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Comment by antisthenes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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