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[quote]There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time - meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online.

[quote]There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time - meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.[/quote] Yes, that's a good thing because you have searchable history [1] and can communicate asynchronously without interrupting anyone :) [1] Although that may be bad for CYA purposes.

khafra 2y ago
After doing a WFH job for 2 years, and then going back to the office for a different job, what strikes me is how terribly everything is documented here--because when someone walks over and asks someone else how something works, that doesn't get automatically documented like it does in Slack. At my WFH job, I spent a lot of time searching Slack, and reading through documentation which had been distilled from Slack conversations. I learned a lot faster than I have, so far, at this job.
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  In general, I find less and less time is given to me and other coworkers to document things compared to a few years ago.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Similar circumstances (but longer time wfh) and similar observation. The in-person place is full of these absurd chains of tracking down the person who knows the thing, terrible processes for communication and defining what work needs to be done, et c, in ways that would never survive in a remote company because you can’t work that way when you’re remote. It’s a huge drag on their efficiency, in person or remote, and hurts hiring because they struggle to provide even a handful of of remote days per year in a market where every office worker I know (aside from here) is at least hybrid-leaning-remote (and most office workers I know aren’t in tech, nor is this a tech company). They have no idea that it’s bad, though.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    Are these huge differences in efficiency visible in financial numbers?
    - nottorp 2y ago
      How do you propose to establish that, clone the people at one company, run both clones for a couple years and find out which made more money?
      - RandomLensman 2y ago
        We kind of have natural experiments: switching to WFH and then switching back (at least for some some), so there should be groups of companies that could be compared.
        vundercind 2y ago
        For companies like this one, WFH probably would look bad. It’d both be harder to work that way because they’re already dysfunctional, and it’d make the existing dysfunction more visible (and so probably be blamed for things that would have been going wrong even with everyone in the office).
- pards 2y ago
  Searchable chat history works when people communicate in public channels. My experience at large financial institutions is that the vast majority of chat is person-to-person. I try to encourage public (or group) chats but I _think_ people, especially juniors or new-joiners, are reluctant to look unknowledgeable.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    My employer had a great culture of talking things out in public channels, but after the acquisition, nearly everything is in private channels & DMs now. For some things, I've explicitly told people: "can you copy and paste this question in our support channel, so I can answer there?" But for a lot of things, I've just accepted that this is the new normal, and for some of it, I even understand why it is the way it is.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Teams encourages this awful pattern because their public “teams” don’t just have a normal-ass chat (and you can’t change it to be one), but a weird interface that seems to mainly be for announcements-with-comments. So 1-on-1 and ad hoc small group chats and chats attached to meetings are where everything happens. And god help you if your org also has a short chat retention policy.
  - cflewis 2y ago
    I had a manager who thought putting questions in group chats would make it look like we were not competent and so should be only posted in DMs. Same about asking questions to other team members in bug tickets: don't do it, others will think the team is incompetent. Spoiler alert: He was one of, if not the worst, manager I have ever had because, surprise! he was awful in every other dimension as well.
- stroupwaffle 2y ago
  This to me seems not a problem with remote vs. office, but a particular company culture. Meeting notes aren’t difficult to create. The problem with chat-based solutions is people get lazy in articulation. So instead of a cohesive idea it’s spread across a giant thread. And instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” But then it never gets done, and the info is privy to only those in the conversation. It can be good or bad either way, but there’s no substitute for in-person communication; and there’s no substitute for a thoughtfully constructed document.
  - qwytw 2y ago
    > instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” Seems like an actual use case for LLMs. Yeah I understand the potential issues but (worst case) confusing documentation with some errors and flawed assumptions yet proper citation and sources (so it can be manually improved and eventually turned into thoughtfully constructed document) seems better than having no docs or entirely outdated ones.
  - khafra 2y ago
    I'd say that, for people just starting a career who need to develop the illegible/intangible skills, in-person mentoring has no replacement. But after that, it's a real tradeoff. You can't just expect people to create and publish meeting notes when they catch a senior in the hallway and get an explanation they need, even if it would help others in their situation (or help themselves, in 6 months when they need to do that again and can't quite remember the steps (Unless their mentor modeled this important skill, I guess?)). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
    It's almost like Github needs to come up with chat app that summarises discussions into a wiki...
- nunez 2y ago
  This falls apart at places that default to DMs.
smcleod 2y ago
Couldn't agree more, the overhead of context switching in-person is also so painfully expensive.
- drzaiusx11 2y ago
  The life hack I've had to resort to for in-office days is wearing large over-ear headphones to signal I'm not available for interrupting. Half the time I don't even have them plugged in. It mostly works, but remote work is still more productive for me.
benterix 2y ago
I can't agree more. I once had a lazy boss that hated putting his ideas in order and expected to act on oral orders that were vague on details. I would always ask at the end of his long stream-of-consciousness speech, "Oh, that's great! I have a big favor to ask you: could you briefly summarize what I have to do in a short email to make sure I haven't missed anything important?" He would look at me with contempt, "Can't you just remember these few simple things?" or would murmur "OK, OK" but never did. So after this kind of conversation I would compose a short email to him, "As agreed during the conversation today, I will do this and that within given period." He hated these emails, I could tell. I'm so glad this shit-show is over.
- kranke155 2y ago
  In Person management is the best way to make poor leadership work through constant oversight and changes (the dreaded "over the shoulder" management). Great for bad/mediocre managers, horrible for workers.
- mapt 2y ago
  It does seem that you need EITHER a very particular combination of things for "Guess culture" to be more effective than "Ask culture", or you need a system that is so irrevocably corrupted by its faulty incentive structures that it can't function as a bureaucracy without lots of plausible deniability. My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway. Sometimes the bureaucratic style, enforced from the top down, is "Ask for unreasonable things in order to attain reasonable outcomes". I do not work with life-critical systems, where this sort of thing absolutely would not fly.
  - noisy_boy 2y ago
    > My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway. Seems like at this point, you two have trust which has been built up based on respect/maturity, evidence of honesty/sincerity and delivery. You two are more or less a well oiled machine.
arzig 2y ago
Async communications can be exhausting. It’s infuriating to need some bit of information and be stuck with chat because 1. People are terrible at organizing things like slack as far as I can tell. 2. Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half. A work from home full time and don’t want to go back to the office, but the periodic need for unscheduled ad-hoc communication is absolutely the most exhausting part of it.
- dickersnoodle 2y ago
  Less disrupting the day for who?
- bitlax 2y ago
  You just set up a quick video call. I do it all the time.
  - nunez 2y ago
    Zoom calls are 10,000% more mentally draining than desk interruptions, for me.
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      Same here. The commute and being at the office are 100000% more mentally and physically draining than working from my own desk at home though.
- acdha 2y ago
  > Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half. There’s a balance here, as the 15 minute conversation is often a 45 minute disruption for the target and often the people around them. The other challenge is in my experience the trade off wasn’t “this information cannot be obtained any other way” but more along the lines of “it’s easier to walk over than read the documentation/make any attempt to answer the question on my own”. Asynchronous shifts the downsides to the person asking, so people tend to have strong opinions if they tend to be on one of those sides a lot more than the other.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dzhiurgis 2y ago
"History search" is a symptom of lack of system of record Few months or weeks is fine. Everything else is just contributing to noise. Slack started when Snapchat introduced disappearing stories.

khafra 2y ago

After doing a WFH job for 2 years, and then going back to the office for a different job, what strikes me is how terribly everything is documented here--because when someone walks over and asks someone else how something works, that doesn't get automatically documented like it does in Slack. At my WFH job, I spent a lot of time searching Slack, and reading through documentation which had been distilled from Slack conversations. I learned a lot faster than I have, so far, at this job.

wildrhythms 2y ago
In general, I find less and less time is given to me and other coworkers to document things compared to a few years ago.
vundercind 2y ago
Similar circumstances (but longer time wfh) and similar observation. The in-person place is full of these absurd chains of tracking down the person who knows the thing, terrible processes for communication and defining what work needs to be done, et c, in ways that would never survive in a remote company because you can’t work that way when you’re remote. It’s a huge drag on their efficiency, in person or remote, and hurts hiring because they struggle to provide even a handful of of remote days per year in a market where every office worker I know (aside from here) is at least hybrid-leaning-remote (and most office workers I know aren’t in tech, nor is this a tech company). They have no idea that it’s bad, though.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Are these huge differences in efficiency visible in financial numbers?
  - nottorp 2y ago
    How do you propose to establish that, clone the people at one company, run both clones for a couple years and find out which made more money?
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      We kind of have natural experiments: switching to WFH and then switching back (at least for some some), so there should be groups of companies that could be compared.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        For companies like this one, WFH probably would look bad. It’d both be harder to work that way because they’re already dysfunctional, and it’d make the existing dysfunction more visible (and so probably be blamed for things that would have been going wrong even with everyone in the office).
pards 2y ago
Searchable chat history works when people communicate in public channels. My experience at large financial institutions is that the vast majority of chat is person-to-person. I try to encourage public (or group) chats but I _think_ people, especially juniors or new-joiners, are reluctant to look unknowledgeable.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  My employer had a great culture of talking things out in public channels, but after the acquisition, nearly everything is in private channels & DMs now. For some things, I've explicitly told people: "can you copy and paste this question in our support channel, so I can answer there?" But for a lot of things, I've just accepted that this is the new normal, and for some of it, I even understand why it is the way it is.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Teams encourages this awful pattern because their public “teams” don’t just have a normal-ass chat (and you can’t change it to be one), but a weird interface that seems to mainly be for announcements-with-comments. So 1-on-1 and ad hoc small group chats and chats attached to meetings are where everything happens. And god help you if your org also has a short chat retention policy.
- cflewis 2y ago
  I had a manager who thought putting questions in group chats would make it look like we were not competent and so should be only posted in DMs. Same about asking questions to other team members in bug tickets: don't do it, others will think the team is incompetent. Spoiler alert: He was one of, if not the worst, manager I have ever had because, surprise! he was awful in every other dimension as well.
stroupwaffle 2y ago
This to me seems not a problem with remote vs. office, but a particular company culture. Meeting notes aren’t difficult to create. The problem with chat-based solutions is people get lazy in articulation. So instead of a cohesive idea it’s spread across a giant thread. And instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” But then it never gets done, and the info is privy to only those in the conversation. It can be good or bad either way, but there’s no substitute for in-person communication; and there’s no substitute for a thoughtfully constructed document.
- qwytw 2y ago
  > instead of actually creating a proper document, it’s easy to say, “Meh, I’ll do it later it’s in slack.” Seems like an actual use case for LLMs. Yeah I understand the potential issues but (worst case) confusing documentation with some errors and flawed assumptions yet proper citation and sources (so it can be manually improved and eventually turned into thoughtfully constructed document) seems better than having no docs or entirely outdated ones.
- khafra 2y ago
  I'd say that, for people just starting a career who need to develop the illegible/intangible skills, in-person mentoring has no replacement. But after that, it's a real tradeoff. You can't just expect people to create and publish meeting notes when they catch a senior in the hallway and get an explanation they need, even if it would help others in their situation (or help themselves, in 6 months when they need to do that again and can't quite remember the steps (Unless their mentor modeled this important skill, I guess?)). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  It's almost like Github needs to come up with chat app that summarises discussions into a wiki...
nunez 2y ago
This falls apart at places that default to DMs.

smcleod 2y ago

Couldn't agree more, the overhead of context switching in-person is also so painfully expensive.

drzaiusx11 2y ago
The life hack I've had to resort to for in-office days is wearing large over-ear headphones to signal I'm not available for interrupting. Half the time I don't even have them plugged in. It mostly works, but remote work is still more productive for me.

benterix 2y ago

I can't agree more. I once had a lazy boss that hated putting his ideas in order and expected to act on oral orders that were vague on details. I would always ask at the end of his long stream-of-consciousness speech, "Oh, that's great! I have a big favor to ask you: could you briefly summarize what I have to do in a short email to make sure I haven't missed anything important?" He would look at me with contempt, "Can't you just remember these few simple things?" or would murmur "OK, OK" but never did. So after this kind of conversation I would compose a short email to him, "As agreed during the conversation today, I will do this and that within given period." He hated these emails, I could tell. I'm so glad this shit-show is over.

kranke155 2y ago
In Person management is the best way to make poor leadership work through constant oversight and changes (the dreaded "over the shoulder" management). Great for bad/mediocre managers, horrible for workers.
mapt 2y ago
It does seem that you need EITHER a very particular combination of things for "Guess culture" to be more effective than "Ask culture", or you need a system that is so irrevocably corrupted by its faulty incentive structures that it can't function as a bureaucracy without lots of plausible deniability. My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway. Sometimes the bureaucratic style, enforced from the top down, is "Ask for unreasonable things in order to attain reasonable outcomes". I do not work with life-critical systems, where this sort of thing absolutely would not fly.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  > My boss at this point understands that he's often putting me in a double or triple bind, but is obligated to do so and is never going to get approval for not doing so; My attempts to acquire verbal directives as to priority are met with "figure it out" and a grin. But then he's also extremely forgiving about accountability, doesn't attempt to apply metrics, because he understands that I'm going to be working on it all day anyway. Seems like at this point, you two have trust which has been built up based on respect/maturity, evidence of honesty/sincerity and delivery. You two are more or less a well oiled machine.

arzig 2y ago

Async communications can be exhausting. It’s infuriating to need some bit of information and be stuck with chat because 1. People are terrible at organizing things like slack as far as I can tell. 2. Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half. A work from home full time and don’t want to go back to the office, but the periodic need for unscheduled ad-hoc communication is absolutely the most exhausting part of it.

dickersnoodle 2y ago
Less disrupting the day for who?
bitlax 2y ago
You just set up a quick video call. I do it all the time.
- nunez 2y ago
  Zoom calls are 10,000% more mentally draining than desk interruptions, for me.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    Same here. The commute and being at the office are 100000% more mentally and physically draining than working from my own desk at home though.
acdha 2y ago
> Walking over to someone and having a 15 minute conversation is less disrupting to the day than tossing a mention into the void and then having responses dribble in over the next hour and a half. There’s a balance here, as the 15 minute conversation is often a 45 minute disruption for the target and often the people around them. The other challenge is in my experience the trade off wasn’t “this information cannot be obtained any other way” but more along the lines of “it’s easier to walk over than read the documentation/make any attempt to answer the question on my own”. Asynchronous shifts the downsides to the person asking, so people tend to have strong opinions if they tend to be on one of those sides a lot more than the other.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dzhiurgis 2y ago

"History search" is a symptom of lack of system of record Few months or weeks is fine. Everything else is just contributing to noise. Slack started when Snapchat introduced disappearing stories.