I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post. Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
In my experience, "rambling" channels build up organically... as you have a thought, you share it with someone relevant, not just drop it into a channel and see who reads it. Over time, small group chats evolve naturally, and assuming everyone has communications skills, topics that become relevant to the whole team are then shared with the whole team.
I agree that such discussions are healthy, maybe even required, for a functional remote team. But let people organize themselves - don't prescribe specific methods that teams must follow. The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)
If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.
Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Ted Crisp: We do everything: industrial products, biomedical, cryogenics, defense technology.
Veronica Palmer: We want to weaponize a pumpkin.
Ted Crisp: Then so do I. Because?
Veronica Palmer: There's a country with whom we do business that grows a great deal of pumpkins and would welcome additional uses for them. As well as cheaper ways to kill their enemies.
Ted Crisp: Well, finally, the pumpkin gets to do something besides Halloween.
I believe this showcases, succinctly, corporate “ethics” in our society.
Absolutely anything to make a buck and strengthen trade.
Better off Ted was sadly canceled way too early. Part of me wishes a streaming service would pick it up for a revival, but I know the monkey's paw there would be that it would be subverted by precisely the sort of corporation it set out to lampoon.
I think that was the first R rated movie I saw as a child (and probably the first movie I pirated, on pre-P2P networks). The grand wisdom of the Geto Boys (sic) has stuck with me ever since.
"The type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do [care about money]"
I've gotten way off topic
I've fotgotten: Did Napster eventually open up to sharing videos and software after MP3s? I can't remember if I'm just conflating it with memories of Kazaa (I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time, my memory is fuzzy lol). I know I got addicted to pirating and filesharing after being introduced to Hotline at an even younger age.
I couldn't buy rated M games or R rated movies, but I could certainly download them... which led me to my first graphics card and RAM upgrade, installing a TV tuner card, and eventually to PC building. Doing all this while in grade school was the best tech education I could get, especially back in the 90s.
Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.
When I told them the movie came out before they were born, yet depict their life damn near exactly as they were living it, their enlightenment lit the room anew hah.
> I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post
This seems to happen a lot: Someone writes some highly exaggerated career advice that has good intent at the core but turns into overly weird suggestions by the end. They might be trying to be memorable or to make an impact by exaggerating the advice.
Then some people, often juniors, take it literally and start practicing it. They think they’re doing some secret that will make them the best employee. Their coworkers and managers are more confused than impressed and think it’s just a personality quirk.
As a manager I found it helpful to skim Reddit and other sites for semi-viral advice blogs like this. With enough juniors in a company there’s a chance one of them will suddenly start doing the thing written in a shared post like this. Knowing why they’re doing it is a good way to help defuse the behavior (assuming they don’t really benefit but rather do it because they perceive it will look good)
Lol yep. Our company decided “sprints” were now to last 4 weeks, but there’s also no task scheduling, no retro, no sprint planning… just tasks get given whenever they come up based on what they feel like.
So… what’s the point of a “sprint”? We don’t even do monthly releases. It’s hilarious.
I suspect we do “agile” in name only so they can pretend to the board that there is a system at all.
The weird practices worked as reported, but as an accident of the context where they arose. Outside that, they're about as robust as really rare orchids, which I think to their credit the authors realized, hence all the "don't take our word for it!" with which they hedged around their wildly bestselling school of management consultancy.
I like to say that the outwardly visible practices and processes of highly effective teams are mostly symptoms, not causes of their success. You can't invert the causal relationship.
Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".
When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.
But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.
I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.
These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.
Same idea as rubber-duck debugging or just explaining things to someone else. The work of translating the idea forces your mind to marshal and walk the structures from a fresh angle and you can gain insights that were lacking.
Getting more eyeballs on that idea also helps. Both in the different knowledge and expectations / assumptions they have and in proofing how clearly the idea's communicated. Really helps reveal areas where there's ambiguity you hadn't even realized because it's not even a confusion spot you'd consider with your knowledge.
Off topic, 10 years ago, I hated confluence and wanted my team to be able to continue using DokuWiki.
Now, I've consulted at places that use Microsoft Teams file shares for their "documentation", and I feel like I'm back in 2005. Confluence would be a dream.
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article states "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."
Nothing in this post suggests any kind of expectation, mandate, or obligation to post anything in any kind of channel.
The problem that this post is trying to address, is that these kinds of informal rambling channels -- which have enormous value -- almost never happen organically.
They say something about posting 3 times a week. Even if it’s not a formal obligation, it’ll certainly feel like one if they notice you never post whilst other people do.
it's pretty interesting to see this discrepancy in response to this idea
some folks -- i guess like you? -- read this and think, "oh, great. a mandate that fixes a problem i don't have, and now might be something i'm forced to participate in against my will"
and other folks -- definitely me, and i believe the OP as well -- read this and think, "oh, great! an idea that might help me with a problem that i have, and might be something i can point-to as one possible solution to that problem"
The difference is for me, that problem is already solved naturally. If you have the right work environment and culture, you’ll already have a bunch of fun and interesting work chats going on. If you need to force it, something else is wrong.
> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working
computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)
Agreed, it’s one of those things that works well if it happens organically but not as a policy. I’ve got a personal wiki at work where I dump a bunch of useful stuff, it has helped people and attracted attention which is nice. I think the easiest solution is to have longer-form team meetings once a week.
I'll add on to this that per-user channels could work well in teams where everyone is comfortable sharing, but could be absolutely paralyzing in other situations.
My personal preference is to have some kind of "Off-Topic" or "Open Discussion" channel that is communal. I'll then make a point of consistently posting half-developed ideas to that channel. Especially the ideas that I know are going to morph as the team discusses them. I find that helps do two things:
- Helps create a culture of collaboration rather than one of "whatever the lead dev says goes".
- Provides Cover For/Reduces Pressure On anyone that is less comfortable putting their thoughts out there for discussion.
As the parent comment said, the fundamental idea in the post isn't bad, but the mechanism may need tweaking for a given team.
I think the pos tog having a designated spot is to remove friction. Otherwise you can gummed up trying to decide where to post: “is this worth bothering the team? Maybe I should just message my friend? Or should I just bring it up in the next standup? Or maybe the retro…”
Overlooked in this recap is a telling line from later in the article:
> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. We want as much deep focus time as possible, so ramblings help us stay connected while minimizing interruptions.
Emphasis in the quote is mine, to call attention specifically to the fact that this is what Obsidian is doing instead of standups.
Taken in that vein, it sounds positively miraculous to me.
Or they're just async standups, except less accessible since OP uses separate, exclusive channels instead of threads within a single shared channel.
The fully remote org I work at does async standup threads, they're great, they work just like they're described here except they're vastly easier to track and search, and nobody has any allusions of them being anything more than just remote asynchronous standups.
Just make a "random" channel, where most people keep notifications off, and use it for everything random, from lunch invitations to "i'm selling olive oil", etc.
Not me, a coworkers parents live in the coastal areas of our country and they grow olives and make homemade oliveoil (traditional processes), so yeah, when they make a batch, it's worth buying :)
Hack Club, the largest Slack instance I’ve ever been a part of, has a culture of personal channels and it is incredibly organic and fun. It’s largely restricted to students under 18, though!
I feel like it’s a common pattern that organically forms. People want to express themselves, they don’t want to distract group chats, so they make a space to do it.
In my experience, "rambling" channels build up organically... as you have a thought, you share it with someone relevant, not just drop it into a channel and see who reads it. Over time, small group chats evolve naturally, and assuming everyone has communications skills, topics that become relevant to the whole team are then shared with the whole team.
I agree that such discussions are healthy, maybe even required, for a functional remote team. But let people organize themselves - don't prescribe specific methods that teams must follow. The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.