We have no cultural norms around how to handle this well in cyberspace.
At the office, it’s unlikely someone would start talking to you if they saw you were already engaged with someone. But on instant messengers, this information is hidden from others, so there’s no reason to hold back. And, from the other side, if you’re engaged with somebody, someone else can come over and wave their hands to get your attention because something is urgent. On instant messengers, they can only @ you a couple of times and pray that you’re not away from keyboard.
So what we get here is a race to the bottom, where everyone has to talk more loudly to be heard above the din.
I’ve seen some companies handle this well by emphasizing asynchronous, long-form writing over other types of communication. I wish I knew how they shifted to that type of culture because my current job is super Slack-heavy.
I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
We have no cultural norms around how to handle this well in cyberspace.
At the office, it’s unlikely someone would start talking to you if they saw you were already engaged with someone. But on instant messengers, this information is hidden from others, so there’s no reason to hold back. And, from the other side, if you’re engaged with somebody, someone else can come over and wave their hands to get your attention because something is urgent. On instant messengers, they can only @ you a couple of times and pray that you’re not away from keyboard.
So what we get here is a race to the bottom, where everyone has to talk more loudly to be heard above the din.
I’ve seen some companies handle this well by emphasizing asynchronous, long-form writing over other types of communication. I wish I knew how they shifted to that type of culture because my current job is super Slack-heavy.
I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
Former boss: you don’t need comments, you can just look at the code and see what it does..
Me: you need comments to tell you why it does it...