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Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

You can also just create a slack channel just for questions (eg #eng-onboarding), where the sole purpose of the channel is those questions. Lowers the barrier a lot. Even better, you'll see even senior folk pop in to ask questions about parts of the stack or codebase they aren't familiar with.

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Ugh this sounds like specific reddit spaced and I dont think it did end well.

TBH you land in a situation where you have 40 channels in the company you have to follow and it drains so much energy just to be in the loop.

Super hard to focus on anything if you know you can get pinged somewhere and you have to check or reply in timely manner.

Add to that emails and PRs and you spend 2/3 of your work day just enabling other ppl or answering questions.

Soo tiresome.

Budget your time in more specific buckets. I let all email and non-direct slack dings wait until I am in between tasks, such as when I get back from a beer lunch. In my previous job, I stopped checking email all together because it was mostly all these dumpster fire notifications for others to put out or ignore until it blew up entire parts of the sector.

Agreed. This is yet another source of distraction for actually getting things done, and turns into side discussions of tangential topics far more often than a useful source of information. Beats wasting everyone's time asking questions in a standup, but should at least be understood to be very asynchronous with no need for timely replies lest it become an attention hog. Might favor just setting aside time for devs to add to a wiki document about their area of the system than just being always available for individual questions.

Agreed. This is yet another source of distraction for actually getting things done

Yes and no. Yes, some individuals might suffer in the short term from the friction. No, the lack of that friction is not good for the team.

The context (i.e., article) is collaboration. That's not about individual GTD, it's about the health and long term well being of the team.

Granted, there are non-team situations but if size and or scale are involved that's less likely. A non-dysfunctional team has overhead. Skip that and while you may not have a dysfunctional team, you'll have a suboptimal one. Either way, that creates friction. The messy shitty kind.

Sounds like you have some major Slack trauma, sorry to hear. There are many ways to use Slack and to have a channel for people to get their questions answered without having people "spend 2/3 of your work day just enabling other ppl" (for instance, setting expectations on response time, having people volunteer to spend their time helping onboard other folks, etc). Like any process, it doesn't work unless thoughtfully implemented.

We've got that channel, and many, many other "help" type of channels, like "help-who-do-i-talk-to" as well as "help" for many different teams, subjects, etc. They work pretty well, but, there's just a lot of communication, and I think the new grads and very young engineers get overwhelmed.

Ultimately, communication between thousands of people is just hard, and technology solutions aren't going to solve all problems perfectly. And again, I want to stress that in general, Slack has been a pretty nice tool. We still just need to do other practices to make sure nothings flying under the radar.

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