High-documentation, low-meeting work culture • Hacker News Board

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#91

Post by hinkley » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #12

Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of. However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventua…

People hate reading bad writing.

As someone who dabbled in creative writing before discovering my vocation, I see a lot of problems caused by people not bothering to explain themselves clearly.

As my time in the industry grew I begin to see people who were confused about their own ideas and came to see how many things we don’t even explain to ourselves. Which likely plays a role in how defensive people get about some of their ideas. They hadn’t considered these things and now they feel out of their element.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#92

Post by gmd63 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

canucklady wrote: post #20

My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…

Lack of organization to that degree is an indicator of failed leadership

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#93

Post by origin_path » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:19 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #78

tqi wrote: post #12

Sounds like this works great for them, and an awesome environment to be a part of. However I'd be very curious to see how this evolves as the company grows. Personally, I am skeptical that this is sustainable in the long term. In my experience, most people are a) bad at writing and b) hate reading. And as a company grows, and the number of documents that need to be written and read explodes, this work pattern eventua…

Most people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...

No not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output minimal. Compared to sitting at a desk and focusing on a single task, it's far inferior for most people, who find that quite exhausting or demotivating.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#94

Post by gmd63 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #85

canucklady wrote: post #20

My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…

I think it's important to realize that a lot of documentation is duplication. It duplicates something expressed in code, in configs, in structure, in people's heads, or in the real world. Duplication can be useful. But the more of it you have, the greater the maintenance burden is. (The main exception is documentation that is not supposed to be kept up to date, like a daily journal or blog posts.) So I think it behoo…

No, code actualizes the intent of the documentation and the product. The natural language description of a product shouldn't need to be discarded in lieu of some machine language.

The lingua franca of ideas is natural language.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#95

Post by beckingz » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #53

I was recently introduced to www.Loom.com which is this fremium screen recording app and website (no affiliation). Being able to have a certain type of meeting asynchronously has been a boon to productivity. The async nature of texting is great and adding the same thing for audio and video/screen recording has been similarly great.

Personally, I do not like video recordings. I find them inferior to text communications in terms of maximum bandwidth and bandwidth to cost ratio (time to write and read).

However, some people are much better at communicating or understanding material if its shown visually, which can be much more time efficient for both parties sometimes. Every format has a place.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#96

Post by jayjay12389 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

I think there is a trade off on amount of time spent on the high-documentation approach and how large you are. Totally makes sense for larger organisations but less so for startups. There is probably a number of consumers of the information produced at which point it makes the most sense to do go for 'high-documentation'. I wonder if anyone has done deeper research on this.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#97

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #60

canucklady wrote: post #20

My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…

> Confluence There's your problem. The only use case for Confluence is when you want to hide information, but credibly claim that it's documented.

Confluence (and all of the similar products) can be used successfully, but you need the teams to agree on and enforce a logical document hierarchy. It’s not really difficult to organize a company wiki into teams, projects, and other logical divisions if you make it a priority.

The primary failure mode I see is when people just throw random documents into Confluence wherever convenient at time of writing and never go back to logically organize anything. One symptom of this is when key information is being recorded in a hundred different people’s “Personal Space”

Taking even half a day to organize the average Confluence makes a huge difference.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#98

Post by l2silver » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:23 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #82

triceratops wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Confluence There's your problem. The only use case for Confluence is when you want to hide information, but credibly claim that it's documented.

I'd take confluence over google docs because of how bad Google Docs' search is surprisingly

Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#99

Post by Reimersholme » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:24 PM UTC

canucklady wrote: post #20

My current employer was sold to me as a "high documentation" place. What it means in practice is that if you're trying to do something there are 5 outdated documents describing the decision making process for how the project was run, and no documents about how to actually use the resulting software. Occasionally if you ask how to actually do a task in Slack someone will yell at you that you should have searched for a…

No post body was provided.

Re: High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

#100

Post by ip26 » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 7:26 PM UTC

thisisbrians wrote: post #7

ifloyd wrote: post #2

Our work culture's obsession with meetings, which is dwindling, it seems, is due in large part to our desire to perform as part of 'productivity theater.' this has mostly been driven up by wfh. but it's interesting to me that so many people focus on performativity vs. output

I think about this a lot. "Managers" are under pressure to make sure their teams are meeting goals/deadlines/whatever, so they are anxious, so they make efforts to observe and oversee "performance". Seeing people in meetings and diligently "working" makes them feel better about their teams' performance. But what really matters is outcome...which is very difficult to measure for a lot of software teams, and even harde…

On the other hand, thirty minutes a week seems like a small overhead to pay if you’re concerned a team might otherwise lose focus & direction entirely. Not, to be clear, that they are lazy, but instead that they could be diligently working… on the wrong thing.

I can understand it both ways.