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If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pag
by concede_pluto 9y ago
If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pagerduty rotation. Showing up at my desk is not the best way to do anything.
- hota_mazi 9y agoThat's adding a lot of paperwork and process for something that should be done in a few minutes. You're excessively reducing productivity if you require each face to face to require a meeting booking.
- lazerwalker 9y agoI think both sides here have a point. One argument: For many kinds of knowledge work, unnecessary unplanned distractions are a huge drain on productivity. Tapping someone on the shoulder is far more damaging than sending them a message they can reply to asynchronously, even if you're defining expected response time in minutes rather than hours. If there's something that really does require face-to-face time, great, plan a meeting. Another argument: face-to-face communication is so much higher bandwidth than voice or text chat that it's worth prioritizing. Tapping someone on the shoulder and hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth. Both of these are totally true! It's really about how an individual, and a team, work together best. To me, the frustration is that most modern team environments tend to implicitly choose the latter value system without it being a conscious choice.
- concede_pluto 9y ago> hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.