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Comment by vp8989 | Hacker News Reader

Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

If it's disseminated via oral lore it's expensive to change and is often misinterpreted across a large enough org.

A silent killer of engineering orgs is bad practices that stick around because that's the way it's always been done. No one knows why because it wasn't written down. The only way to fix that is for someone high enough to provide blessing, but maybe none of those things are individually disruptive enough to get the CTO involved. So everyone eats the costs in perpetuity.

Much easier to just write everything down.

Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.

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> Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

I'm always startled by comments like this because it's so counter to how I understand humanity. We are social mammals. No amount of good grammar and excellent font choice can substitute for sharing the same physical space together, an act that has been core to what it means to be human literally since we first speciated.

Yeah, writing stuff down is important. But engineering culture is a culture in the real sense of the word and trying to transmit that entirely through text sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm.

Personally, I find it hilarious to use "humans are social animals" to justify office oriented mandatory wage labor.

Humans are social animals in the sense that they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social. I don't know about you, but I have more time to be social with the people (friends, family, neighbors, volunteer groups, etc) that I actually want to be social with when WFH. Being forced to drive to an office under the pretense of "this is how our evolutionary ancestors preferred it" is low key gross.

You can - and should - be able to disseminate engineering culture through digital means.

> they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social.

At almost no point in human history has that ever been true. Only in the very recent past has any notion of mobility and sufficient population density existed where one could choose who they socialized with. For all of our evolutionary history, you lived and died within your tribe.

I am equally startled by comments like this implying our nature as social mammals is so limited in ways to be appeased, or expecting the only way to be human is to work with colleagues of the same craft on an almost daily basis.

Socializing can be done with people outside that very limited circle. Meanwhile, I can get my knowledge-sharing itch by looking up new techniques on the internet, going to conferences, etc.

I participate in multiple online communities where the "culture" has only ever existed through text.

Just because it doesn't involve beer or seeing each other's faces doesn't mean that it's not a real culture.

That's not to say that any particular group's culture will translate seamlessly from in-person to text/video chat, but the idea that having and sharing a culture in a text format is somehow lesser than having one in person doesn't make sense to me.

I grew up on BBSes, USENET, email, LKML FFS! I really don't get people who make provably false claims that online culture doesn't work.

I guess medicine is a failure in that regard? Everything is documented to the letter. Perhaps we should let go of it to see what marvelous processes each individual hospital will come up with.

"sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm"

No it's like raising a baby using advice you read from books that are peer reviewed and revised over time vs. just listening to what your parents say.

No, it's like raising a baby using advice your parents wrote down for you because they were parenting remotely. "Peer review" is your stepdad quickly skimming through your mom's PR and saying 'sure looks good'.

Yeah, GP has apparently never heard of Dr. Spock's books.

> We are social mammals.

We are sentient beings that have had writing for thousands of years. Perhaps we should start acting like it.

> Engineering culture should be disseminated via documents rather than oral lore.

A million times this! If there's anything that WFH has done, it's exposed the big gaping hole known as "institutional knowledge."

> Increased difficulty for juniors to ramp up when you are remote is a symptom of a culture with lots of overly complicated processes that are not well documented.

Or no process at all. Even on small teams, even on projects I start from scratch by myself, I GD document things. It's not that hard once you start practicing and make it a habit.

I swear, if a programmer had zero comments in their code and said "just come by the water cooler if you have any questions", they'd be fired within a week, yet we put up with this ephemeral bullshit for other things.

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