5 ms·

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 y

by 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.

by munin 11y ago

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.