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People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley. Career switching from the military to developmen
by poof131 11y ago
People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley. Career switching from the military to development has been interesting in this regards. The military uses chat, but only when needed—realtime communication is critical and people are distributed geographically. On duty on the carrier keeping track of planes and other issues happening “in country”, chat is great. On the ground in Iraq scheduling airborne assets and keeping track of SF missions, chat is great. But for most things, chat is more of a distraction and slows down the real work.
I understand chat if you are working in operations, but for pure development, it feels like a college dorm, more about the community and less about the work, where people still confuse time at the office with getting your work done. After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t. Building camaraderie is important, but chat probably isn’t the best way. And putting everyones communications in a single channel isn’t helping communication, it’s increasing distraction.
In my ideal dev team, you have chat, use it for one-on-one communication, and for anything that is time sensitive which goes into group channels. Anything that not everyone needs to know or isn’t time sensitive should go in an email or a message or a shoulder tap. Cluttering a few group channels with a ton of individual conversations, meaningless alerts, and random banter is downright juvenile and a detriment to productivity. I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution.
- niels_olson 11y ago> On duty on the carrier keeping track of planes and other issues happening “in country”, chat is great. Very similar observations from 10 years ago and now. And in the hospital, chat has no role. It's curious watching the Dev community obsess about how many things could theoretically do without getting off their butts, and then swear the latest standing desks.
- kbenson 11y ago> It's curious watching the Dev community obsess about how many things could theoretically do without getting off their butt I understand the sentiment, but it's important to consider the people in situations where it's not feasible to meet physically. It's not about "getting off your butt" if you live multiple hours away from the office.
- visakanv 11y ago> People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley. > After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t. > I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution. "Dorm room chat" is a great way of thinking and talking about it, and I think you can extend the metaphor really far. A lot of young people working in Silicon Valley and startups (not all, of course) see it partially as a lifestyle choice of sorts. Where it gets interesting and messy is– if your employees value that sort of thing, should you encourage it? Discourage it? I guess it depends on what you're trying to achieve. I agree completely with the philosophy that communications in general should be lean and tidy. It's interesting to observe that different people have different attitudes about this, and that every organization comes to its own sort of compromise.
- crdoconnor 11y agoThis is all very true, but I've seen many cases where: >use it for one-on-one communication ^^ This often ends up hiving off critical information. My ideal 'team chat' software would let you, by default, have one on one communications which get indexed and are searchable by everyone.