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That happens quite often, indeed. My theory for this works as follows: 1. People do not have the time (or think they do not have the time) to read documentatio
by choeger 5y ago
That happens quite often, indeed. My theory for this works as follows:
1. People do not have the time (or think they do not have the time) to read documentation for more than 5min by default. They need to consciously allocated that time.
2. C-level types generally do not read details IMO, presumably because they think they won't understand it anyways. (thus, "executive summary")
3. Everyone who aspires to become C-level someday copies this behavior and ignores all but the "executive summary".
4. Otoh, C-level types are always in meetings. Thus, aspiring career folks will copy this behavior, too and only ever focus on something if they are in a meeting.
5. This culture of only ever sharing information synchronously is somewhat infectious and will spread throughout the company.
6. The behavior is also self-enforcing. If several people are in a meeting-only mode, you can only get them information by scheduling a meeting yourself. This will, step by step, bring you into meeting-only mode.
7. In the end-game the whole company slows down because information is spread only by the speed of meetings.
- eru 5y agoAdd in the use of PowerPoint to make everything worse. That's part of why Amazon famously banned PowerPoint.
- ianai 5y agoFor 1. (for me) I think the ever present feeling of having no time to read documentation stems from being in a desktop support role and an ops role. If the phone's not ringing - it has a good chance of ringing any moment. There's also monitoring all the things I'm expected to monitor. Those build in a kind of moment to moment thinking that outright stops deeper thinking.
- Tainnor 5y agoThe worst thing about this, IMHO, is that we had a chance to change this with the shift to remote work, but what happened instead of switching to more async-first and written communication styles, was that everything was moved to Zoom/Teams/whatever virtual meetings which IMHO are even worse than in-person meetings. I also believe that many people, including developers, actually don't have very good reading comprehension skills. Obviously, this doesn't apply for most people who comment on forums such as Hacker News, but in general I believe that it's true.
- thrower123 5y agoEstimates of the literacy level of the adult population are doubtless wildly over-estimated. There's a reason that newspapers are targeted at a seventh-grade reading level, or at least used to be. Writing skills are even more depressing. Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.
- myko 5y ago> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers. I feel like a relatively intelligent person but I absolutely struggle with writing concise emails / docs that are well organized. It's an agonizing process and I feel my results are hit or miss with little inbetween.
- whoisthemachine 5y agoWriting good documentation takes time! There's no way around it other than practice.
- developer93 5y agoWas it Samuel Johnson who wrote "I would write a shorter letter but I don't have time" or something along those lines
- Tainnor 5y ago> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers. To be fair, that's not my forte either as my writing tends to be sort-of meandering at times. Just recently I wrote a longer message to my PM and he told me "yo, bullet points please".
- 8note 5y agoThe literacy and writing of my colleagues has always been good, but sometimes it's in a different language, and their English literacy and writing are not as good.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gautamdivgi 5y ago>>> or think they do not have the time fwiw - As a lead engineer I tried to influence meeting formats as being "review only". The idea is to distribute ideas as wiki or markdown prior and review/comment prior to meeting. It failed spectacularly. I believe the demands of multi-tasking (meeetings, chat, meetings+chat+work at the same time) have caused a lot of people to not have the will power to sit and read. Reading is considered "not-productive" when you can just go to a call and ask the person to explain. In short, its really hard to change bad habits.
- wikibob 5y agoSome companies are famous for explicitly dedicating 20 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for silent reading in order to address this.
- betwixthewires 5y agoThis is actually a very compelling theory.