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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

My experience working for a Bay Area company during the pandemic:

- No one uses email. Literally no one. The only things I get from email is automated notifications and meeting invites.

- Everyone uses Slack synchronously. I get multiple pings per hour. Sometimes I have to carry on 2-3 conversations in real time, simultaneously.

- Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway.

- Absolutely nothing is in writing: not meeting outcomes, not project plans, not reported issues. Messages in our Slack expire automatically after 60 days, so there is no written record of anything either.

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Sounds like everyone just kept on going like they were in person. Remote work takes a different cadence and communication patterns. I work at a 100% remote company and we have none of those problems (AFAIK).

- We use email extensively, both person-to-person and with various internal mailing lists we can subscribe to.

- Slack is very asynchronous and it is common for people to silence it when busy.

- All meetings are recorded and optional if you aren't an active participant.

- We write everything down with historical archives, for example all projects are proceeded by a written RFC describing the problem, solution and alternatives.

There are places that do remote work well.

I gotta say, our Slack messages are retained for so long I don’t even know what our Slack expiry is set to. This makes our Slack our single best repository of information available, far more likely to yield useful results than Confluence or searching old emails.

Companies that delete slack messages automatically shoot themselves in the foot. Whatever legal exposure you reduce is vastly outweighed by the convenience factor.

The companies might night be deleting slack messages automatically. They might just be on the free plan which only shows the most recent 10,000 messages.

A company that's a going concern has money to pay for Slack. We have maximum data retention requirements of a legal nature, so we are deleting Slack messages with fully conscious intention.

Believe it or not, some companies out there simply won't pay for Slack and will just use the free tier, which will eat the messages after some time anyways.

Of course, if billing or other concerns prevent them from doing this, i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either.

I actually did that myself and wrote about it on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat...

>i fail to see why they don't just use self hosted solutions, like Rocket.Chat, which isn't all that hard to do either.

I would assume CYA. If a self-hosted, non-industry-standard program went down, the person who set it up would be putting be their balls on the line. If Slack goes down, they can blame someone externally.

I was a part of company during a Hipchat > Teams migration that saw us lose all direct message history. The amount of knowledge lost was incalculable. It was certainly a wakeup call for me to start documenting stuff more permanently.

So many times I've searched some weird intranet hostname, or $megacorp_specific_lingo and found it in Slack, yet nowhere in our Confluence. Confluence is great for more long-form stuff, but it also gets stale. But the great thing with a slack message, it's mostly immutable, so I can see the date (a decent proxy for relevance). I don't have to peer through the edit history in Confluence to ascertain the age of the information on a document with a long lifespan and many edits.

> Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway.

That's because everyone just hates other people's meetings.

Sorry to hear that, I've been in this situation in the early years of my career. It sucks, puts way too much unnecessary pressure...

If you need to focus, just disable all notifications. Literally all of them. No one will die while you are focusing on the task at hand. And the project you are working on will definitely benefit from someone paying 100% attention to it. This may sound too extreme, but it'll feel natural after just one week.

Tried doing that, immediately got feedback from team lead: "Scarlett mentioned that she tried to reach you about the metrics she's trying to collect, she ended up getting blocked for the whole day. Could you be more more responsive?"

Or maybe Scarlett can work on more than one thing so that when she needs to make demands on other people's time that comes with a reasonable expectation of turnaround (such as 24 hours) or to communicate such needs timely rather than at the last moment.

Let me tell my boss how to manage the team and get back to you about how that goes.

find a new boss?

I work at FAANG and kind of like the comp? Other teams here are generally just as bad, from what I hear.

Well, I guess if the comp compensates for the stress you are having, then there is no problem to solve here.

IMHO, while the median comp might be higher in FAANG, one can get comparable or even higher compensation in many other companies given certain level of excellence in one's craft.

No, the problem is all this activism for entrenching remote work. I'll be much happier when it dies down again. I'm quite happy that my employer is implementing pay reductions for people who move away and make themselves harder to collaborate with.

I think the activism is because companies are already trying to push back hard against it, when actually it should be a matter of personal preference.

For lab work I can see why wfh is not an option, but for software development and lots of other work that could be done from home the decision should in principle lie with the employee, whatever works best for them, assuming that they are able to function like that.

The question of allowing devs (and other office workers but lets focus on devs) to go remote if they want is the big work-life issue of today. A few people want to work in person, but I'd say easily 75% of the people I work with do not want to be forced to go back to the office. In practice I have yet to actually meet someone who wants to go back to the big o except for the vp of engr. Everyone else, from recruiters, new hires, experienced people wants to be remote. There must be some people who want it of course.

One example, I'm a dev, and I talk to people we are trying to recruit from companies I worked at previously, they all ask me whether my company serious about going to in person, will that slowly fade away based on covid. I asked the recruiters and they said almost all the recruits ask that question too. I've always been in person at faang type companies and now about every month our vp of engineering schedules a new 'go back to the office' date, but it keeps going backward. Next date was going to be January something, but I'll put money on it going back monthly. One last whine, they keep saying they will do a survey of employee desires and concerns around this, but they keep delaying it for some reason.

Ok! ;)

Nice saying from the metalworking world: 'increased feeds and speeds are no substitute for better planning'.

A half decent manager should be able to handle this feedback, surely

That is true. But the problem here is not the remote work, is the company workflow. It will be the same problem in the office.

I don't know about that. Some middle management has been using remote working to amplify their toxic behaviour because its easier to get away with when people are isolated.

My experience is/was very different. Email and JIRA are the #1 communication tools. And occasionally (a few times a year) a 5 minutes mobile phone call to resolve an issue that couldn’t be resolved asynced. It works great. Constantly being pinged by Slack etc. would be annoying and negatively impact productivity.

So no email and lots of slack messages interrupting you, I have to wonder how does anything get done? I also find Slack (and all other IM platforms) to be horrendous when it comes to holding information that you might need later.

I've started keeping my slack status off permanently in working hours. It discourages people from contacting me, but I imagine the effect will wear off with time, as people catch on. The bigger picture takeaway is Slack status is not synonymous with me doing work that delivers company value (eg: doesn't mean I'm afk gaming or whatever).

The expectation of 'always on' is draining. I withdrew from social media for this reason, and now I'm applying that lens to professional communication software, in an effort to enforce barriers a bit better.

Wow, that sounds awful. Mostly asynchronous Slack/Teams/whatever is so so productive. You need a team that is all committed to deprioritizing message checking and knowing how to @at the right person or group when something is actually urgent in order for it to work though.

That's a privilege that our architect/principal engineer enjoyed. Everyone knew that he was too important to bother, so people generally didn't ask him questions. He'd reach out to you if he needed something, and otherwise he'd scan Slack and code reviews once a day and that was all the comms you'd get from him. He basically delivered solutions, and then it was our job to fix, maintain, and support them.

Wow, that sounds very bad.

Does it? They've carved out the essential space needed for deep thinking and are still responsive to questions on a daily basis. Sounds fine to me.

It could be very dysfunctional if someone is throwing stuff over the wall, but isn't so involved in day to day understands of what is needed, what are the problems. That's a hard thing to be successful at, that remoteness.

It's the typical American corporate culture of shuffling responsibility away from yourself, akin to a game of musical chairs.

Notice how most actions here are not designed to maximize productivity and finish the task quickly, but to maximize virtue signaling and to have as much plausible deniability as possible.

Personally, I would go bonkers in such an environment. I have some very harsh words that are best left off HN for people who engage in, perpetuate and sometimes (yes, some managers) encourage this behavior whether by ignorance or by deliberate example.

There's another less sinister explanation.

Most of what people think is important to document simply isn't. Particularly, collaborative sessions.

If a customer reports a bug in production, it really doesn't matter what was spec'd because the spec might be wrong. You need to evaluate the case and decide if something actually needs to be fixed.

Try that trick in a regulated industry and I guarantee you that you'll be out the door the first time.

What is in the spec is crucial and if the spec is wrong you fix the spec, assuming you have the authority to do so.

It would be good to have a spec so you know if it is a bug or not. That is independent of your customer thinking it is a bug.

No, this is exactly wrong.

Slack in real time = I ran into a problem and I will bother you in real time until you fix it. Endemic to data scientists!

Not writing email = I need you to answer me now, not later. Also, I don't want to waste time composing text when I can just talk to you over video right now.

Meetings all the time = I want the highest bandwidth communication immediately, instead of having to wait for an unspecified length of time, only to realize that I have a follow-up question.

This is precisely about responsibility and responsiveness, right now, immediately, and in real time, until the problem is solved. It's very much a young person and startup thing. Maybe it works differently if you contract with a large, slow bigcorp of some kind, but I've never worked in such an environment.

No, meetings and slack pings happen all the time in bigcorp land too.

Actually not true. That is the typical environment of big corps in my experience. And also for companies who didnt adapt correctly to remote work. I work from Europe with a NY based startup and these problems were resolved. If some work may require people involved in some critical path, it is scheduled in advance. And there is always someone on call for each critical system.

You keep using problems that are not related to remote work neccesarily, but to the way the company works.

> This is precisely about responsibility and responsiveness

Yes, it's about placing the responsibility on the person you're bothering, and doing less of it yourself. So I think you're actually agreeing with me or somehow misinterpreted my post.

Here's your cases laid out:

1. I think my problem is more important than whatever it is you're doing, so it's Ok to bother you.

2. I can't bother to organize my thoughts and compose them in writing, so have fun parsing my word salad over voice, because obviously you have nothing better to do.

3. I am horrible at planning and cannot think of questions in advance, so it's your fault.

> It's very much a young person and startup thing

Right, so the toxic business practices.

Yes, this is called "seniority" and "delegation." As you get more senior, your problems get more important, your time gets more valuable, your needs get more urgent. This is why there are more junior employees than senior employees, why companies are structured like pyramids, why a team generally has one lead, and so on.

So: all of the Slack pings you're talking about are coming from further up the heirarchy?

My point was - I don't mind being pinged and generally making myself more available to my immediate senior managers.

I do take issue if I constantly get pinged from people who are in lateral teams and positions and in companies where there's no clearly defined structure and everyone pings everyone. Then it's pure toxic chaos.

Hope that clarifies it.

True if you are a bad manager. False if you know how to hire competent people and delegate effectively. The best managers are not busy at all. The worst managers are constantly trying to fix problems ultimately created by themselves.

What you are describing is a disfunctional company. A company that doesn’t know how to organise tasks and people to not block each other.

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