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Why public chats are better than direct messages

teamplify.com

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Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#41

Post by workingon »

kqr wrote: post #10
ungamedplayer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned that its good to praise in public, criticise in private. It is possible to have criticism in PR's private inside a company which reduces its "publicness" but some people are still sensitive even with the reduced exposure.

I hate that idea. If I criticise an idea in public, and I'm wrong in my criticism, then five other people will immediately correct me. Or provide nuance and perspective I miss. Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard. ---- Edit: almost forgot! Private criticism also lea…

This is the biggest part of life that people just don't get and has always bothered me.

I can't stand people that are always-positive and nice all the time. I know they are lying and holding stuff back --- but what? I'd rather be friends with someone honest than nice. At least I know what they are thinking, and thus actually know them. Some people would rather just go through life in a mask and insist everyone else wear one too -- something I generally refuse to do.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#42

Post by rodrigodlu »

zibby8 wrote: post #32
jrootabega wrote: post #4

This is why, when a colleague has a question about a pull request, or my feedback on THEIR pull request, I push us to have the discussion in the PR comments, instead of the pernicious "I just have a few questions, it will only take a few minutes" that always adds up to more time and attention than people claim. There ARE often situations where opening a synchronous communication channel is necessary, but even then, y…

Honestly, that does sound difficult. I get what you're trying to achieve, but if I'm trying to land a change, having a synchronous conversation (ideally in person) will resolve any misunderstandings between us on the order of minutes. Having an asynchronous back-and-forth takes on the order of hours or even days. And what do you get for your time? A nice record you can look back on? What are you going to use that for…

If you work on a healthy team, public comments are better from my POV.

I can remember many times, specially on new teams that I just joined, that by reading PRs, specially following https://conventionalcomments.org/, I get much faster the motto and the spirit of the team.

You have the context and the focused discussions on the same place. You can also check how much time it took to deliver and even connect easier to the outcomes of the deliverables.

If the discussion gets too subjective, use the team private chat, with threaded comms, then a direct call.

I know it depends on the urgency as well, but we should strive for general efficiency, not efficiency only during rush / at the end of sprint.

That's why also I prefer to open WIP PRs with incomplete code. Open discussions beforehand.

Also, repeated questions and similar problems can be retrieved from the chat / comments history.

Now, for early designs, spikes, initial research on an epic/hard tasks, needs some sync comms, followed by some asynchronous comments and questions.

Even things like "yesterday we discussed during a call x, y and z, and we agreed on w. it still holds up? In this case, I will use the strategy N to develop the solution, please comment back if you changed your mind".

It helps me a lot, and the people that I asked about this kind of message are heavily positive on it, because it's neutral enough and consolidates the agreement.

Then after a few weeks working close to someone (same team, for instance), I can make that phrase shorter, because we established a protocol.

Now that said, under my new contract, the entire team is almost silent on chat and everything is a direct call with 4 people on avg. I'm wrecked today because of 5 consecutive 30min~1h meetings to sync information yesterday.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#43

Post by intrasight »

dsr_ wrote: post #35
zibby8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that does sound difficult. I get what you're trying to achieve, but if I'm trying to land a change, having a synchronous conversation (ideally in person) will resolve any misunderstandings between us on the order of minutes. Having an asynchronous back-and-forth takes on the order of hours or even days. And what do you get for your time? A nice record you can look back on? What are you going to use that for…

It is certainly the case that in most archives, most messages will never be looked at again. This is the price we pay for not knowing what's going to be important in the future. If we knew that, we could mark the messages immediately and have them pushed into the FAQ or the wiki or whatever. By obvious corollary, message archives need good full-text searching or else they are useless.

Our team includes a technician. One of his jobs is to copy important info from email threads to the FAQ wiki. We have a policy to not use one-on-one messages for anything that should be known by the larger team. I preach bus problem avoidance so I am totally on board with that policy.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#44

Post by zschuessler »

The example with feeling comfortable asking trivial questions hints at a common theme of successful teams: psychological safety.

If you are interested in learning more on it here are a few resources!

1. Project Aristotle - A study from Google https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

2. Good to Great had a couple chapters touching on safety, but also making company information easy to access.

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/good-to-great-why-some...

3. A more sciencey approach https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310384/

I couldn't find the second study I wanted to link to. I recall reading a study on team composition that focused on impact of different types of leaders. Teams that had a leader which got everyone to talk in a group were consistently successful. That was the one constant over time, even beating out visionary/charisma types that weren't inclusive.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#45

Post by dmos62 »

kqr wrote: post #10
ungamedplayer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned that its good to praise in public, criticise in private. It is possible to have criticism in PR's private inside a company which reduces its "publicness" but some people are still sensitive even with the reduced exposure.

I hate that idea. If I criticise an idea in public, and I'm wrong in my criticism, then five other people will immediately correct me. Or provide nuance and perspective I miss. Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard. ---- Edit: almost forgot! Private criticism also lea…

> Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard.

Interesting, that's the opposite of what I've experienced. Also a problem with group dicussions is that it's too easy for participants to drift into group think and conformism. I thought these are general principles, but maybe they are predicated on the group.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#46

Post by rodrigodlu »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #9
dmos62 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult. Sorry to hear that. Getting the right balance of sync and async, and knowing when to use one or the other makes a big difference. In my current team we went through multiple iterations to come to a mix that works for us. If it's too much sync, the constant sync conversations drain you; if it's too much async, co…

I have learned that its good to praise in public, criticise in private. It is possible to have criticism in PR's private inside a company which reduces its "publicness" but some people are still sensitive even with the reduced exposure.

I also have learned that people that worked long time with toxic people, or are the toxic ones that are more sensitive to this. One starts being afraid of openness.

It's hard - but a wonderful soft skill - to do this in semipublic envs and be gentle.

"enhancement: Extracting the lines below into a separate function. As far as I understood it's only calculating x, you can call 'x_calculation'. Fell free to use a better name than my suggestion".

shorter, for a team that you are already know for some time:

"enh: extract into a new function. It's calculating x, maybe it's 'x_calculation'. You can name it better than me."

During retros then, I usually recall everyone that I'm open to be criticized in good terms, and send me a message if I'm out of touch. Or even be open during the retro.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#47

Post by Trasmatta »

Something that I've found really valuable about private chats is the ability to build rapport and trust with immediate team members in a way that just isn't quite the same in a public channel. You need both. I don't like the idea of setting policies of "almost all communication should be done in public channels". Humans need both types of communication, and I think it's a mistake to try to enforce your team to always prefer one over the other.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#48

Post by duxup »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #29
jrootabega wrote: post #4

This is why, when a colleague has a question about a pull request, or my feedback on THEIR pull request, I push us to have the discussion in the PR comments, instead of the pernicious "I just have a few questions, it will only take a few minutes" that always adds up to more time and attention than people claim. There ARE often situations where opening a synchronous communication channel is necessary, but even then, y…

I'm back in a team setting again - we've got face-to-face, Slack, Teams / email, and Gitlab as communcations channels (too many different ones for my liking), and I'm already noticing how everything important seems to have to be repeated 2-3 times; there's the informal one to one, there's stand-up and other meetings, and then usually someone isn't around due to holidays or working part-time and they have to be caught…

I once joined a team and in my first face to face meeting the person who was the technical leader was upset in a meeting that “people are still doing this process wrong”.

Being new-ish I felt like I could ask the obvious question.

“Where do we find this process?”

Leader: “Oh don’t worry, I’m not blaming you. I sent out the process in email before you joined.”

“I joined nine months ago.”

Leader: “Yup.”

In the end this person was actually pretty great to work with but man having a ton of wonky communication methods and etc just constantly causes problems.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#49

Post by Mandatum »

It comes down to culture. Will you be reprimanded for talking the wrong way about a project, feature or service in your organisation?

I’ve worked at FAANG where I was reprimanded by HR equivalent for raising an issue in chat rather than email because of who was in the channel. I wasn’t rude in my report, I just explained the issue, the impact it had and the likely resolution.

Maybe a VP was having a bad day, but I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut working for large organisations as an IC.

It’s something I expected from shitty workplaces like Big4, consultancies or FinTechBroCorps but it’s everywhere.

Re: Why public chats are better than direct messages

#50

Post by pasc1878 »

m_eiman wrote: post #13
pasc1878 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is internal to a company - everyone able to access the chat better have and account and use it - you need to be sure who said what. And setting up search on the chat is not difficult, we had search on chat 25 years ago.

Extracting useful information from a chat log is tedious and error prone, though. If it's something that should be saved for later, copy it over to a wiki or some such and edit it suitably. Chat is ephemeral, treat it as such and everyone's life will be better.

Yes if it is useful copy it to a wiki etc.

But how do you get the information first. You have to look at the chat transcript - and in an international company and a problem requiring thought or research the information could be spread over a couple of weeks SO you still need to scan the transcripts.

Yes Chat is ephemeral and I can't think of cases that involved looking back a year but weeks definitely.

Chat id part of the process - if an issue is raised then the solution will be a permanent change, in my case software code changes, or an email summarising the solution for non computer issues, or chnages to documentation (if you are lucky enough to have documentation)

Another example is if you go on vacation for a few weeks the a quick scan of chat is often useful.

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