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Comment by slykar | Hacker News Reader

The image I get from this article is that their work is very unorganized? They complain about issued with discussing stuff online, yet they don't use video?

> Engineers who worked remotely with the engineers in the U.S. said, “We miss the hallway stuff.” Andrei told me that when he spent time in Houston, he was able to build a mental map of “who knows what.” When he got back to Romania, the map got out of date quickly.

How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this? What if someone leaves the company. Whay if you have someone new? Why would every person need to build this map. Create it once, share it with everyone, make it accessible and editable.

IMO online work often magnifies the issues that are already there.

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It’s uncomfortable to write down that “Abel is here primarily because he’s good friends with the CTO but he mostly stays out of the way, Baker is the one who really knows what’s going on but can’t write reliable code, and Charlie is a code monster but doesn’t have the faintest idea of nor interest in how our business actually works.”

Pick your combinations of what pros and cons each team member brings, but it’s rare for the unvarnished truth about your people map to be exclusively positive.

> How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this?

By talking to people on a regular basis?

This problem isn't new and even affects open source. Which people in the Linux kernel are experts on which USB drivers? You can look at commits, but that doesn't always reflect the reality on the ground of the people with the actual understanding of the detailed bits of the hardware. Unless you sit on the mailing list and chat server for a couple weeks, you won't figure this out.

Big companies used to have this problem all the time back before ubiquitous communication. Some group would need knowledge about Subject A. They would appoint Person B in the group to be the liaison with Expert C who was in some other division--they would have to talk on the phone, fly to the the other division, etc. to maintain that knowledge Over time, Person B would become the "local" expert and would probably become a global expert as well. How would you find out who the experts are and where they are? You would tap your network and start walking it.

Humans network--that's just how they are.

> By talking to people on a regular basis?

So it's like keeping data in a RAM instead of a persistent storage. Does not sound like a good practice. I would also say it does not scale.

The advice I usually hear from people running software houses is to have an internal KB. Even experts forget what they told 3 months ago or how the complex process was supposed to go like.

> How would you find out who the experts are and where they are?

Team Directory. Write down who knows what and how to reach them. People figure out in small, focused groups who knows what by seeing who delivers. You don't need to do it in a hallway.

Your answer doesn't explain why live colocation matters. Your example is asynch text.

You're basically describing the difference between a free market and a regulated economy with extra transaction costs. Harnessing people's natural tendencies gets results that bureaucracy does not. the choice isn't chitchat vs wiki, it's chitchat vs wiki vs do nothing because maintaining wiki is to much work and typing is slower than talking.

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