The Difficulty of DMs

https://www.withcardinal.com/blog/2022-05-10-the-difficulty-of-dms

by commondream • 4 years ago

22 11 4 years ago

theamk• 4 years ago

I think team culture means a lot, and you can change it even as IC.

We have Slack and sometimes people DM me... but I have been trying to push them to more accessible locations (like a team channel). Simply telling, "I think this discussion would be interesting for many people, let's continue in thread in #some_channel" works surprisingly well!

dspillett• 4 years ago

You can also prioritise the other channels, or simply sit on DMs if they are not urgent¹, and let it be known that you do this. Many will start using your preferred channel if you explicitly don't make it easy not to.

We do something similar for external requests: if a client sends a direct mail to me, there is absolutely no SLA covering my response times and I deliberately don't jump on the case. You have to be a little dickish to make this work, if you respond quickly to direct contact by mail/phone/other people will not start favouring the proper channels.

[1] also make it clear to people that what is urgent to them may not be as urgent to you!

commondream4• 4 years ago

I totally agree that cultural norms can rework all these issues, but I also imagine if I were building an app and saw people constantly using it in a particular way that caused people to constantly say "Hey, do this in this other place instead," I'd rework the app to fit what I was shooting for.

hinkley• 4 years ago

I have started wondering how much emotional capital I’m burning every week trying not to snap at people doing a cold opening. Lots of people want to ask me questions, and we both know you aren’t just saying hi. Ask the damned question.

Half of my output comes from trying to maintain the balance between accessible and productive. Some months are better than others, and the last couple have been bad. Too often I have my normal work, the surprise bit I didn’t think about, the nasty, low quality, test that’s making that take four times as long because I can’t see why it’s red, someone trying to figure out if we’re having a production or preproduction issue, and someone sending me “Hello” “…” in too close a proximity. It’s a recipe for burnout, and rationally the former should be the ones I focus/fixate on, but the last couple are outsized, as later insults often are.

Then again, managers work with people, so they should expect to deal with people problems, not dispassionate problems based entirely on objective reasoning. Objective reasoning doesn’t need to be managed.

I do try to move a lot of things to the Wiki or code docs, but there are inflection points where everyone doing a little starts to add up, and if you don’t have that critical mass it can be glacial and unrewarding. In those environments your reward is being summoned to the meeting because you have the info, and many people enjoy that feeling way too much.

Gravityloss• 4 years ago

One can not be sure but this sounds like an organisational issue. Questions should be communicated mostly in open chat so everybody can learn from them. Then later others can answer the same question for you. Operational roles should be rotated as well so people can concentrate.

sverhagen2• 4 years ago

In a physical space a couple of people can start chatting and then call someone else over really easily to get their input. (...) Yes, you can broaden the discussion into a different channel, but that involves losing the entire existing history of the discussion.

As if you can call someone else over in the physical space and they immediately have all the context of what y'all were already talking about. You'll have to give them a summary at least. Which is the same that happens when I pull them in on Slack DMs. Like with rubber duckying, it may not be a bad thing to gather your thoughts on the subject, and re-articulate them when you pull in a new person.

More generally I do agree, though, that DMs should be avoided by default.

commondream4• 4 years ago

I guess I'm not understanding part of this. Say I've been at a company for a year or so and talk to Ashley a lot, so we have basically a year of DM history. Today we talk about something that we need to pull Derrick in on. How do I add Derrick to this DM that we've had running for a year in a way that doesn't expose everything else we've talked about?

I agree with the weakness of my open space situation in terms of having to provide context, but I think that's actually a spot where technology (like expanding discussions in Cardinal) really helps because the context can just be there automatically.

sverhagen2• 4 years ago

So, let's say that you've been talking with Ashley at a whiteboard for over an hour, and you pull in Derrick, how are they going to catch up on the conversation then? (Right, by you summarizing.) I felt the article was falsely suggesting that in that physical space, the "need to catch the person up" problem didn't exist.

PoignardAzur• 4 years ago

I think Zulip is pretty good at avoiding those problems.

If you have a new spontaneous question, you just create a new topic. It's never too crowded.

I've used DMs on Zulip a few times, but it was mostly to set up 1-on-1 meetings or ask for personal advice, not for sharing information that might be relevant to other people.

commondream4• 4 years ago

Yeah, that's a lot more what we're shooting for with Cardinal as well. More topical discussions that can start private and grow from there in a clear, natural way.

The Difficulty of DMs

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