29 ms·

Why public chats are better than direct messages

156 points by stebunovd 4y ago

greymalik 4y ago
There’s a fine line between promoting a unique work culture and having an authoritarian, micromanaging, infantilizing policy. I’m fine with this as a preferred approach but think I’d hate working at the kind of place that made it a strict requirement.
fxtentacle 4y ago
They aren't. When I know who I'm talking to, I can tailor my message for them. If I talk to another embedded C++ coder about memory management, I can make my request short and concise by assuming that the recipient already knows what the placement new operator is, how it works, and what using it implies. That means I send a quick 10s chat message to ask for one thing. If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. But the contained information for my target recipient is still the same. So I have just wasted my time and his/her time. Also, there's the increasing issue of people taking internal work discussions and sharing them publicly. I wouldn't want some of the new hires in the social media team to read our internal discussions about CLV and CAQ, because discussing clients in a purely financial and/or mathematical way would rub more emotionally skilled people the wrong way. There was a huge scandal when word got out that some companies called their Dallas office the "discount" location, even though it had been blatantly obvious to everyone before that SF employees earned much more. So the simple act of sharing a chat message to a wider audience requires: 1. additional explanations, thereby making things longer and slower 2. additional safety checks, thereby making things slower
- danpalmer 4y ago
  You don’t need to do all this extra work up front though. Start the discussion at the level you want, make it clear who it’s for, and others can read along if they want. They may learn something, they may ask a question or two (and it’s good to answer for knowledge sharing), but also they may decide they don’t need to understand and not bother asking, and you can encourage this subtly if you get too many questions. It’s also great for reducing comms later as rather than explain a decision or design or something later to each person who asks you can just point them at the original discussion.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  You don't have just one company wide chat channel - when I used chats and came to the same conclusion as the article. It was a large company and we had hundreds of group chats. So the C++ Embedded developers and Ruby would be have separate chat channels. ALso in that case you still put out your question without the details and the relevant people will be able to answer others can ignore it, but sometimes it does help for a different expert to see the issue and ask for clarification and then come up with a new solution. As for repeating to external - I don't see that as a problem - well it fixes itself quickly the leaker would get fired pretty quickly.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. This is a strawman scenario. Nobody expects you to make your directed C++ discussion accessible to the front-end Ruby developers. The point is that a team needs to move team-specific discussions into shared team spaces where the relevant team members can observe and be informed or involved as necessary, as well as understand now and where things are decided. The point isn’t to inform the entire company of every detail of every step.
icod1 4y ago
Or why you should not use chats but use forums or QA setups. Use something that can be searched, and doesn't require one to have an account to read the messages and/or search.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  This is internal to a company - everyone able to access the chat better have and account and use it - you need to be sure who said what. And setting up search on the chat is not difficult, we had search on chat 25 years ago.
  - m_eiman 4y ago
    Extracting useful information from a chat log is tedious and error prone, though. If it's something that should be saved for later, copy it over to a wiki or some such and edit it suitably. Chat is ephemeral, treat it as such and everyone's life will be better.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      Yes if it is useful copy it to a wiki etc. But how do you get the information first. You have to look at the chat transcript - and in an international company and a problem requiring thought or research the information could be spread over a couple of weeks SO you still need to scan the transcripts. Yes Chat is ephemeral and I can't think of cases that involved looking back a year but weeks definitely. Chat id part of the process - if an issue is raised then the solution will be a permanent change, in my case software code changes, or an email summarising the solution for non computer issues, or chnages to documentation (if you are lucky enough to have documentation) Another example is if you go on vacation for a few weeks the a quick scan of chat is often useful.
jrootabega 4y ago
This is why, when a colleague has a question about a pull request, or my feedback on THEIR pull request, I push us to have the discussion in the PR comments, instead of the pernicious "I just have a few questions, it will only take a few minutes" that always adds up to more time and attention than people claim. There ARE often situations where opening a synchronous communication channel is necessary, but even then, you need to capture your discussion and agreements publicly. Commit messages and PR discussions are "hyperdocumentation". Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult.
- dmos62 4y ago
  > Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult. Sorry to hear that. Getting the right balance of sync and async, and knowing when to use one or the other makes a big difference. In my current team we went through multiple iterations to come to a mix that works for us. If it's too much sync, the constant sync conversations drain you; if it's too much async, coming to a concensus becomes grindingly slow.
  - ungamedplayer 4y ago
    I have learned that its good to praise in public, criticise in private. It is possible to have criticism in PR's private inside a company which reduces its "publicness" but some people are still sensitive even with the reduced exposure.
    - kqr 4y ago
      I hate that idea. If I criticise an idea in public, and I'm wrong in my criticism, then five other people will immediately correct me. Or provide nuance and perspective I miss. Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard. ---- Edit: almost forgot! Private criticism also leads to an air of suspicion, in my experience. When everything public is upbeat and positive you start to wonder what terriblenesses people are hiding. It might be nothing, but that's the thing -- you just don't know. Being able to publically discuss both the good and the bad is a prerequisite for a smooth operation, and the hallmark of a mature organisation.
newbieuser 4y ago
I do not agree . Unfortunately, most people lack basic communication skills. I don't think it's good for nonsense to come out of a one-to-one message and be on a channel.
- karolzlot 4y ago
  So hire those who have communication skills or teach them.
  - newbieuser 4y ago
    What if recruiters lack communication skills?
    - karolzlot 4y ago
      My answer is the same.
- guenthert 4y ago
  Well, for one it isn't quite clear what comprises basic communication skills. "I don't think it's good for nonsense to come out of a one-to-one message and be on a channel." I have no idea what you tried to convey there (did auto-correct mangle the words?).
  - newbieuser 4y ago
    nevermind. we won't be able to communicate anyway :)
gregwebs 4y ago
There is a third option. When ever there is a private or out of band discussion, summarize it in the public discussion. Done well, this makes for the best of both worlds in part because it reduces the text that others need to read. However, it requires discipline and extra effort on the part of those having the private conversation.
- nijave 4y ago
  Yeah or bring it up in a meeting. It could be a quick reference in a daily team meeting/standup or a short 15 minute meeting.
- godeye17 4y ago
irt24 4y ago
I think this view is heavily influenced by the fact that the writer is a project manager -- I can see how having full visibility into all communications could make their particular job easier. The same way managers always advocate for more regular write-ups on your progress. The problem is -- they delude themselves into thinking that if their job is made easier, then everyone's must be too. The reality is that people who do the actual ground work need focus and want to avoid cognitive overload.
doctor_eval 4y ago
As I read this, I got the sinking feeling that I'd read it all before. But then I realised, it's just another case of someone thinking that their specific solution is best, solely on the basis that it worked for them, in their specific circumstances. But here's the thing: every group is different, has different needs, and will respond differently to different styles of communication. Some people (especially people not using their first language) can find working in public stressful; some people get very stressed by the intensity of 1:1s. It takes all types, and as a manager, understanding how to get the best out of everyone is part of the job. There is no single, correct way, and we know this because, if there was, then we wouldn't keep hearing about these interminable "solutions".
- westurner 4y ago
  Yes, but so is which is best for which situation still the question? Presuming that information asymmetry will hold over time is a bad assumption, regardless of cost of information security controls. Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? Instead of Chat or IM, hopefully working on Issues with checkbox Tasks and Edges; and Pull Requests composed of Commits, Comments, and Code Reviews; with conditional Branch modification rules; will produce Products: deliverables of value to the customer, per the schema:Organization's Mission. What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel?
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    > Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? The new tools we have at our disposal are amazing. Of course they are better. But they are just tools. They don’t solve any problems relating to interpersonal communication any more than a hammer solves building a house. > What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel? It’s the job of a manager to work that out. There is no formula. It’s not even possible to write one down. That’s the point.
jsz0 4y ago
It's still kind of crazy to me how cutting edge modern commutation in 2022 is basically just IRC from the 1990s.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  You think that's crazy, wait until you open a book written in the 60s explaining solutions today. The real crazy thing is how slow our nontechnical progress is.
- kqr 4y ago
  Why is that crazy? Would you expect the basics of human nature and community to have changed in the past 20 years?
- danuker 4y ago
  It's adapted to today's environment: a 100x slower Electron app that also snoops around on your system.
- nijave 4y ago
  We have threads and GIFs now
halotrope 4y ago
The fundamental issue is that companies often employ people that are just meh about working. Then it is tried to make it work with tools and methologies and whatnot. If your team is alligned and motivated, they will figure out how to efficiently collaborate. If not, no amound of Scrum BS, ceremony, standups and chat-tools will save you.
ijlmond 4y ago
Public communication is vital for so many reasons: reducing information silos, enabling async work, increasing decision making consistency. This post from the CTO at Metaview summarises the approach well: https://builds.metaview.ai/pup/ https://builds.metaview.ai/pup/
zschuessler 4y ago
The example with feeling comfortable asking trivial questions hints at a common theme of successful teams: psychological safety. If you are interested in learning more on it here are a few resources! 1. Project Aristotle - A study from Google https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ 2. Good to Great had a couple chapters touching on safety, but also making company information easy to access. http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/good-to-great-why-some-companies-make-the-leap-and-others-dont.html http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/good-to-great-why-some... 3. A more sciencey approach https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310384/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310384/ I couldn't find the second study I wanted to link to. I recall reading a study on team composition that focused on impact of different types of leaders. Teams that had a leader which got everyone to talk in a group were consistently successful. That was the one constant over time, even beating out visionary/charisma types that weren't inclusive.
- kwyjibo1230 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing these! this is actually very appropo to a conversation at my work now. Any other great guides like this you can share?
Trasmatta 4y ago
Something that I've found really valuable about private chats is the ability to build rapport and trust with immediate team members in a way that just isn't quite the same in a public channel. You need both. I don't like the idea of setting policies of "almost all communication should be done in public channels". Humans need both types of communication, and I think it's a mistake to try to enforce your team to always prefer one over the other.
- mattm 4y ago
  This is the answer. There is no better period. There is better depending on the context. Can you imagine having all your conversations with your spouse in front of all your co workers? Their company size is only 25 people. I doubt they will be giving the same advice if their company grows to 200+ people.
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    Exactly. The advice doesn't quite scale. I find the better approach is: if this feels like a question that the wider team would benefit from seeing and contributing to, post it in a public channel. If not, then message it privately. Use your own discretion. At some point you should trust your team to be adults, and to make the best choice for the situation.
- inanutshellus 4y ago
  The private chats should be for non-work conversations. DMs are for private/personal/rapport-building conversations. There's no reason you can't have both going at the exact same time.
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    Except sometimes private chats are the best place for work conversations.
    - inanutshellus 4y ago
Mandatum 4y ago
It comes down to culture. Will you be reprimanded for talking the wrong way about a project, feature or service in your organisation? I’ve worked at FAANG where I was reprimanded by HR equivalent for raising an issue in chat rather than email because of who was in the channel. I wasn’t rude in my report, I just explained the issue, the impact it had and the likely resolution. Maybe a VP was having a bad day, but I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut working for large organisations as an IC. It’s something I expected from shitty workplaces like Big4, consultancies or FinTechBroCorps but it’s everywhere.
skeeter2020 4y ago
My entire job is focused on communication and visibility, and the answer of MORE COMMUNICATION is pretty simplistic. I think teams would be better to focus on the areas of (1) identifying the correct audience, (2) sharing the right information at the right level of abstraction and (3) using the appropriate tool or communication channel. None of this likely involves adding me to your channel or meeting.
blondin 4y ago
this is fine but my guess is their company is not big enough yet. the Apple example is not very convincing.
EGreg 4y ago
We go further. We encourage most conversations to happen on our public forum and our youtube show. Documentation and architectural, economic and legal discussion is in the open too. Everyone is encouraged to prepare their thoughts privately, so they do not embarrass themselves publicly, but the cross-pollination of ideas is crucial. The result is here: https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org https://youtube.com/c/intercoin https://youtube.com/c/intercoin Anyone coming by is able to see what we are working on. We’re gradually moving to self-hosting everything open source, with no reliance on Big Tech at all. We do want to rely increasingly on decentralized networks, though. Even our clients are encouraged to come on the show to discuss their challenges and their needs, rather than “requirements gathering” in private. They sign a release that we can use clips in our marketing. We explain to them that they get exposure for their community and fundraising, as the clips get shared in the subsequent months. A few clients insist on an NDA - we put them on a waitlist at the back of the line. We prioritize clients who are willing to openly discuss their community and needs. As a result, we also have an endless supply of “reality TV” case studies from beginning to end of testimonials about how they needed our service, and then how we helped them. By creating a culture of openness and collaboration, we make sure people know what is happening. Our roadmap is public. Our customers are public. I personally interviewed some well known people this past year: Noam Chomsky, political commentator Sara Hanks, author of Regulation S at SEC Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, the first truly decentralized hosting network Thomas Greco, community currency economist And much more. Now in the show’s second season, I plan to organize panels where we have multiple well-known people and have them discuss stuff for 1-2 hours. Sometimes we may use a famous person as a reason to reach out to other famous people to be on the same show. I used to wonder why I accomplish so much and yet get so little interest. It’s because you have to be public with your successes and grow a snowball around your project, to attract people with clout, reach, resources, and other forms of capital. To build a movement, it’s better to have every member to bring 1 new person a week, than spend $ on marketing on FAMGA in a zero-sum game to strangers. Virality wins in the end, and us far more sustainable. The goal is about more cross pollination of ideas. We don’t have a big audience (yet). But we will be selling this software and this system, to celebrities, conferences and other projects - including tech startups. If you’re interested, comment below.
beeforpork 4y ago
...'better'... I stopped reading there -- maybe it's prejudice, but it's also my spam filter.
black_13 4y ago
talideon 4y ago
I'm not a fan of DMs. While they have their place, they have some massive problems: they create silos and oracles, and reduce visibility. I know this because I'm an unwilling oracle on my team. Part of this can be solved with documentation, but then you have the problem of people who won't look at the docs sending people DMs that could've been solved by searching the docs for a keyword.
civilized 4y ago
In general I agree, but I have private Slack channels for some projects for a couple reasons: 1. Concern that certain specific people could hijack conversations or take them the wrong way 2. Ability to candidly express frustrations with partners and stakeholders not doing their part I don't think we are unkind or impolite, but any negativity we express, even for the purposes of effective internal problem solving, can be used against us.
krnlpnc 4y ago
Yes,I suppose the only thing better would be having deep technical discussions by yelling across a fully populated open concept office /s It does not scale.
booleandilemma 4y ago
I've found that people like to DM me when they're asking a question they should already know the answer to, and they like to message me in public when they're accusing me or telling me to do something. They DM me or publicly message me depending on what's most convenient for their public image.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  This feels like short term thinking on their part. You are unlikely to gain many allies this way and more likely to develop enemies.
larrik 4y ago
I feel I disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article, even if its a little shallow and short. For starters, he's talking about communications within a team, not the whole company. Should all work conversation happen in a single #general channel on slack (or whatever the equivalent is wherever)? Absolutely not. For a long time my boss was a big proponent of this, and I was against it. However, I'm personally tired of having the same conversation over and over as we realize we need to add more people to it. Or half the team decides on an approach in private, and then someone in the other half sees in the PR immediately that they didn't consider some huge thing and now it's back to the drawing board. So now, everything should happen in the team's open channel.
- theptip 4y ago
  I don’t think the OP at any point advocated for using one channel. That’s a horrible approach IMO. Public vs DM just means (to me at least) “put all comms in the relevant channel, never in a DM”. I’d go so far as to advocate temporary channels for individual projects but not everyone buys into that. At least have team and working-group/functional channels. Basically it’s analogous to email (point-to-point) vs. archived mailing lists (which anyone can subscribe or view after the fact). Mailing lists and public slack still have threads/channels.
  - SPascareli13 4y ago
    I have come to the very same realization as you in the "temp channel for a project" thing. Before this, the devs would make a private channel without product and management people, to discuss technical things openly or just to complain. But product/management was unhappy to be left out of this communication channel. Eventually we, devs, decided on our own to end the private channel and "banalize" the main team channel, by that I mean that we were going to try to make the main channel less "official" looking and more casual, like sending memes, talking outside of threads and so on. With the intention of making people mor comfortable in using it. This had mixed to low effectiveness, some people were more comfortable speaking entirely on the main channel, some other people pretty much just started only using private conversations and never used the main channel. So my solution was to create a temporary project channel, open, but only with devs explicitly invited (but communicated at the main channel that the channel existed). This channel is implied to be a dev channel, but whoever wants to join in can, or they can also just peek in without joining, being a public channel. So far this has been working well, as long as you are in a reasonably long running project. I have archived more then one of these channels as the projects ended, and I'm thinking of maybe not even achieving the current one and just rename it after the project, let's see. So, keep of trying to make this fly with your team, it did worked somewhat with mine.
rajeshp1986 4y ago
I think this doesn't solve a fundamental problem with chat. chat has a discoverability problem. Even if you force the discussion to public chat, it is hard for someone to discover that. Chat by design is ephemeral. Sure you can scroll back and search for keywords but most probably people end up asking the same questions again.
scaradim 4y ago
FYI Similar messages here: - https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open/research https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open/research - https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open# https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open#
guenthert 4y ago
This seems to assume rational, mature peers with a shared goal. I have yet to find such a place.
mr_tristan 4y ago
I see this more as a challenge of managing the different threads of communication. Basically, threads, as they are implemented in most chat apps, just suck. If you're not involved in that particular thread, you tend to just skip over it. And most of the time, you have to manually interact with each thread to figure out what's going on. As a more real-world example, in Slack, you can decide to use more channels instead of having a big channel with lots of threads. But this tends to need a lot of discipline on channel management. Places devise naming conventions, etc. Or maybe they integrate with some other tool to manage the conversations. So, a lot of my DMs tend to just be me and a "tiger team" on a particular subject. Which is really just a workaround to not having to figure out channel management. It's not a carefully thought through system, it's a workaround to our current crop of chat tools. Personally, I've found older "discussion forum" systems do a better job of threading instead of a chat-style tool. But maybe I'm just getting to be an old person.
nijave 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but in practice there are plenty of times where it's best to limit the audience. Posting in a public channel with more than a handful of people can lead to multithreaded discussions spiralling in various directions that aren't relevant to the original post. It can also lead to issues when members of the chat have varying degrees of context. Shared understanding is ideal, but it's impractical for everyone to be aware of everything so there's a balance to strike. Public chats are somewhere between the extreme of broadcasting everything to everyone and talking only in private chats. There's definitely a lot of middle ground.
joeyguerra 4y ago
Make the work visible. Transparency enables others to help.

156 points by stebunovd 4y ago

There’s a fine line between promoting a unique work culture and having an authoritarian, micromanaging, infantilizing policy. I’m fine with this as a preferred approach but think I’d hate working at the kind of place that made it a strict requirement.

fxtentacle 4y ago

They aren't. When I know who I'm talking to, I can tailor my message for them. If I talk to another embedded C++ coder about memory management, I can make my request short and concise by assuming that the recipient already knows what the placement new operator is, how it works, and what using it implies. That means I send a quick 10s chat message to ask for one thing. If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. But the contained information for my target recipient is still the same. So I have just wasted my time and his/her time. Also, there's the increasing issue of people taking internal work discussions and sharing them publicly. I wouldn't want some of the new hires in the social media team to read our internal discussions about CLV and CAQ, because discussing clients in a purely financial and/or mathematical way would rub more emotionally skilled people the wrong way. There was a huge scandal when word got out that some companies called their Dallas office the "discount" location, even though it had been blatantly obvious to everyone before that SF employees earned much more. So the simple act of sharing a chat message to a wider audience requires: 1. additional explanations, thereby making things longer and slower 2. additional safety checks, thereby making things slower

danpalmer 4y ago
You don’t need to do all this extra work up front though. Start the discussion at the level you want, make it clear who it’s for, and others can read along if they want. They may learn something, they may ask a question or two (and it’s good to answer for knowledge sharing), but also they may decide they don’t need to understand and not bother asking, and you can encourage this subtly if you get too many questions. It’s also great for reducing comms later as rather than explain a decision or design or something later to each person who asks you can just point them at the original discussion.
pasc1878 4y ago
You don't have just one company wide chat channel - when I used chats and came to the same conclusion as the article. It was a large company and we had hundreds of group chats. So the C++ Embedded developers and Ruby would be have separate chat channels. ALso in that case you still put out your question without the details and the relevant people will be able to answer others can ignore it, but sometimes it does help for a different expert to see the issue and ask for clarification and then come up with a new solution. As for repeating to external - I don't see that as a problem - well it fixes itself quickly the leaker would get fired pretty quickly.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. This is a strawman scenario. Nobody expects you to make your directed C++ discussion accessible to the front-end Ruby developers. The point is that a team needs to move team-specific discussions into shared team spaces where the relevant team members can observe and be informed or involved as necessary, as well as understand now and where things are decided. The point isn’t to inform the entire company of every detail of every step.

icod1 4y ago

Or why you should not use chats but use forums or QA setups. Use something that can be searched, and doesn't require one to have an account to read the messages and/or search.

pasc1878 4y ago
This is internal to a company - everyone able to access the chat better have and account and use it - you need to be sure who said what. And setting up search on the chat is not difficult, we had search on chat 25 years ago.
- m_eiman 4y ago
  Extracting useful information from a chat log is tedious and error prone, though. If it's something that should be saved for later, copy it over to a wiki or some such and edit it suitably. Chat is ephemeral, treat it as such and everyone's life will be better.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    Yes if it is useful copy it to a wiki etc. But how do you get the information first. You have to look at the chat transcript - and in an international company and a problem requiring thought or research the information could be spread over a couple of weeks SO you still need to scan the transcripts. Yes Chat is ephemeral and I can't think of cases that involved looking back a year but weeks definitely. Chat id part of the process - if an issue is raised then the solution will be a permanent change, in my case software code changes, or an email summarising the solution for non computer issues, or chnages to documentation (if you are lucky enough to have documentation) Another example is if you go on vacation for a few weeks the a quick scan of chat is often useful.

jrootabega 4y ago

This is why, when a colleague has a question about a pull request, or my feedback on THEIR pull request, I push us to have the discussion in the PR comments, instead of the pernicious "I just have a few questions, it will only take a few minutes" that always adds up to more time and attention than people claim. There ARE often situations where opening a synchronous communication channel is necessary, but even then, you need to capture your discussion and agreements publicly. Commit messages and PR discussions are "hyperdocumentation". Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult.

dmos62 4y ago
> Some people get it. But overall in the cultures I've done it in, it mostly gets me branded as difficult. Sorry to hear that. Getting the right balance of sync and async, and knowing when to use one or the other makes a big difference. In my current team we went through multiple iterations to come to a mix that works for us. If it's too much sync, the constant sync conversations drain you; if it's too much async, coming to a concensus becomes grindingly slow.
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  I have learned that its good to praise in public, criticise in private. It is possible to have criticism in PR's private inside a company which reduces its "publicness" but some people are still sensitive even with the reduced exposure.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I hate that idea. If I criticise an idea in public, and I'm wrong in my criticism, then five other people will immediately correct me. Or provide nuance and perspective I miss. Also with private criticism, any decision tends to gravitate toward the opinion of the highest paid person. If the debate happens in public, everyone has more of an equal chance to be heard. ---- Edit: almost forgot! Private criticism also leads to an air of suspicion, in my experience. When everything public is upbeat and positive you start to wonder what terriblenesses people are hiding. It might be nothing, but that's the thing -- you just don't know. Being able to publically discuss both the good and the bad is a prerequisite for a smooth operation, and the hallmark of a mature organisation.

newbieuser 4y ago

I do not agree . Unfortunately, most people lack basic communication skills. I don't think it's good for nonsense to come out of a one-to-one message and be on a channel.

karolzlot 4y ago
So hire those who have communication skills or teach them.
- newbieuser 4y ago
  What if recruiters lack communication skills?
  - karolzlot 4y ago
    My answer is the same.
guenthert 4y ago
Well, for one it isn't quite clear what comprises basic communication skills. "I don't think it's good for nonsense to come out of a one-to-one message and be on a channel." I have no idea what you tried to convey there (did auto-correct mangle the words?).
- newbieuser 4y ago
  nevermind. we won't be able to communicate anyway :)

gregwebs 4y ago

There is a third option. When ever there is a private or out of band discussion, summarize it in the public discussion. Done well, this makes for the best of both worlds in part because it reduces the text that others need to read. However, it requires discipline and extra effort on the part of those having the private conversation.

nijave 4y ago
Yeah or bring it up in a meeting. It could be a quick reference in a daily team meeting/standup or a short 15 minute meeting.
godeye17 4y ago

irt24 4y ago

I think this view is heavily influenced by the fact that the writer is a project manager -- I can see how having full visibility into all communications could make their particular job easier. The same way managers always advocate for more regular write-ups on your progress. The problem is -- they delude themselves into thinking that if their job is made easier, then everyone's must be too. The reality is that people who do the actual ground work need focus and want to avoid cognitive overload.

doctor_eval 4y ago

As I read this, I got the sinking feeling that I'd read it all before. But then I realised, it's just another case of someone thinking that their specific solution is best, solely on the basis that it worked for them, in their specific circumstances. But here's the thing: every group is different, has different needs, and will respond differently to different styles of communication. Some people (especially people not using their first language) can find working in public stressful; some people get very stressed by the intensity of 1:1s. It takes all types, and as a manager, understanding how to get the best out of everyone is part of the job. There is no single, correct way, and we know this because, if there was, then we wouldn't keep hearing about these interminable "solutions".

westurner 4y ago
Yes, but so is which is best for which situation still the question? Presuming that information asymmetry will hold over time is a bad assumption, regardless of cost of information security controls. Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? Instead of Chat or IM, hopefully working on Issues with checkbox Tasks and Edges; and Pull Requests composed of Commits, Comments, and Code Reviews; with conditional Branch modification rules; will produce Products: deliverables of value to the customer, per the schema:Organization's Mission. What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel?
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  > Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not? The new tools we have at our disposal are amazing. Of course they are better. But they are just tools. They don’t solve any problems relating to interpersonal communication any more than a hammer solves building a house. > What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel? It’s the job of a manager to work that out. There is no formula. It’s not even possible to write one down. That’s the point.

jsz0 4y ago

It's still kind of crazy to me how cutting edge modern commutation in 2022 is basically just IRC from the 1990s.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
You think that's crazy, wait until you open a book written in the 60s explaining solutions today. The real crazy thing is how slow our nontechnical progress is.
kqr 4y ago
Why is that crazy? Would you expect the basics of human nature and community to have changed in the past 20 years?
danuker 4y ago
It's adapted to today's environment: a 100x slower Electron app that also snoops around on your system.
nijave 4y ago
We have threads and GIFs now

halotrope 4y ago

The fundamental issue is that companies often employ people that are just meh about working. Then it is tried to make it work with tools and methologies and whatnot. If your team is alligned and motivated, they will figure out how to efficiently collaborate. If not, no amound of Scrum BS, ceremony, standups and chat-tools will save you.

ijlmond 4y ago

Public communication is vital for so many reasons: reducing information silos, enabling async work, increasing decision making consistency. This post from the CTO at Metaview summarises the approach well: https://builds.metaview.ai/pup/ https://builds.metaview.ai/pup/

zschuessler 4y ago

The example with feeling comfortable asking trivial questions hints at a common theme of successful teams: psychological safety. If you are interested in learning more on it here are a few resources! 1. Project Aristotle - A study from Google https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ 2. Good to Great had a couple chapters touching on safety, but also making company information easy to access. http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/good-to-great-why-some-companies-make-the-leap-and-others-dont.html http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/good-to-great-why-some... 3. A more sciencey approach https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310384/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310384/ I couldn't find the second study I wanted to link to. I recall reading a study on team composition that focused on impact of different types of leaders. Teams that had a leader which got everyone to talk in a group were consistently successful. That was the one constant over time, even beating out visionary/charisma types that weren't inclusive.

kwyjibo1230 4y ago
Thanks for sharing these! this is actually very appropo to a conversation at my work now. Any other great guides like this you can share?

Trasmatta 4y ago

Something that I've found really valuable about private chats is the ability to build rapport and trust with immediate team members in a way that just isn't quite the same in a public channel. You need both. I don't like the idea of setting policies of "almost all communication should be done in public channels". Humans need both types of communication, and I think it's a mistake to try to enforce your team to always prefer one over the other.

mattm 4y ago
This is the answer. There is no better period. There is better depending on the context. Can you imagine having all your conversations with your spouse in front of all your co workers? Their company size is only 25 people. I doubt they will be giving the same advice if their company grows to 200+ people.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Exactly. The advice doesn't quite scale. I find the better approach is: if this feels like a question that the wider team would benefit from seeing and contributing to, post it in a public channel. If not, then message it privately. Use your own discretion. At some point you should trust your team to be adults, and to make the best choice for the situation.
inanutshellus 4y ago
The private chats should be for non-work conversations. DMs are for private/personal/rapport-building conversations. There's no reason you can't have both going at the exact same time.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Except sometimes private chats are the best place for work conversations.
  - inanutshellus 4y ago

Mandatum 4y ago

It comes down to culture. Will you be reprimanded for talking the wrong way about a project, feature or service in your organisation? I’ve worked at FAANG where I was reprimanded by HR equivalent for raising an issue in chat rather than email because of who was in the channel. I wasn’t rude in my report, I just explained the issue, the impact it had and the likely resolution. Maybe a VP was having a bad day, but I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut working for large organisations as an IC. It’s something I expected from shitty workplaces like Big4, consultancies or FinTechBroCorps but it’s everywhere.

skeeter2020 4y ago

My entire job is focused on communication and visibility, and the answer of MORE COMMUNICATION is pretty simplistic. I think teams would be better to focus on the areas of (1) identifying the correct audience, (2) sharing the right information at the right level of abstraction and (3) using the appropriate tool or communication channel. None of this likely involves adding me to your channel or meeting.

blondin 4y ago

this is fine but my guess is their company is not big enough yet. the Apple example is not very convincing.

EGreg 4y ago

We go further. We encourage most conversations to happen on our public forum and our youtube show. Documentation and architectural, economic and legal discussion is in the open too. Everyone is encouraged to prepare their thoughts privately, so they do not embarrass themselves publicly, but the cross-pollination of ideas is crucial. The result is here: https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org https://youtube.com/c/intercoin https://youtube.com/c/intercoin Anyone coming by is able to see what we are working on. We’re gradually moving to self-hosting everything open source, with no reliance on Big Tech at all. We do want to rely increasingly on decentralized networks, though. Even our clients are encouraged to come on the show to discuss their challenges and their needs, rather than “requirements gathering” in private. They sign a release that we can use clips in our marketing. We explain to them that they get exposure for their community and fundraising, as the clips get shared in the subsequent months. A few clients insist on an NDA - we put them on a waitlist at the back of the line. We prioritize clients who are willing to openly discuss their community and needs. As a result, we also have an endless supply of “reality TV” case studies from beginning to end of testimonials about how they needed our service, and then how we helped them. By creating a culture of openness and collaboration, we make sure people know what is happening. Our roadmap is public. Our customers are public. I personally interviewed some well known people this past year: Noam Chomsky, political commentator Sara Hanks, author of Regulation S at SEC Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, the first truly decentralized hosting network Thomas Greco, community currency economist And much more. Now in the show’s second season, I plan to organize panels where we have multiple well-known people and have them discuss stuff for 1-2 hours. Sometimes we may use a famous person as a reason to reach out to other famous people to be on the same show. I used to wonder why I accomplish so much and yet get so little interest. It’s because you have to be public with your successes and grow a snowball around your project, to attract people with clout, reach, resources, and other forms of capital. To build a movement, it’s better to have every member to bring 1 new person a week, than spend $ on marketing on FAMGA in a zero-sum game to strangers. Virality wins in the end, and us far more sustainable. The goal is about more cross pollination of ideas. We don’t have a big audience (yet). But we will be selling this software and this system, to celebrities, conferences and other projects - including tech startups. If you’re interested, comment below.

beeforpork 4y ago

...'better'... I stopped reading there -- maybe it's prejudice, but it's also my spam filter.

black_13 4y ago

talideon 4y ago

I'm not a fan of DMs. While they have their place, they have some massive problems: they create silos and oracles, and reduce visibility. I know this because I'm an unwilling oracle on my team. Part of this can be solved with documentation, but then you have the problem of people who won't look at the docs sending people DMs that could've been solved by searching the docs for a keyword.

civilized 4y ago

In general I agree, but I have private Slack channels for some projects for a couple reasons: 1. Concern that certain specific people could hijack conversations or take them the wrong way 2. Ability to candidly express frustrations with partners and stakeholders not doing their part I don't think we are unkind or impolite, but any negativity we express, even for the purposes of effective internal problem solving, can be used against us.

krnlpnc 4y ago

Yes,I suppose the only thing better would be having deep technical discussions by yelling across a fully populated open concept office /s It does not scale.

booleandilemma 4y ago

I've found that people like to DM me when they're asking a question they should already know the answer to, and they like to message me in public when they're accusing me or telling me to do something. They DM me or publicly message me depending on what's most convenient for their public image.

confidantlake 4y ago
This feels like short term thinking on their part. You are unlikely to gain many allies this way and more likely to develop enemies.

larrik 4y ago

I feel I disagree with most of the comments here, and agree with the article, even if its a little shallow and short. For starters, he's talking about communications within a team, not the whole company. Should all work conversation happen in a single #general channel on slack (or whatever the equivalent is wherever)? Absolutely not. For a long time my boss was a big proponent of this, and I was against it. However, I'm personally tired of having the same conversation over and over as we realize we need to add more people to it. Or half the team decides on an approach in private, and then someone in the other half sees in the PR immediately that they didn't consider some huge thing and now it's back to the drawing board. So now, everything should happen in the team's open channel.

theptip 4y ago
I don’t think the OP at any point advocated for using one channel. That’s a horrible approach IMO. Public vs DM just means (to me at least) “put all comms in the relevant channel, never in a DM”. I’d go so far as to advocate temporary channels for individual projects but not everyone buys into that. At least have team and working-group/functional channels. Basically it’s analogous to email (point-to-point) vs. archived mailing lists (which anyone can subscribe or view after the fact). Mailing lists and public slack still have threads/channels.
- SPascareli13 4y ago
  I have come to the very same realization as you in the "temp channel for a project" thing. Before this, the devs would make a private channel without product and management people, to discuss technical things openly or just to complain. But product/management was unhappy to be left out of this communication channel. Eventually we, devs, decided on our own to end the private channel and "banalize" the main team channel, by that I mean that we were going to try to make the main channel less "official" looking and more casual, like sending memes, talking outside of threads and so on. With the intention of making people mor comfortable in using it. This had mixed to low effectiveness, some people were more comfortable speaking entirely on the main channel, some other people pretty much just started only using private conversations and never used the main channel. So my solution was to create a temporary project channel, open, but only with devs explicitly invited (but communicated at the main channel that the channel existed). This channel is implied to be a dev channel, but whoever wants to join in can, or they can also just peek in without joining, being a public channel. So far this has been working well, as long as you are in a reasonably long running project. I have archived more then one of these channels as the projects ended, and I'm thinking of maybe not even achieving the current one and just rename it after the project, let's see. So, keep of trying to make this fly with your team, it did worked somewhat with mine.

rajeshp1986 4y ago

I think this doesn't solve a fundamental problem with chat. chat has a discoverability problem. Even if you force the discussion to public chat, it is hard for someone to discover that. Chat by design is ephemeral. Sure you can scroll back and search for keywords but most probably people end up asking the same questions again.

scaradim 4y ago

FYI Similar messages here: - https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open/research https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open/research - https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open# https://www.atlassian.com/practices/open#

guenthert 4y ago

This seems to assume rational, mature peers with a shared goal. I have yet to find such a place.

mr_tristan 4y ago

I see this more as a challenge of managing the different threads of communication. Basically, threads, as they are implemented in most chat apps, just suck. If you're not involved in that particular thread, you tend to just skip over it. And most of the time, you have to manually interact with each thread to figure out what's going on. As a more real-world example, in Slack, you can decide to use more channels instead of having a big channel with lots of threads. But this tends to need a lot of discipline on channel management. Places devise naming conventions, etc. Or maybe they integrate with some other tool to manage the conversations. So, a lot of my DMs tend to just be me and a "tiger team" on a particular subject. Which is really just a workaround to not having to figure out channel management. It's not a carefully thought through system, it's a workaround to our current crop of chat tools. Personally, I've found older "discussion forum" systems do a better job of threading instead of a chat-style tool. But maybe I'm just getting to be an old person.

nijave 4y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but in practice there are plenty of times where it's best to limit the audience. Posting in a public channel with more than a handful of people can lead to multithreaded discussions spiralling in various directions that aren't relevant to the original post. It can also lead to issues when members of the chat have varying degrees of context. Shared understanding is ideal, but it's impractical for everyone to be aware of everything so there's a balance to strike. Public chats are somewhere between the extreme of broadcasting everything to everyone and talking only in private chats. There's definitely a lot of middle ground.

joeyguerra 4y ago

Make the work visible. Transparency enables others to help.