Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

- Ignore your inbox: Unless you're in a support role, most company emails are not as critical as you might think. All of that noise between blathering newsletters, GitHub notifications, calendar events, various service updates, and alerts from failed CI jobs are mere distractions. You can configure your mail to filter these out or, like I do, not bother checking them for days. If something's actually important, you'll probably find out on Slack.

- Unless someone is coming to you with an urgent ask, either delay getting back to them or just tell them that you need heads-down time right now.

- Pause notifications in Slack. On top of this, add your phone number to your Slack profile and make it clear to everyone that they can still reach you if everything's on fire.

- Mute most of the Slack channels you feel obligated to join. Why companies and even individual employees believe that more channels is better, I have no clue. Complete waste of time.

- Invent reasons to skip your daily standup. Even a 15 minute interruption can disrupt you from being in your zone. Screw these lame ass status update meetings in disguise.

- Just say no to pair programming if you're in a flow, unless the other person needs urgent help.

- If you work in an office, find a hallway or room deep in the bowels of the office building where no one seems to go and do your work there. There was an office I worked at once where there was a concrete hallway way in the bottom corner of the building where almost nobody went but it had a treadmill desk, so I worked down there a lot in peace. Some lady eventually figured out I was doing this and started spreading rumors that I was creepy or that I had quit. Just ignore idiots like this if that happens. That office environment was loud.

- Observe what area of the office floor is the least noisy (and possibly furthest away from your interrupt-happy team members) and ask management if you can switch to a desk over there.

- Recognize when being distracted isn't a bad thing. Everyone's mileage may vary, but personally, being ultra-focused all the time made no impact on my career versus working diligently but not punishing myself if I felt like stepping away from work for a while. Time spent at the keyboard doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with productivity in tech. Above all, you're not a cog.

As tech lead on my team, I ask them to make it to standup and I'll forgive any other absence. It's 15 minutes, we time box it so we just hang up on second 900 if we even make it that long.

My team won't update ticket comments, they wont read emails, they won't read Teams channel questions directed at them. I try to keep these things at a minimum so that I can't be accused of making a point about over-stimulation - I get it.

But if they start to skip standup, the one time each day I can ask them where the hell one of my things I need is, then I have no reliable connection to them at all. And I'm not a boss so all I can do is beg.

I concede that an individual's response should also be within some amount of reason in a given context. If your team isn't responding to anything in a reasonable amount of time, that's a serious problem. To me, ticket status and Teams channel questions are way more important than the vast majority of emails or standups. However, in your situation, there's some benefit (mainly to you) to standups.

You're in a tough position, it sounds. You're a lead, yet likely restricted to leading technology and not so much people. I don't know what your leadership style is, but I've noticed some people are treated like bosses for merely acting the part, so that's something to consider.

Also, what I meant to say was that a person should skip standup if it actually benefits their productivity. They should show up to some standups, perhaps most. Hypothetically, standups could be done well, but I don't usually experience this. I don't think people should never show up to team rituals.

> And I'm not a boss so all I can do is beg.

There must be an interesting story that explains why companies everywhere created the powerless tech lead position separate from manager. The tech lead is stuck in an impossible situation, apparently.

Having previously been in a project lead position, I've wondered about this myself. It's downright impossible to get a team to follow a project plan when you have no management authority over them. You can report the facts to their managers, but sometimes the managers don't care and there is no recourse.

I worked at a place where story comments were answered by the next day, slack messages were answered pretty quickly too. It sucks that standup was the only place you could get anything from anyone. I think it's basic communication skills

Adding my voice, if your stand up sucks, I'm sorry, but you will still need to provide some kind of input to those you work with on what you're doing and what you need. Otherwise, don't be surprised at performance reviews.

In which case, I would extend what I wrote to say that providing a written version of your standup in Slack (or whatever) can be a reasonable alternative, as long as actual standup isn't skipped too frequently.

> Mute most of the Slack channels you feel obligated to join. Why companies and even individual employees believe that more channels is better, I have no clue. Complete waste of time.

I hate being in hundreds of channels but it's the way people found to segment long discussions or projects. I've heard tools like Zulip have better ways to organize this but I haven't tried them extensively (and I doubt I could convince the whole company to switch).

I think this is on Slack, tbh.

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