4 ms·

I'd argue more people severely overestimate the need of communication quantity and management roles/responsibilities have inflated everything as a result. Worse

I'd argue more people severely overestimate the need of communication quantity and management roles/responsibilities have inflated everything as a result. Worse, people who want to primarily talk are going to advocate for others to talk more. Regardless, whoever brings up what GP does is frequently bombarded with the old "communication important" or "soft skills matter" spiel in an attempt to validate the explosion of communicational requirements.

jseban 4y ago
kqr 4y ago
Many big modern organisations are built by bureaucrats whose specialisation it is to create more bureaucracy. Thus they spend a lot of time thinking up ways to measure the work performed from various angles, create reports for their superiors, and find other ways to ride on the work of others to earn their salary instead of doing actual work. This propagates downward and soon everyone (but perhaps the most junior contributors) is working in politics about meta-work, rather than doing the actual work. It takes rebel managers to go "no, I won't participate in this seventh time allocation study" and instead do actual work to break the cycle.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Precisely this. I've seen every size and type of organisation from single digit employee count up to tens of thousands in huge bureaucracies. Inevitably, the paperwork becomes the goal, and no amount of pleading with middle-managers will convince them that their job is unnecessary. If they were to believe us, they'd have to quit and become unemployed. Even in my relatively small consulting org I have to actively fight against the rising tide of overhead. Just recently I tried to explain to a manager that status reports are not the most important deliverable. That the actual product is, and reporting about it is secondary. They were aghast.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Even more shocking: if the manager was active in implementation -- even just a small part -- they would only need a fraction as many status reports. They could just talk to the relevant people instead.
  - mbrodersen 4y ago
    I strongly believe that you can dramatically improve the productivity of most companies by firing 50% of middle management and using the money to hire more people who actually work on the products/services the company is selling.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Really need a "clean communication" movement just like we have a "clean code" movement.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I remember reading a thought experiment: after a fire drill when everyone is in the parking lot, the CEO can say, "Everyone who was in an actual call with a customer when the drill started can get back in. The rest of you stay out until someone dealing with a customer asks for your help." I imagine a lot of people in HR, marketing, and various other paper-shuffling positions have to stay in the parking lot for quite some time. Not to mention many executives!
    - matwood 4y ago
      > I imagine a lot of people in HR, marketing, and various other paper-shuffling positions have to stay in the parking lot for quite some time. Not to mention many executives! Most of the IT people also...
      - kqr 4y ago
        In some organisations where many customer-facing employees are fairly IT literate, yup, definitely.
rocqua 4y ago
What matters is not communication, but shared understanding. This is of incredible importance to get written code to actually matter. One gets the shares understanding through communication. If that is going poorly, more communication is required. So whilst we agree an abundance of communication is a bad thing, we disagree on why. It's easy to hate on time wasted on communication. Disruption to your process sucks. But it's not wasted time if you don't have shared understanding yet. It's crucial in that case.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >If that is going poorly, more communication is required. No, you need better communication. Start decoupling "more" from "better". That's the crux of the matter, people trying to bruteforce communication issues by adding more communication. Most people suck at communication. Including 99% of the people applauding themselves or each other for "great communication". We're not solving these issues layering more communication, that's how orgs die under their own weight. What they need is better strategies and to stop boggling down ICs with redundant bureaucracy, as sibling points out.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    Let me rephrase: If your communication is bad, then you will need more communication to get to shared understanding. Yes, better communication would also be a great solution. But "if you are bad at X, just do X better" is meaningless advice. Useful advice is either how to fix the problem (advice on how to do X better) or less popularly but often very useful, how to mitigate the problem (advice on how to avoid bad outcomes from being bad at X). Turns out that more communication is essentially the only way to mitigate ineffective communication.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      >Turns out that more communication is essentially the only way to mitigate ineffective communication. No, it's not. This is the equivalent of saying "if your writing sucks, just use more words". Anyone reading an overly terse, jumbled mess can tell you that's not the silver bullet. Somehow, that is the solution we go for whenever management is involved, until they figure out "oh crap maybe boggling our ICs with bureaucracy is in fact a bad idea". Layering on more communication is not a net positive by default, not even in a world where time isn't a factor. Heck, we both know most people have neither the mental capacity nor the note-taking diligence to keep up with this all. The system is already showing signs of oversaturation with how many go "what did we discuss again last meeting?" >But "if you are bad at X, just do X better" is meaningless advice Several others have already given examples. If you don't have information, stop making 30m-2h meetings when everyone already knows the answer is "we have to do more research", followed by actions such as "make a few quick prototypes and test with the client" or "have the front-facing people ask more questions". Use audio, visual, video media to communicate what becomes terse in words. Use less words and less meetings overall, where possible. Start thinking about what truly adds value and what is a horrible proxy with near-zero evidence behind it. The default attitude is "never delete until evidence proves otherwise". Anyone looking at Brook's Law can understand how this goes wrong. I shouldn't even have to explain this. I'm a consumer of the culture, not a producer. The fact ICs have to tell management types how to do their job better is ridiculous: that's management's job to begin with, optimizing communicational processes. I don't expect clients to tell me more than "the product is slow" either, even if I'll take any bit of information they can provide me.

jseban 4y ago

kqr 4y ago

Many big modern organisations are built by bureaucrats whose specialisation it is to create more bureaucracy. Thus they spend a lot of time thinking up ways to measure the work performed from various angles, create reports for their superiors, and find other ways to ride on the work of others to earn their salary instead of doing actual work. This propagates downward and soon everyone (but perhaps the most junior contributors) is working in politics about meta-work, rather than doing the actual work. It takes rebel managers to go "no, I won't participate in this seventh time allocation study" and instead do actual work to break the cycle.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Precisely this. I've seen every size and type of organisation from single digit employee count up to tens of thousands in huge bureaucracies. Inevitably, the paperwork becomes the goal, and no amount of pleading with middle-managers will convince them that their job is unnecessary. If they were to believe us, they'd have to quit and become unemployed. Even in my relatively small consulting org I have to actively fight against the rising tide of overhead. Just recently I tried to explain to a manager that status reports are not the most important deliverable. That the actual product is, and reporting about it is secondary. They were aghast.
- kqr 4y ago
  Even more shocking: if the manager was active in implementation -- even just a small part -- they would only need a fraction as many status reports. They could just talk to the relevant people instead.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  I strongly believe that you can dramatically improve the productivity of most companies by firing 50% of middle management and using the money to hire more people who actually work on the products/services the company is selling.
Jensson 4y ago
Really need a "clean communication" movement just like we have a "clean code" movement.
- kqr 4y ago
  I remember reading a thought experiment: after a fire drill when everyone is in the parking lot, the CEO can say, "Everyone who was in an actual call with a customer when the drill started can get back in. The rest of you stay out until someone dealing with a customer asks for your help." I imagine a lot of people in HR, marketing, and various other paper-shuffling positions have to stay in the parking lot for quite some time. Not to mention many executives!
  - matwood 4y ago
    > I imagine a lot of people in HR, marketing, and various other paper-shuffling positions have to stay in the parking lot for quite some time. Not to mention many executives! Most of the IT people also...
    - kqr 4y ago
      In some organisations where many customer-facing employees are fairly IT literate, yup, definitely.

rocqua 4y ago

What matters is not communication, but shared understanding. This is of incredible importance to get written code to actually matter. One gets the shares understanding through communication. If that is going poorly, more communication is required. So whilst we agree an abundance of communication is a bad thing, we disagree on why. It's easy to hate on time wasted on communication. Disruption to your process sucks. But it's not wasted time if you don't have shared understanding yet. It's crucial in that case.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>If that is going poorly, more communication is required. No, you need better communication. Start decoupling "more" from "better". That's the crux of the matter, people trying to bruteforce communication issues by adding more communication. Most people suck at communication. Including 99% of the people applauding themselves or each other for "great communication". We're not solving these issues layering more communication, that's how orgs die under their own weight. What they need is better strategies and to stop boggling down ICs with redundant bureaucracy, as sibling points out.
- rocqua 4y ago
  Let me rephrase: If your communication is bad, then you will need more communication to get to shared understanding. Yes, better communication would also be a great solution. But "if you are bad at X, just do X better" is meaningless advice. Useful advice is either how to fix the problem (advice on how to do X better) or less popularly but often very useful, how to mitigate the problem (advice on how to avoid bad outcomes from being bad at X). Turns out that more communication is essentially the only way to mitigate ineffective communication.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    >Turns out that more communication is essentially the only way to mitigate ineffective communication. No, it's not. This is the equivalent of saying "if your writing sucks, just use more words". Anyone reading an overly terse, jumbled mess can tell you that's not the silver bullet. Somehow, that is the solution we go for whenever management is involved, until they figure out "oh crap maybe boggling our ICs with bureaucracy is in fact a bad idea". Layering on more communication is not a net positive by default, not even in a world where time isn't a factor. Heck, we both know most people have neither the mental capacity nor the note-taking diligence to keep up with this all. The system is already showing signs of oversaturation with how many go "what did we discuss again last meeting?" >But "if you are bad at X, just do X better" is meaningless advice Several others have already given examples. If you don't have information, stop making 30m-2h meetings when everyone already knows the answer is "we have to do more research", followed by actions such as "make a few quick prototypes and test with the client" or "have the front-facing people ask more questions". Use audio, visual, video media to communicate what becomes terse in words. Use less words and less meetings overall, where possible. Start thinking about what truly adds value and what is a horrible proxy with near-zero evidence behind it. The default attitude is "never delete until evidence proves otherwise". Anyone looking at Brook's Law can understand how this goes wrong. I shouldn't even have to explain this. I'm a consumer of the culture, not a producer. The fact ICs have to tell management types how to do their job better is ridiculous: that's management's job to begin with, optimizing communicational processes. I don't expect clients to tell me more than "the product is slow" either, even if I'll take any bit of information they can provide me.