81–90 of 279 posts
I will never understand people who write "Hello" or "Hi Joe" in Slack and then just wait. It has to be some form of mental illness.
Oh, come on...
Am I loosing time waiting for your "hello" back? Well, guess what: maybe I took it into consideration the fact that you're busy, and that I might be waiting for hours, but not answering at all only makes you a jerk.
This is far from politely refusing "quick calls" when busy. And no: you can't be always busy: if you want to keep telling yourself you're working in a team you need to allocate a reasonable amount of time to social interactions.
Do you really expect me to send you a calendar event invitation to have a quick call with you once in a month? To update you about something that might even interest you? Maybe it's not going to be communicated in the most efficient way possible, as would be with an email, but certainly it will be done in a way that would keep us human beings, not mentioning the fact that it would also improve team work.
If you do, please do not expect me to sit next to you if we happen to meet in person, and be happy and friendly.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for productivity, when the sacrifice (being pleasant & accessible to coworkers) isn't worth the gain (more focus time coding).
Sometimes it seems that we're over focused on efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. And I get it, because it's very hard to "be both". You can either spend your day coding away solving problems or you can spend your day discussing with people figuring out what the problem is. Both pursuits have clear failure modes; you can spend a lot of time trying to understand the problem better without really getting anywhere a…
Find the right balance by understanding the needs of the whole business, the needs of your department, and the needs of your specific team, and your manager’s expectations of you. Then balance all that with the work assigned to you, deadlines, etc. And then align your day to day work with what the business is telling you is most important.
(This is also how average engineers can put themselves in positions to be promoted ahead of “rockstar engineers”. Companies promote and elevate employees who have the most positive impact on the business, not people who have the most impact on the codebase)
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…
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…
In my experience forced online water cooler talk has never worked and was always incredibly awkward and boring.
Perhaps they should put all the water coolers in the executives' offices, so they can listen to all the brilliant conversations that take place at the water cooler.
But social behaviors are habitual. I spent time in many parts of Africa where it's just downright rude/unacceptable to go to someone and ask something, even if it's just a change for a few bucks. You have to go through the pleasantries and WAIT for them to acknowledge before you ask what you want.
It's impossible to change that habit, no matter the tool, medium, rationale, process, even urgency. They're still going to say "can I talk to you for a sec" and wait for an answer. I've had people do this in the middle of production issues and it's driven me crazy. Even when things are burning, their way of escalating is still only to say "I NEED to talk to you right now", they're simply not tuned to state what they want.
To not help with this, I also went through trainings on personality traits and communication styles. Some people reveal and then explain (direct communication style), and some people first explain then reveal (indirect style), they need you to go through the thought process first before concluding. I learned that it's guaranteed to create conflicts when the communication style for a person is reversed. If you give a conclusion-first to someone who needs explanation-first, they're tuned to mentally reject the conclusion – no matter how you sugar coat it or your intention or rationale.
So we have to constantly keep reinforcing what we're ok with. Just keep calm and reinforce, tell people to provide context in your chat profile, use an auto reply, copy paste a message saying "next time please feel free to ask the question..." and so on. It's kind of a never ending battle. The only thing is, please don't assume anyone is being a jerk, the same way you are not being a jerk by ignoring that message or replying tersely.
I work with people whose days are a sequence of meetings and chats within meetings. They don't understand (or respect) that I have meetings but also must concentrate for periods of time.
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…
> So, when I answer your "Quick call?" with "What's the problem?", that's really for your own good :wink face:
Please do not ever write sentences like this in a professional context where you are not friends with the recipients, it's terrible.
It sets the tone to "adult to children discussion where I think that I am smarter than you" which is the last thing you want when you try to solve on of your pain point.
One the other hand if you want me to avoid interacting with you as much as I can that would be spot on.
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…
The problem is all of those acts take you out of flow state. I don't want and I can't randomly brainstorm when I am deep into coding. Even if I have to go take a quick water I would try to do it as quick as possible to continue with the problem I am focused on and I couldn't pay attention to the random conversation or brainstorming at a cooler.