[HN Gopher] Open Messaging Improves Engineering Quality
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       Open Messaging Improves Engineering Quality
        
       Author : ritmatter
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-05-23 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.mattritter.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.mattritter.me)
        
       | ThalesX wrote:
       | I feel this is a very hard balancing act. I worked for a small
       | team where all members would constantly think "out loud" in a
       | public channel. It felt very nice for everyone involved, no one
       | would criticize and the discourse was at a very pleasing level.
       | Then, someone joined our team, that while smart, has a very
       | intimidating way of stating his opinion.
       | 
       | It took maybe two weeks since this person became active on the
       | channel for private conversations to start popping up.
        
       | theptip wrote:
       | Public/private is orthogonal to Slack/email. You can communicate
       | by email in open DL/mailing-list style, and many default to using
       | Slack with private group threads.
       | 
       | I do strongly agree with the main premise that open is better
       | than closed. This requires organizational cultural discipline to
       | pull off; someone needs to be pushing and training for an open
       | approach to be used by default.
       | 
       | But you don't need Slack to implement that open style.
        
       | nelsonic wrote:
       | Couldn't disagree more with this post. My experience of Slack in
       | a recent 200 person startup is _dozens_ of private groups where
       | information is siloed and not open at all. Slack fosters instant
       | gratification through constant distraction /interruption at the
       | expense of Deep Work. it's a _horrible_ antipattern for
       | effectiveness.
        
         | ctvo wrote:
         | Agreed. It takes effort to establish a culture where people
         | work openly through Slack. The path of least resistance is to
         | message someone privately with a question. Two obvious reasons:
         | 
         | - It reduces embarrassment from looking ignorant, uninformed or
         | in a negative light to your peers. "How could you not have
         | known that?!". This is worse when the channel has anyone in the
         | power hierarchy that's above you.
         | 
         | - It gets a more immediate response. Ask publicly and the
         | chance someone answers is lower than asking directly to a
         | subject matter expert.
         | 
         | So at a systemic level, because we're humans, Slack _defaults_
         | to being pools of private knowledge or private conversations.
         | There 's nothing in the tool itself that encourages open
         | communication. It takes leadership and effort to establish a
         | culture where people feel safe asking things in the open, and
         | it's a default.
        
           | ritmatter wrote:
           | It's definitely possible that in my post I conflate openness
           | coming from Slack vs coming from my company's culture. Maybe
           | the openness I'm describing would persist with many different
           | apps, as long as the company fosters that culture.
        
       | upofadown wrote:
       | >This openness actually improves engineering quality because it
       | steers discussions towards convergence on the correct or most
       | reasonable outcome.
       | 
       | Perhaps, but this can be hard to insure. Short form messaging
       | tends to lead to a situation where everyone is in perfect
       | agreement but no one knows that everyone has agreed to something
       | different. Eventually someone has to write up an email with their
       | long form understanding of what was agreed to.
        
       | pkulak wrote:
       | Sorry, I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs trying to
       | tell me that the entirely open, federated-for-50-years, global
       | standard is the closed system.
        
         | AlabasterAxe wrote:
         | You and the author are conflating two different kinds of
         | "openness". The user is talking about the openness of the
         | default visibility where you're presumably referring to the
         | openness of the implementation.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | OJFord wrote:
           | In fairness, GP may also be envisaging a public (or intranet)
           | 'mailing list archive' which is 'open' in the former sense.
        
           | ritmatter wrote:
           | This is exactly right. It is definitely possible that the
           | email protocol could be as open as what I'm describing, but
           | that has not functionally been my experience anywhere.
        
       | mdoms wrote:
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-23 23:02 UTC)