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Perhaps it's an abrasive trait, but I really am not over-concerned about being available. That is, I check my work email once in the morning and I flip through

Perhaps it's an abrasive trait, but I really am not over-concerned about being available. That is, I check my work email once in the morning and I flip through my team's Slack channel when I'm directly pinged or after coming back from a time-out mini-break. Other communication mediums I check even less frequently. Folks who feel compelled to be highly-available, what's the draw? Is it a nervous compulsion, a sense that you're going to miss out on something or yet something I haven't even imagined?

munin 11y ago
Here's a scenario. Someone sends you a message Tuesday morning, asking "hey what is the best way to push data into this system." You are not available, off in your fortress of solitude, so they wait for about 30 minutes to hear back from you, they don't, and they proceed with reading documentation and trying to figure something out. A day passes. The next day, you look at their work and you exclaim "wow! this is going to be really inefficient and cause problems with other features that I know are coming!" and they say "well that's why I asked you..." and you reply "well, I'm not concerned about being AVAILABLE..."
- saurik 11y ago
  Is there really nothing else they could be working on while they wait for a response? Are they in such a rush to work on that one specific thing that they have a 30 minute timeout before deciding "ok, our scout is dead, we need to come up with some other way to get out of this cave: let's try explosives"?
  - dvanduzer 11y ago
    it was a contrived example for rhetorical purposes. people who use Slack regularly might recognize this as a use case for "can anyone @here help me with pushing data into #system?"
    - saurik 11y ago
      "Can anyone help me go pick up the dresser and move it into the other room? No? No one is around? Well, this has to get done right now for reasons that are still not yet clear so I guess I will just try to do it myself. ... Great, now I'm lying on the floor in agony as I pulled a muscle in my back, and I knocked over the dresser in the process. If only you were available on Slack none of this would have happened."
      - dvanduzer 11y ago
        dude, there is a big difference between volunteer IRC teams, and coworkers who aren't able to communicate well.
        saurik 11y ago
        I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say by that... I can only guess you are trying to claim that I only have experience dealing with "volunteer IRC teams" by my argument; but in fact I tend to spend most of my time talking with the small number of people whom I have as employees, and I spent quite a bit of time working in a consulting company. There is something fundamentally broken about either the employee or the company if they find themselves trying to do something and it is not acceptable for them to wait until the correct resource is available. This same employee is going to do tons of dumb things as they time out on external events (support tickets, vendor fixes, financing, approval, etc.). If you just can't see how "everyone needs to be available at all times to be interrupted from the task they have to help someone else with a task they have or that task is going to get done in some dumb way without you" is absolutely not a sign of "coworkers who are able to communicate well" then I guess I'm glad I don't work with you at your company :(.
        dvanduzer 11y ago
        I mean, the article is misunderstanding asynchronous but urgent communication. But it's about Slack, and my comments are geared toward learning the communication habits of a team. If Slack is interrupting your work, then you are using Slack wrong. Period.
  - munin 11y ago
    What is an acceptable timeout? What if the answer is no, there is actually nothing else they could be working on? What if the problem is "hey, you forgot to add this file and the build is broken?" When is it appropriate to interrupt someone to get them to respond?
- troutwine 11y ago
  That scenario wouldn't happen. If someone is sending me a message directly, in my present organization, we're talking Slack. Sent directly, that'll be a ping and I'll respond as soon as I notice which'll be in a few seconds. It's a disruption, sure, but if you're reaching out directly it's important. If it's _super_ important escalation to video-chat or in-person talk happens. What I'm curious about is the regular polling model of availability. I could have been more clear.
  - geofft 11y ago
    That assumes that they know you're the person to contact. In several cases I know how to do something, but it's not totally clear to my coworkers that I do and it's appropriate to contact me. Or, more commonly -- I know someone on the team knows how to make a system work, but I don't know who. (I don't think you need to poll more frequently than every 30 minutes to make this work well enough, so you can do Pomodoro-length blocks without checking every ten seconds if someone else needs you.) The other thing about this model is it encourages things to be personally-directed disruptions. In a healthy, non-tiny engineering organization, there are important parts of the system where multiple people understand the subtleties (to avoid SPOF) but not everyone understands the subtleties (because they don't need it). Multiple pings will bother everyone for no good reason, when only one of them needed to be bothered. But to avoid that, you have to ensure that a broadcast query will probabalistically be answered by one person who knows the answer.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      This isn't a problem. A company big enough where someone doesn't know who handles what will already have a good chance of someone seeing the message. Direct pings for immediate responses, otherwise a reply within an hour or two is just fine. Or if that really doesn't work, I'm sure the first incorrect direct ping will redirect to the right person right after, it's not like you need to annoy everyone in a massive blast. And big companies will generally have managers, assistants and others who are more flexible and can deal with this very well as general routers of communications.
  - munin 11y ago
- dlisboa 11y ago
  He said he checks messages if they're sent directly to him. That's perfectly reasonable and I'd wager everyone on this thread does exactly the same, not caring too much about chatter not specifically related to them. I assume no one here has 10 different people DMing them questions or new stuff to do. I read his comment as he doesn't check Slack all the time unless someone mentions or DMs him. Your scenario doesn't happen in that case.
rayiner 11y ago
Checking your email while doing mentally difficult work is like stopping to walk every few minutes while running a marathon.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  I'd say it's much worse than that. If I stop to walk in a marathon, I can probably expect to run faster for a little bit afterward. But I work slower after checking email. It's more like drinking a beer during a marathon. (Taking a short walk outside during mentally difficult work does help.)
ryanSrich 11y ago
A few things I need to be available for on slack: - customers having issues that involve things I work on - employees I work with asking me questions about a specific thing - getting feedback on ideas - uploading documents and commenting on them - having any type of conversation with a fellow employee - letting people know I'll be out the next day, that I'm AFK for a bit, etc.
dvanduzer 11y ago
Availability depends heavily on role. The thing that's so great about Slack is that it's IRC, but private, but well synchronized, with persistent state across client instances, and you have fine grained control over the notifications. The threading mechanism the article doesn't seem to understand is Slack teams.
rnovak 11y ago
after reading your other comments in this thread, I completely agree, and maintain things the same way. I've found that by closing slack, I can get multiple orders of magnitude more work done in a day, which is crazy. I have everything set up so that iff I am directly mentioned, or directly messaged, I'll get a ping, otherwise it won't bother me. Same with email (Everything without me & only me in the TO field gets filtered into a folder that I'm not sent push notifications for). This way, I've found, lets me be far more productive, and I still feel that I respond to requests faster than 80% of anyone else in our company, so I don't think there's much drawback.

munin 11y ago

Here's a scenario. Someone sends you a message Tuesday morning, asking "hey what is the best way to push data into this system." You are not available, off in your fortress of solitude, so they wait for about 30 minutes to hear back from you, they don't, and they proceed with reading documentation and trying to figure something out. A day passes. The next day, you look at their work and you exclaim "wow! this is going to be really inefficient and cause problems with other features that I know are coming!" and they say "well that's why I asked you..." and you reply "well, I'm not concerned about being AVAILABLE..."

saurik 11y ago
Is there really nothing else they could be working on while they wait for a response? Are they in such a rush to work on that one specific thing that they have a 30 minute timeout before deciding "ok, our scout is dead, we need to come up with some other way to get out of this cave: let's try explosives"?
- dvanduzer 11y ago
  it was a contrived example for rhetorical purposes. people who use Slack regularly might recognize this as a use case for "can anyone @here help me with pushing data into #system?"
  - saurik 11y ago
    "Can anyone help me go pick up the dresser and move it into the other room? No? No one is around? Well, this has to get done right now for reasons that are still not yet clear so I guess I will just try to do it myself. ... Great, now I'm lying on the floor in agony as I pulled a muscle in my back, and I knocked over the dresser in the process. If only you were available on Slack none of this would have happened."
    - dvanduzer 11y ago
      dude, there is a big difference between volunteer IRC teams, and coworkers who aren't able to communicate well.
      - saurik 11y ago
        I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say by that... I can only guess you are trying to claim that I only have experience dealing with "volunteer IRC teams" by my argument; but in fact I tend to spend most of my time talking with the small number of people whom I have as employees, and I spent quite a bit of time working in a consulting company. There is something fundamentally broken about either the employee or the company if they find themselves trying to do something and it is not acceptable for them to wait until the correct resource is available. This same employee is going to do tons of dumb things as they time out on external events (support tickets, vendor fixes, financing, approval, etc.). If you just can't see how "everyone needs to be available at all times to be interrupted from the task they have to help someone else with a task they have or that task is going to get done in some dumb way without you" is absolutely not a sign of "coworkers who are able to communicate well" then I guess I'm glad I don't work with you at your company :(.
        dvanduzer 11y ago
        I mean, the article is misunderstanding asynchronous but urgent communication. But it's about Slack, and my comments are geared toward learning the communication habits of a team. If Slack is interrupting your work, then you are using Slack wrong. Period.
- munin 11y ago
  What is an acceptable timeout? What if the answer is no, there is actually nothing else they could be working on? What if the problem is "hey, you forgot to add this file and the build is broken?" When is it appropriate to interrupt someone to get them to respond?
troutwine 11y ago
That scenario wouldn't happen. If someone is sending me a message directly, in my present organization, we're talking Slack. Sent directly, that'll be a ping and I'll respond as soon as I notice which'll be in a few seconds. It's a disruption, sure, but if you're reaching out directly it's important. If it's _super_ important escalation to video-chat or in-person talk happens. What I'm curious about is the regular polling model of availability. I could have been more clear.
- geofft 11y ago
  That assumes that they know you're the person to contact. In several cases I know how to do something, but it's not totally clear to my coworkers that I do and it's appropriate to contact me. Or, more commonly -- I know someone on the team knows how to make a system work, but I don't know who. (I don't think you need to poll more frequently than every 30 minutes to make this work well enough, so you can do Pomodoro-length blocks without checking every ten seconds if someone else needs you.) The other thing about this model is it encourages things to be personally-directed disruptions. In a healthy, non-tiny engineering organization, there are important parts of the system where multiple people understand the subtleties (to avoid SPOF) but not everyone understands the subtleties (because they don't need it). Multiple pings will bother everyone for no good reason, when only one of them needed to be bothered. But to avoid that, you have to ensure that a broadcast query will probabalistically be answered by one person who knows the answer.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    This isn't a problem. A company big enough where someone doesn't know who handles what will already have a good chance of someone seeing the message. Direct pings for immediate responses, otherwise a reply within an hour or two is just fine. Or if that really doesn't work, I'm sure the first incorrect direct ping will redirect to the right person right after, it's not like you need to annoy everyone in a massive blast. And big companies will generally have managers, assistants and others who are more flexible and can deal with this very well as general routers of communications.
- munin 11y ago
dlisboa 11y ago
He said he checks messages if they're sent directly to him. That's perfectly reasonable and I'd wager everyone on this thread does exactly the same, not caring too much about chatter not specifically related to them. I assume no one here has 10 different people DMing them questions or new stuff to do. I read his comment as he doesn't check Slack all the time unless someone mentions or DMs him. Your scenario doesn't happen in that case.

rayiner 11y ago

Checking your email while doing mentally difficult work is like stopping to walk every few minutes while running a marathon.

grayclhn 11y ago
I'd say it's much worse than that. If I stop to walk in a marathon, I can probably expect to run faster for a little bit afterward. But I work slower after checking email. It's more like drinking a beer during a marathon. (Taking a short walk outside during mentally difficult work does help.)

ryanSrich 11y ago

A few things I need to be available for on slack: - customers having issues that involve things I work on - employees I work with asking me questions about a specific thing - getting feedback on ideas - uploading documents and commenting on them - having any type of conversation with a fellow employee - letting people know I'll be out the next day, that I'm AFK for a bit, etc.

dvanduzer 11y ago

Availability depends heavily on role. The thing that's so great about Slack is that it's IRC, but private, but well synchronized, with persistent state across client instances, and you have fine grained control over the notifications. The threading mechanism the article doesn't seem to understand is Slack teams.

rnovak 11y ago

after reading your other comments in this thread, I completely agree, and maintain things the same way. I've found that by closing slack, I can get multiple orders of magnitude more work done in a day, which is crazy. I have everything set up so that iff I am directly mentioned, or directly messaged, I'll get a ping, otherwise it won't bother me. Same with email (Everything without me & only me in the TO field gets filtered into a folder that I'm not sent push notifications for). This way, I've found, lets me be far more productive, and I still feel that I respond to requests faster than 80% of anyone else in our company, so I don't think there's much drawback.