Well, yeah. If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that having their time and attention isn't important to you.
As Aaron Burr in "Hamilton" so put it, you have to be in the room where it happens.
As an introvert, I flip that around. If I have to engage in social games to improve things, I am instead just not going to bother and will confine my ideas to my conversations with co-workers laughing at inefficiencies and failures.
This may be an uncharitable reading of what you said, but you're implying that introverts are special fragile people who can't be bothered to share their brilliant ideas.
If someone comes up with an idea, and they think it's a good idea, it's their responsibility to advocate for it. They're already that idea's #1 fan. They're uniquely motivated to get it out in the world. How can they get others to take them seriously when they can't even take the initiative to share it themselves?
Sure, maybe some people are true solitary geniuses. But that's a waste of genius if they can't effectively communicate their thoughts with other humans.
Ed: incidentally, suggestion boxes (mentioned nearby in the thread) are also probably not helpful. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, I assume those are ignored and don't bother.
Depending on your approach, you'll get differing amounts of information from different people. A more charitable reading of the post you replied to might be: You shouldn't be content getting information only from those who like to talk and volunteer information.
You have to be effective in managing people. Maybe some people like to socialize an idea in their in group before they find someone to champion it. Maybe others like to write up their thoughts and share the doc on chat. Maybe others like to whiteboard it out after talking to someone at the bar.
But all of them actively push change.
That being said, developers are in a very unique position because they are the ones who actually build the product. If you can’t sell your devs on an idea, it ain’t getting built.
The process of getting to saying what your idea is? Frequently, especially if it is very informal or reliant on social cred to get into the room.
I mean the agile manifesto is all about human interaction. People over process. Face to face conversation over piles of stale documents.
Are we done with agile? Is it time to embrace the waterfall?
Alternatives to hallway conversations in increasing depth:
* slack message
* README.md
* RFC
* Business plan
Plus there’s always zoom or the phone if you really want to shoot the shit.
Slack is good for easy questions where you already know how to convert your thoughts into words. If you don’t because your thoughts are currently encoded visually… slack (or any online medium) doesn’t work. In the real world I would almost always abandon the slack conversation and go visit the person / people.
Email is crap for communication, at least for my working style.
The rest are okay when you’ve got a lot of clarity already but not so hot when you are very early in the ideation phases.
All of your substitutes are significantly lower bandwidth, much more latent mediums.
You can’t replace face time with online. You just can’t.
I’ve long held that the secret to FAANG company success wasn’t their technical prowess or even their products. Is that they have superior software development processes. Their secret sauce is their process. Companies with shitty offices, crappy untrusting management, and heavyweight processes get beat by those with processes similar to FB or Google.
You’ll note that all the companies in FAANG invest a shit ton into their office experiences… well except Amazon.
Give it a year and life will look much as it did back in 2019.
For instance, I would never work in an office again and because there is a developer shortage, that requirement hasn’t impacted my market rate, which is on par for the valley.
Having worked at one of the FAANGs I would definitely not say they have a superior development process. Waaaaay too much middle management baggage and drag. They are successful due to first mover advantages, network effects, regulatory capture and in some cases a literal monopoly.
Zero of the FAANG companies had a first mover advantage.
* Facebook replaced MySpace within the course of like a year. Today TikTok and other things threaten them.
* Apple... well... it was for a long time a huge underdog.
* Amazon... born in the dot com era. At the time lots of people thought the company was gonna implode any day. It took like a decade before they even remotely generated something other than a loss.
* Netflix... was DVD's, competed against brick & mortor and companies like Kozmo. Today it competes with media companies offering their own streaming service.
* Google... plenty of search engines came before google.
Not sure how any of these companies became successful because of regulatory capture, network effects or even literal monopolies. None of these companies could be successful in the long haul if their products sucked. Building non-sucky products involves a hell of a lot more than just developers sitting at home writing code 24/7. Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.
Network effects are all over the place, mainly FB and Google.
> Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.
For the most part, large companies “innovate” via acquisition.
The Hiptop/Sidekick and Palm Pilots were already popular long before the iPhone came out. They just weren't nearly as good and the companies couldn't overcome the carriers' poor business plans.
If you can’t take a step back and make a paragraph, and instead attempt to just bombard others with your thought-stream and let them sort it out, then maybe YOU are the problem - face-to-face or not.
Untrue. My DMs are open.
If introverts aren't voicing their ideas, what are we supposed to do, read minds?
For example, something where folks ask "please post your papers and ideas to this shared document repository where they can each then be read by the team at whatever pace is required."
A collection of folks read the documents, write about which ideas they like, then make a decision based on the contents raised in said papers, all over text mediums.
Something like that is an alternative to a world where whoever speaks loudly fastest, and to the right people, has their idea taken seriously.
Hallway conversations are temporal noise, at best.
But, say you have some half-baked idea and want to talk it out with a coworker next to you. You both roll over to the whiteboard in your pod and start scribbling, both of you exchanging high-bandwidth information via utterances, gestures, and facial expressions with millisecond roundtrips. Third teammate overhears and rolls over, contributing further. This scenario IME used to happen a lot, created a lot of value, and is hard to replicate with a scheduled meeting or documents because the communication roundtrips and bandwidths are atrocious.
Half the time I don’t need to ask for help because in the comfort and focus of my home office I can figure out much more difficult problems then I could when a sales dude was closing a deal next to my desk, or having half the devs at my table coughing and sick.
Documents are useful when the volume of details is too much to remember in a conversation, and to communicate with wider audiences, but for communicating key points in a small group, conversation is vastly more efficient.
In person can truly make a difference. You're all subject to the same distractions, can keep each other on task, and pound through collective decisions in a way even a video chat can never facilitate well.
A hallway conversation is a random happenstance between a couple of people. Any decisions made are going to have to be communicated more broadly as a next step anyway, which will require written communication.
It’s pretty hard to read and comment on HN when you’re in the office. Especially an open office where everyone can see your screen.
I feel all these "solutions" just tell the other type of 'verts' to suck it up and adapt to the other style.
Think Lex Friedman in a one-on-one vs. Joe Rogan with 2 guests at the same time.