5 ms·

The same thing happens in the workplace, too. My last two jobs have had groups that adopted Notion and tried to use heaps of rules and templates and emojis that

The same thing happens in the workplace, too. My last two jobs have had groups that adopted Notion and tried to use heaps of rules and templates and emojis that they wanted everyone to use to structure and document everything in Notion. It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. The Product Management group at my last company was the worst at this. They had hundreds of Notion pages that supposedly collected everything and show them in meetings, slide decks, and at every chance they had as proof that they were on top of things. Yet they could barely do any product management work that we needed to ship product because their whole world revolves around building Notion pages rather than building products. The sad part was that it worked, at least for a while. Executives would praise the team for being so organized and always having so much to show in presentations. Eventually people started to realize that they were lost in the process of writing Notion docs rather than focusing on getting work done, but it took a long time.

blakblakarak 3y ago
We tried it where I work and had the same result - we've since gone back to boring old Redmine. I do think it's great for personal use though - I use for everything from shopping lists to dream journals (don't judge me ;) ) to 5 year plans.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Redmine is amazing! Way underrated. https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/
spzb 3y ago
> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.
- nuancebydefault 3y ago
  As long as you use Jira and Confluence to track what you are doing and make handy reference notes, they work super good. About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. Also story points estimations/tracking (as opposed to time in real world units) : never saw it work in practice. Whoever says software/hardware project time schedules are 'under control' or 'predictable' is probably joking.
  - Macha 3y ago
    I would argue that the performance of Jira being what it is along makes it pretty unsuitable for just taking reference notes. Our onprem hosted instance is pretty slow, which you might blame on server provisioning, except last time I used Jira cloud it was even worse with an empty instance (compared to our at least multiple million tickets instance)
    - nuancebydefault 3y ago
      Well Confluence is for the handy notes, which can grow into quality documents if you have them reviewed and updated. Personally never experienced performance issues.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    > About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. If your management can't understand these charts - including when you get results you don't want - I think your management is failing. E.g. if you don't realize "whoa there's a lot more ambiguity here than we expected and it's causing big delay" until the project goes sideways trying to find clarity, then you missed something big in your earlier planning and estimation. And whether or not it was important to spend the time to try to get a more accurate estimate vs just start building should be a business-requirement and project-specific decision, but it should be a conscious one.
- 3y ago
majormajor 3y ago
This is one of the lowest hanging fruits for generative AI in the workplace: let the language model rewrite people's notes into the structured form.
Spivak 3y ago
That's why you have someone whose job is to make that Notion/Confluence/Dokku who is part designer, part technical writer. They're sometimes called company historians. It is the only solution I've ever seen for the "documentation always gets cut" problem with SWE. Someone's whole work stream is thorough documentation and knowing everything. How features work, what customers requested them, what technical trade-offs were made and why. I miss having one of these people every day at $dayjob. She would make reports for questions that's needed a thorough response. I asked what I thought was an innocent question about what a small kafka cluster was used for and I got back a long-ass document that outlined the whole saga, the complaints the customer had, the VP discussions, the MRs that introduced it, other things people proposed and why they were shot down, meeting notes, screenshots of the discussion on Slack. Like hot damn.
- asherah 3y ago
  i hadn't ever heard of this but this sounds immensely helpful. i wish this were a more common practice!
- jen729w 3y ago
  Yes! I'm Johnny.Decimal and I'm starting to advocate for the idea of 'the Librarian' at work. You need someone to organise your stuff. That person needs the right skills -- passion, even -- to do that job. Today that role is filled by either a) nobody or b) the lowest lackey who doesn't give a hoot about the concept.

blakblakarak 3y ago

We tried it where I work and had the same result - we've since gone back to boring old Redmine. I do think it's great for personal use though - I use for everything from shopping lists to dream journals (don't judge me ;) ) to 5 year plans.

freedomben 3y ago
Redmine is amazing! Way underrated. https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/

spzb 3y ago

> It turns into an exercise where the Notion document becomes the goal, rather than a tool to help get work done. Same, except it's Jira and Confluence. Everything has to have story points assigned to it just so we can say we did an arbitrary number of points per sprint and show a impressive looking graph in retrospectives.

nuancebydefault 3y ago
As long as you use Jira and Confluence to track what you are doing and make handy reference notes, they work super good. About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. Also story points estimations/tracking (as opposed to time in real world units) : never saw it work in practice. Whoever says software/hardware project time schedules are 'under control' or 'predictable' is probably joking.
- Macha 3y ago
  I would argue that the performance of Jira being what it is along makes it pretty unsuitable for just taking reference notes. Our onprem hosted instance is pretty slow, which you might blame on server provisioning, except last time I used Jira cloud it was even worse with an empty instance (compared to our at least multiple million tickets instance)
  - nuancebydefault 3y ago
    Well Confluence is for the handy notes, which can grow into quality documents if you have them reviewed and updated. Personally never experienced performance issues.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > About showing burn down chats: usually they are shown a few times in early stages of the project, but don't get any attention anymore once they start showing unwanted or erratic results. If your management can't understand these charts - including when you get results you don't want - I think your management is failing. E.g. if you don't realize "whoa there's a lot more ambiguity here than we expected and it's causing big delay" until the project goes sideways trying to find clarity, then you missed something big in your earlier planning and estimation. And whether or not it was important to spend the time to try to get a more accurate estimate vs just start building should be a business-requirement and project-specific decision, but it should be a conscious one.
3y ago

majormajor 3y ago

This is one of the lowest hanging fruits for generative AI in the workplace: let the language model rewrite people's notes into the structured form.

Spivak 3y ago

That's why you have someone whose job is to make that Notion/Confluence/Dokku who is part designer, part technical writer. They're sometimes called company historians. It is the only solution I've ever seen for the "documentation always gets cut" problem with SWE. Someone's whole work stream is thorough documentation and knowing everything. How features work, what customers requested them, what technical trade-offs were made and why. I miss having one of these people every day at $dayjob. She would make reports for questions that's needed a thorough response. I asked what I thought was an innocent question about what a small kafka cluster was used for and I got back a long-ass document that outlined the whole saga, the complaints the customer had, the VP discussions, the MRs that introduced it, other things people proposed and why they were shot down, meeting notes, screenshots of the discussion on Slack. Like hot damn.

asherah 3y ago
i hadn't ever heard of this but this sounds immensely helpful. i wish this were a more common practice!
jen729w 3y ago
Yes! I'm Johnny.Decimal and I'm starting to advocate for the idea of 'the Librarian' at work. You need someone to organise your stuff. That person needs the right skills -- passion, even -- to do that job. Today that role is filled by either a) nobody or b) the lowest lackey who doesn't give a hoot about the concept.