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Comment by phoenixy1 | Hacker News Reader

These were popular at my workplace maybe seven years ago, and while I was into the idea at first, IMO it was impractical most of the time. Turns out it's a pretty unreasonable burden to place on people that they should read and follow instructions in a document in order to communicate with someone and to personalize their work approach for every person they interact with.

The main context these make sense in is when written by a manager (or maaybe by a direct report for their manager). They can be useful to establish expectations for a team around things like "is it ok to message me on the weekend" and "here's what you should have prepared for our 1:1s".

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I find that I never know what to write about myself in these. I had to make one for work also a few years ago for similar reasons to you. But when I would read it I could see it represented a part of me, but it's hard to say "talk to me like this" because it depends on what the subject is and who the person is. I found it was interesting to do as a team building exercise because we all did them together and read them to each other as teams but I never found myself or others getting back to it. And at some point I would've preferred if the document disappeared because years later some new joiners would read it and think something I wrote in 15mins in a workshop 6 years ago still represented who I was at the present time.

> it depends on what the subject is and who the person is

bingo.

> because years later some new joiners would read it and think something I wrote in 15mins in a workshop 6 years ago still represented who I was at the present time.

As with any other documentation, you need to spend time keeping it up to date. If you'd upgraded some libraries and added new ones, but still had docs you gave to new team members referencing the outdated libraries... how productive could they possibly be?

Maybe they only make sense, when they are really simple like:

"is it ok to message me on the weekend"

Mine would be:

"message anytime, don't expect response outside work hours, but can happen"

"only call in emergencies"

I mean, this should just be the worldwide default.

We should not be normalizing a culture of working outside of working hours.

There is also that I have different expectations for different types of work relationships.

I don't want a manager pinging me 7 times a day with questions. But I am OK with a coworker messaging me 15 times about their progress on something we're trying to get done together for that manager. One disrupts the maker cycle and one is two makers making together in the same cycle.

+1, rules of engagement make sense at the team level, not the individual level.

> "here's what you should have prepared for our 1:1s"

Tangentially, I'd like to survey attitudes about this kind of 1:1. I'm of the opinion that my 1:1 with my manager is my time to discuss my thoughts and needs. If a manager is assigning me homework so I can "come prepared" for yet another status update, they can sacrifice their time to make that meeting happen.

Almost like we need API's for interpersonal communication, which, as long as we all adhere to them, remove many of the difficulties.

Some modern-day teams will do a simplified team building exercise where they determine what "colour" people are, idk which one it is exactly, might be Hartman Personality Profile

This is honestly for a subset of the population the needs special catering. I can see things like disabilities, pronouns, and trigger words going into something like this.

I also can see this a hinderence to our general interpersonal communication.

one might also position it this way: “most people probably don’t feel the need for a document like this because they believe their preferences are the default for most people.”

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