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well that's true, I'm a little fishbowled because I work in devops, so my conversations are constrained to technical matters which don't require (if your team i

by ldehaan 10y ago

well that's true, I'm a little fishbowled because I work in devops, so my conversations are constrained to technical matters which don't require (if your team is any good) trust in anything but the code you review and accept. I restrict conversations about jobs, raises and things that require convincing to face to face encounters, but those are intermittent and not a daily or even weekly occurrence. since the majority of my conversations are: hey, X needs to be done on Y, or build a mesos cluster on Z, or we're having intermittent connection issues on demo. It makes sense to have everything written down for reference, jira helps too, but getting the business side to create tickets is harder than it looks. overall maybe it's more of a role based issue.

matwood 10y ago
I agree with everything you just said. Some items should only be in person, but the majority actually work better in some written form. Having an instant log is great for basically any work conversation. JIRA ticket comments and Slack come to mind. I also find conversations more of a lazy way to communicate. Most just talk and never really think. Forcing someone to validate their idea(s) to the point where they are writing them down helps everyone involved. Finally, written down helps avoid the circular conversations and keeps others who were not present up to speed. Being able to go off and think and come back to exactly where the written conversation left off is a big win. Contrast this with the often endless meetings where the same things are discussed for a majority of the start of the meeting and at the end 1 extra decision is made.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
One thing is that talking about "restrategizing our value proposition to better synergize our resource allocation" doesn't look so impressive or meaningful when it's written down. You can get away with a lot more of bullshit when you're talking face-to-face. It's one of the reason why I prefer text. To drop a data point - as a developer, there's very little in my job that would be done better by personal meeting that isn't handled better via asynchronous communication. Be it IM or e-mail, or whatever. E-mail preferably, because IMs seem to give people the impression they don't have to think before writing. As for things that do require personal meetings - I'd say some initial architectural discussions, when you really want to be together in front of a large whiteboard. That however could be moved to software too, if someone someday writes a non-utterly-shitty collaboration program.
matt4077 10y ago
A command-and-control structure is indeed possible even via morse code. But some office jobs actually involve creativity which seriously profits from being in the same room from time to time,

by ldehaan 10y ago

matwood 10y ago

I agree with everything you just said. Some items should only be in person, but the majority actually work better in some written form. Having an instant log is great for basically any work conversation. JIRA ticket comments and Slack come to mind. I also find conversations more of a lazy way to communicate. Most just talk and never really think. Forcing someone to validate their idea(s) to the point where they are writing them down helps everyone involved. Finally, written down helps avoid the circular conversations and keeps others who were not present up to speed. Being able to go off and think and come back to exactly where the written conversation left off is a big win. Contrast this with the often endless meetings where the same things are discussed for a majority of the start of the meeting and at the end 1 extra decision is made.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

One thing is that talking about "restrategizing our value proposition to better synergize our resource allocation" doesn't look so impressive or meaningful when it's written down. You can get away with a lot more of bullshit when you're talking face-to-face. It's one of the reason why I prefer text. To drop a data point - as a developer, there's very little in my job that would be done better by personal meeting that isn't handled better via asynchronous communication. Be it IM or e-mail, or whatever. E-mail preferably, because IMs seem to give people the impression they don't have to think before writing. As for things that do require personal meetings - I'd say some initial architectural discussions, when you really want to be together in front of a large whiteboard. That however could be moved to software too, if someone someday writes a non-utterly-shitty collaboration program.

matt4077 10y ago

A command-and-control structure is indeed possible even via morse code. But some office jobs actually involve creativity which seriously profits from being in the same room from time to time,