particular topic.

Often there is next to no information actually exchanged. What I was actually doing was feeling strong emotions. They were in no way conveyed over to the other person.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#47

Post by nostalgk »

macNchz wrote: post #36
jezclaremurugan wrote: post #2

Anecdotal experience - I've noticed that shipping late by 2 weeks with advance notice to stakeholders is taken way more positively than shipping late by 1 week but informing people late. This seems like plain common sense and required courtesy but I've been on the wrong side of this from both approaches enough times from both sides of the table - people somehow have a block in sharing the bad news (also because in un…

This was one of my first real work life "lessons" after college and something that a good manager can really help drive home with junior employees. Coming from college where deadlines were immutable and professors didn't really care to hear about why some long research paper was taking longer than expected, the idea of telling a boss that you're behind schedule doesn't necessarily come naturally.

Yup, and it's a tragedy. A boss cares about the work being delivered, and wants the end product as a valuable piece of the business.

It's not like school where if one is late, one might as well not even turn it in; even if it's late, it's still valuable, and school doesn't teach that.

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#48

Post by dangrossman »

I find it amusing to see this come from Glowforge, a company known for its poor communication with customers. They sell $6000 lasers to consumers but have no phone number to talk to them. You order, give them your money, and then you'll hear nothing from them from over 30 days while you wait for your purchase: often customers don't get so much as a shipping confirmation before their order finally shows up at their door. If you email them, you get an auto-reply saying they hope to get back to you within 3 business days, which means troubleshooting an issue with their products can mean multiple 3-day round-trips back and forth to get resolved under warranty. And they have a habit of introducing and pulling software features without any advanced notice, when many of their customers rely on their $6000 lasers as production equipment for their small businesses, so these unannounced changes can be disruptive to say the least. All issues that could be fixed with some better communication. And it's too bad, because I think they easily have the best product in their niche of consumer-targeted laser engravers (ping me if you'd like a $500 discount... I own one).

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#49

Post by hinkley »

Any long lived project (that doesn't want to end as legacy code) is a performance art piece.

If you've ever seen five minutes of an opera (go to YouTube if not), they move their mouths in an almost comical exaggeration so the people farther away can see what's going on.

Early on when I relied on subtlety, I'd find repeatedly that someone has grossly mistaken my intention and undone a bunch of work that I put time into. The bigger the gesture the harder it is for them to either misunderstand or feign confusion (easier to ask forgiveness... unless forgiveness involves admitting you're an idiot).

Re: When to Overcommunicate

#50

Post by james_s_tayler »

dustingetz wrote: post #20
jezclaremurugan wrote: post #2

Anecdotal experience - I've noticed that shipping late by 2 weeks with advance notice to stakeholders is taken way more positively than shipping late by 1 week but informing people late. This seems like plain common sense and required courtesy but I've been on the wrong side of this from both approaches enough times from both sides of the table - people somehow have a block in sharing the bad news (also because in un…

slow is smooth and smooth is fast

One of my favorites.
Post reply on HN