Death by a Thousand Comments

Thanks for your honest thoughts. It bothers me because there’s many places to check all the time. It seems every tool has an inbox and wants to send me notifications about it. I have to read them all to keep up to date, and my job becomes piecing them all together into a cohesive story just to make sense of what’s going on at work.

It can feel super useful as an engineer to find a line of code in PR or a sentence in a Notion document, and then add your feedback directly there. But then I find the conversation half happens on Slack, and then continues in a Zoom meeting, and then the comment on the Notion doc is out of date. So I have to keep track of all of this in my head with which piece of feedback is stale and which one is still relevant, and then reconcile that with feedback from others.

It’s assumed that we need another tool, something that can do the job of retrieving all of these comments and reconciling them into a total order. My article asks whether reconciling decisions into a total order is actually part of the job of leadership. If we defer to AI to make sense of what we’re saying and deciding then we risk the people and the org becoming weaker from lack of clarity.