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My experience working for a Bay Area company during the pandemic: - No one uses email. Literally no one. The only things I get from email is automated notifica

My experience working for a Bay Area company during the pandemic: - No one uses email. Literally no one. The only things I get from email is automated notifications and meeting invites. - Everyone uses Slack synchronously. I get multiple pings per hour. Sometimes I have to carry on 2-3 conversations in real time, simultaneously. - Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway. - Absolutely nothing is in writing: not meeting outcomes, not project plans, not reported issues. Messages in our Slack expire automatically after 60 days, so there is no written record of anything either.

xkqd 5y ago
I gotta say, our Slack messages are retained for so long I don’t even know what our Slack expiry is set to. This makes our Slack our single best repository of information available, far more likely to yield useful results than Confluence or searching old emails.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Companies that delete slack messages automatically shoot themselves in the foot. Whatever legal exposure you reduce is vastly outweighed by the convenience factor.
  - slyall 5y ago
    The companies might night be deleting slack messages automatically. They might just be on the free plan which only shows the most recent 10,000 messages.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      A company that's a going concern has money to pay for Slack. We have maximum data retention requirements of a legal nature, so we are deleting Slack messages with fully conscious intention.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Believe it or not, some companies out there simply won't pay for Slack and will just use the free tier, which will eat the messages after some time anyways. Of course, if billing or other concerns prevent them from doing this, i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either. I actually did that myself and wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-platform https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat...
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either. I would assume CYA. If a self-hosted, non-industry-standard program went down, the person who set it up would be putting be their balls on the line. If Slack goes down, they can blame someone externally.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  I was a part of company during a Hipchat > Teams migration that saw us lose all direct message history. The amount of knowledge lost was incalculable. It was certainly a wakeup call for me to start documenting stuff more permanently.
- 88913527 5y ago
  So many times I've searched some weird intranet hostname, or $megacorp_specific_lingo and found it in Slack, yet nowhere in our Confluence. Confluence is great for more long-form stuff, but it also gets stale. But the great thing with a slack message, it's mostly immutable, so I can see the date (a decent proxy for relevance). I don't have to peer through the edit history in Confluence to ascertain the age of the information on a document with a long lifespan and many edits.
antisthenes 5y ago
It's the typical American corporate culture of shuffling responsibility away from yourself, akin to a game of musical chairs. Notice how most actions here are not designed to maximize productivity and finish the task quickly, but to maximize virtue signaling and to have as much plausible deniability as possible. Personally, I would go bonkers in such an environment. I have some very harsh words that are best left off HN for people who engage in, perpetuate and sometimes (yes, some managers) encourage this behavior whether by ignorance or by deliberate example.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  There's another less sinister explanation. Most of what people think is important to document simply isn't. Particularly, collaborative sessions. If a customer reports a bug in production, it really doesn't matter what was spec'd because the spec might be wrong. You need to evaluate the case and decide if something actually needs to be fixed.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Try that trick in a regulated industry and I guarantee you that you'll be out the door the first time. What is in the spec is crucial and if the spec is wrong you fix the spec, assuming you have the authority to do so.
  - auggierose 5y ago
    It would be good to have a spec so you know if it is a bug or not. That is independent of your customer thinking it is a bug.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  No, this is exactly wrong. Slack in real time = I ran into a problem and I will bother you in real time until you fix it. Endemic to data scientists! Not writing email = I need you to answer me now, not later. Also, I don't want to waste time composing text when I can just talk to you over video right now. Meetings all the time = I want the highest bandwidth communication immediately, instead of having to wait for an unspecified length of time, only to realize that I have a follow-up question. This is precisely about responsibility and responsiveness, right now, immediately, and in real time, until the problem is solved. It's very much a young person and startup thing. Maybe it works differently if you contract with a large, slow bigcorp of some kind, but I've never worked in such an environment.
dag11 5y ago
> Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway. That's because everyone just hates other people's meetings.
paganel 5y ago
So no email and lots of slack messages interrupting you, I have to wonder how does anything get done? I also find Slack (and all other IM platforms) to be horrendous when it comes to holding information that you might need later.
- 88913527 5y ago
  I've started keeping my slack status off permanently in working hours. It discourages people from contacting me, but I imagine the effect will wear off with time, as people catch on. The bigger picture takeaway is Slack status is not synonymous with me doing work that delivers company value (eg: doesn't mean I'm afk gaming or whatever). The expectation of 'always on' is draining. I withdrew from social media for this reason, and now I'm applying that lens to professional communication software, in an effort to enforce barriers a bit better.
kulikalov 5y ago
Sorry to hear that, I've been in this situation in the early years of my career. It sucks, puts way too much unnecessary pressure... If you need to focus, just disable all notifications. Literally all of them. No one will die while you are focusing on the task at hand. And the project you are working on will definitely benefit from someone paying 100% attention to it. This may sound too extreme, but it'll feel natural after just one week.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Tried doing that, immediately got feedback from team lead: "Scarlett mentioned that she tried to reach you about the metrics she's trying to collect, she ended up getting blocked for the whole day. Could you be more more responsive?"
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Or maybe Scarlett can work on more than one thing so that when she needs to make demands on other people's time that comes with a reasonable expectation of turnaround (such as 24 hours) or to communicate such needs timely rather than at the last moment.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      Let me tell my boss how to manage the team and get back to you about how that goes.
      - kulikalov 5y ago
        find a new boss?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        legerdemain 5y ago
        I work at FAANG and kind of like the comp? Other teams here are generally just as bad, from what I hear.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
Wow, that sounds awful. Mostly asynchronous Slack/Teams/whatever is so so productive. You need a team that is all committed to deprioritizing message checking and knowing how to @at the right person or group when something is actually urgent in order for it to work though.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  That's a privilege that our architect/principal engineer enjoyed. Everyone knew that he was too important to bother, so people generally didn't ask him questions. He'd reach out to you if he needed something, and otherwise he'd scan Slack and code reviews once a day and that was all the comms you'd get from him. He basically delivered solutions, and then it was our job to fix, maintain, and support them.
  - ahoka 5y ago
    Wow, that sounds very bad.
    - n4r9 5y ago
      Does it? They've carved out the essential space needed for deep thinking and are still responsive to questions on a daily basis. Sounds fine to me.
      - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
        It could be very dysfunctional if someone is throwing stuff over the wall, but isn't so involved in day to day understands of what is needed, what are the problems. That's a hard thing to be successful at, that remoteness.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Karenifornia tax cattle state property objects are extremely biohazardous, do not comply.
eikenberry 5y ago
Sounds like everyone just kept on going like they were in person. Remote work takes a different cadence and communication patterns. I work at a 100% remote company and we have none of those problems (AFAIK). - We use email extensively, both person-to-person and with various internal mailing lists we can subscribe to. - Slack is very asynchronous and it is common for people to silence it when busy. - All meetings are recorded and optional if you aren't an active participant. - We write everything down with historical archives, for example all projects are proceeded by a written RFC describing the problem, solution and alternatives. There are places that do remote work well.
mbrodersen 5y ago
My experience is/was very different. Email and JIRA are the #1 communication tools. And occasionally (a few times a year) a 5 minutes mobile phone call to resolve an issue that couldn’t be resolved asynced. It works great. Constantly being pinged by Slack etc. would be annoying and negatively impact productivity.

xkqd 5y ago

I gotta say, our Slack messages are retained for so long I don’t even know what our Slack expiry is set to. This makes our Slack our single best repository of information available, far more likely to yield useful results than Confluence or searching old emails.

cm2012 5y ago
Companies that delete slack messages automatically shoot themselves in the foot. Whatever legal exposure you reduce is vastly outweighed by the convenience factor.
- slyall 5y ago
  The companies might night be deleting slack messages automatically. They might just be on the free plan which only shows the most recent 10,000 messages.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    A company that's a going concern has money to pay for Slack. We have maximum data retention requirements of a legal nature, so we are deleting Slack messages with fully conscious intention.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Believe it or not, some companies out there simply won't pay for Slack and will just use the free tier, which will eat the messages after some time anyways. Of course, if billing or other concerns prevent them from doing this, i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either. I actually did that myself and wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-platform https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat...
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either. I would assume CYA. If a self-hosted, non-industry-standard program went down, the person who set it up would be putting be their balls on the line. If Slack goes down, they can blame someone externally.
lelandfe 5y ago
I was a part of company during a Hipchat > Teams migration that saw us lose all direct message history. The amount of knowledge lost was incalculable. It was certainly a wakeup call for me to start documenting stuff more permanently.
88913527 5y ago
So many times I've searched some weird intranet hostname, or $megacorp_specific_lingo and found it in Slack, yet nowhere in our Confluence. Confluence is great for more long-form stuff, but it also gets stale. But the great thing with a slack message, it's mostly immutable, so I can see the date (a decent proxy for relevance). I don't have to peer through the edit history in Confluence to ascertain the age of the information on a document with a long lifespan and many edits.

antisthenes 5y ago

It's the typical American corporate culture of shuffling responsibility away from yourself, akin to a game of musical chairs. Notice how most actions here are not designed to maximize productivity and finish the task quickly, but to maximize virtue signaling and to have as much plausible deniability as possible. Personally, I would go bonkers in such an environment. I have some very harsh words that are best left off HN for people who engage in, perpetuate and sometimes (yes, some managers) encourage this behavior whether by ignorance or by deliberate example.

SkyPuncher 5y ago
There's another less sinister explanation. Most of what people think is important to document simply isn't. Particularly, collaborative sessions. If a customer reports a bug in production, it really doesn't matter what was spec'd because the spec might be wrong. You need to evaluate the case and decide if something actually needs to be fixed.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Try that trick in a regulated industry and I guarantee you that you'll be out the door the first time. What is in the spec is crucial and if the spec is wrong you fix the spec, assuming you have the authority to do so.
- auggierose 5y ago
  It would be good to have a spec so you know if it is a bug or not. That is independent of your customer thinking it is a bug.
legerdemain 5y ago
No, this is exactly wrong. Slack in real time = I ran into a problem and I will bother you in real time until you fix it. Endemic to data scientists! Not writing email = I need you to answer me now, not later. Also, I don't want to waste time composing text when I can just talk to you over video right now. Meetings all the time = I want the highest bandwidth communication immediately, instead of having to wait for an unspecified length of time, only to realize that I have a follow-up question. This is precisely about responsibility and responsiveness, right now, immediately, and in real time, until the problem is solved. It's very much a young person and startup thing. Maybe it works differently if you contract with a large, slow bigcorp of some kind, but I've never worked in such an environment.

dag11 5y ago

> Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway. That's because everyone just hates other people's meetings.

paganel 5y ago

So no email and lots of slack messages interrupting you, I have to wonder how does anything get done? I also find Slack (and all other IM platforms) to be horrendous when it comes to holding information that you might need later.

88913527 5y ago
I've started keeping my slack status off permanently in working hours. It discourages people from contacting me, but I imagine the effect will wear off with time, as people catch on. The bigger picture takeaway is Slack status is not synonymous with me doing work that delivers company value (eg: doesn't mean I'm afk gaming or whatever). The expectation of 'always on' is draining. I withdrew from social media for this reason, and now I'm applying that lens to professional communication software, in an effort to enforce barriers a bit better.

kulikalov 5y ago

Sorry to hear that, I've been in this situation in the early years of my career. It sucks, puts way too much unnecessary pressure... If you need to focus, just disable all notifications. Literally all of them. No one will die while you are focusing on the task at hand. And the project you are working on will definitely benefit from someone paying 100% attention to it. This may sound too extreme, but it'll feel natural after just one week.

legerdemain 5y ago
Tried doing that, immediately got feedback from team lead: "Scarlett mentioned that she tried to reach you about the metrics she's trying to collect, she ended up getting blocked for the whole day. Could you be more more responsive?"
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Or maybe Scarlett can work on more than one thing so that when she needs to make demands on other people's time that comes with a reasonable expectation of turnaround (such as 24 hours) or to communicate such needs timely rather than at the last moment.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    Let me tell my boss how to manage the team and get back to you about how that goes.
    - kulikalov 5y ago
      find a new boss?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - legerdemain 5y ago
        I work at FAANG and kind of like the comp? Other teams here are generally just as bad, from what I hear.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

Wow, that sounds awful. Mostly asynchronous Slack/Teams/whatever is so so productive. You need a team that is all committed to deprioritizing message checking and knowing how to @at the right person or group when something is actually urgent in order for it to work though.

legerdemain 5y ago
That's a privilege that our architect/principal engineer enjoyed. Everyone knew that he was too important to bother, so people generally didn't ask him questions. He'd reach out to you if he needed something, and otherwise he'd scan Slack and code reviews once a day and that was all the comms you'd get from him. He basically delivered solutions, and then it was our job to fix, maintain, and support them.
- ahoka 5y ago
  Wow, that sounds very bad.
  - n4r9 5y ago
    Does it? They've carved out the essential space needed for deep thinking and are still responsive to questions on a daily basis. Sounds fine to me.
    - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
      It could be very dysfunctional if someone is throwing stuff over the wall, but isn't so involved in day to day understands of what is needed, what are the problems. That's a hard thing to be successful at, that remoteness.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Karenifornia tax cattle state property objects are extremely biohazardous, do not comply.

eikenberry 5y ago

Sounds like everyone just kept on going like they were in person. Remote work takes a different cadence and communication patterns. I work at a 100% remote company and we have none of those problems (AFAIK). - We use email extensively, both person-to-person and with various internal mailing lists we can subscribe to. - Slack is very asynchronous and it is common for people to silence it when busy. - All meetings are recorded and optional if you aren't an active participant. - We write everything down with historical archives, for example all projects are proceeded by a written RFC describing the problem, solution and alternatives. There are places that do remote work well.

mbrodersen 5y ago

My experience is/was very different. Email and JIRA are the #1 communication tools. And occasionally (a few times a year) a 5 minutes mobile phone call to resolve an issue that couldn’t be resolved asynced. It works great. Constantly being pinged by Slack etc. would be annoying and negatively impact productivity.