Hacker News Reader

Comment by kirykl | Hacker News Reader

What I despise most the is the desk drop in, especially for things that could be easily emailed. Sometimes even interrupting me to alert me in person that you've sent me an email.

However I've been told by a manager to use the desk drop in more, to get more visibility and make it look like I'm engaging with the team to outside observers

View on HN

I recently had a manager say the same thing to me about Slack.

The founders were apparently trolling the tech channels and my name didn't come up enough. Mostly because I was busy working and not incessantly spamming giphy nonsense.

Needless to say I quit.

Some workplaces have the "fish-bowl" feeling, and Slack can really amplify that. Imagine having alerts come into a channel where your boss's boss is watching you acknowledge them, DM'ing him critiques of your work in realtime.

That is exactly what happened. The company is now imploding because the entirety of senior engineering staff has resigned over the last two weeks.

One of our founders left herself logged in on a QA device, needless to say the entire team got to read her emails for two weeks without her knowledge.

I don't like that either, but see the other responses in the thread where people admit to leaving hundreds (even thousands) of emails unread.

If it's a small number of people doing the "drop in" on you, maybe finding a way to let them know you they don't have to...that you'll answer them, would help?

This is interesting, as I sometimes do this. I don't like just writing an email requesting something and flinging it off to someone without talking to them in person. I put everything I need into an email. I'll then pop over just to say hey and explain. I guess I do this with people I don't usually communicate with.

Surely face to face contact is a good thing?

This duplication of communication confuses me. At which employer is the work pace slow enough to have so much face time? And how do you handle this with your remote coworkers, or those on completely different shifts?

> At which employer is the work pace slow enough to have so much face time?

I think the point is exactly opposite - you duplicate this communication when the thing is urgent. Face time creates this sense of urgency, whereas a simple email may be sitting in an inbox for days.

Of course, if communication is duplicated for every little meaningless detail, then I agree it probably means people have too much free time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com