4 ms·

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 an

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
Oh, I see. That is more sensible. Regular polling, IME, happens when you're trying to "keep abreast" of a decision making process that you are not directly involved in. Say you are the SME for data security and there is a discussion which could involve you but presently does not. You initially pay attention, but work on some other tasks in the background and poll on the discussion to see if there is anything that would affect you. The danger happens when you start thinking that everything could affect you and you spend more time keeping up to date on what everyone else is doing rather than doing stuff yourself. Eventually the pendulum swings the other way and you stop paying attention to anything, until Something Happens and If Only You Were There, and then you start paying attention to little things, a few times, again. And the cycle repeats itself.

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

Oh, I see. That is more sensible. Regular polling, IME, happens when you're trying to "keep abreast" of a decision making process that you are not directly involved in. Say you are the SME for data security and there is a discussion which could involve you but presently does not. You initially pay attention, but work on some other tasks in the background and poll on the discussion to see if there is anything that would affect you. The danger happens when you start thinking that everything could affect you and you spend more time keeping up to date on what everyone else is doing rather than doing stuff yourself. Eventually the pendulum swings the other way and you stop paying attention to anything, until Something Happens and If Only You Were There, and then you start paying attention to little things, a few times, again. And the cycle repeats itself.