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by nederdirk
711 days ago
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This resonates with my experience. The small company I worked at during Covid lockdowns had a 3-questions structured standup. At one point we added the question 'how do you feel today?' as 0th question. It helped us to see each more other as humans, which is often difficult when Slack, Zoom and PRs are the dominant communication forms. Also: all-day Slack huddles in the #watercooler channel, everyone muted by default, is a surprisingly effective way to lower the barrier for team communication. If you're waiting to talk about being blocked until morning standup, you'll probably ask for help about 16 hours later than necessary. |
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I spent my first years as a programmer not asking enough questions, because I didn't want to be perceived as incompetent.
Now I will ask questions until I get it, and I get it when I can explain it back sufficiently. I'll ask the same question repeatedly if I have to. And new colleagues are surprisingly tolerant of dumb questions because how else are you going to learn, and how could this be obvious to anyone, and if you're machine-gunning them now, maybe they'll get a break from you later.
I was in charge of training new hires for some years, and I adopted the policy of "you can always interrupt me". It takes some effort to convince people, but if you're surrounded by people who interrupt you, people catch on pretty quickly that it doesn't bother you, and what your code is for when you don't want to be interrupted.
If your team is big enough to elect someone who likes to get distracted because of the social interaction, and everyone who dislikes it gets a free pass unless you have to, I've found that extremely rewarding.
> all-day Slack huddles in the #watercooler channel, everyone muted by default
I've always wanted to work at a place that had this.
I can imagine it works great for remote.
But do you branch off to another voice chat once you're past the "Can I ask about X?" or "How does X do ...?" and someone pitches in?