Oddly enough I think I’ve never seen an official guide to either chat or email practice, despite them being core job skills which are clearly as trainable (and amenable to automatic aid!) as e.g. code standards / linting.
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1481699291504594947
Examples include: don’t send a blocking salutation. (“Hey.” or “Got a minute?”) Salutations are fine; just put them in *one message* with the actual content immediately after them.
If you are a manager and you ask for a meeting without an identified agenda/topic, be aware many employees will think they are getting fired. This is poorly calibrated but very easy for you to fix.
(“Can we get 30 minutes on Thursday [(for the usual / nothing major / about X)]”)
Learn how to navigate channels at your organization. Respect norms about e.g. how to discover whether the channel with 700 devs in it is the right one to ask “I can’t compile the foo project. What gives.”
Don’t at people unless you intend it to be interruptive to work. Recognition of coworkers is important! Here’s one of many ways to do it.
“We wrote a good blog post today. (Thanks pa.tio11 for the edits!)”
“We wrote a good blog post today. (Thanks pa.tio11 for the edits!)”
Learn what goes in an email versus a ticket versus a chat. At larger orgs, make sure your team/etc is explicit about preferences and establishes good incentives such that people who respect your preferences are doing the optimal thing to get great service.
If you do not publish an API, your API is “random member of team gets DMed with escalation to manager.” Consider carefully whether that will be optimal.
Be very clear with close team members (and frequent counterparties) how you work and what communication norms are. (I like “working with X” docs but there are a variety of form factors that work.)
For example, I have a quirky relationship with work hours and the realities of an international business. (And also, as you can see by a 4 AM Twitter thread, insomnia.)
One thing I tell people is “I have Slack/etc well-configured to not wake me up if you DM me out of hours.”
One thing I tell people is “I have Slack/etc well-configured to not wake me up if you DM me out of hours.”
“Conversely, if you DM me out of hours, my response is optional until the working hours listed here. If you need a more urgent response, call me with the thing that is worth waking me up in the middle of the night.”
(A… surprising number of Americans will not, given many many years to ponder the question, learn to understand that “I don’t like being ignored when I send you synchronous comms” is equivalent to “I think I have the right to wake you at will, person in Japan.” So be explicit.)
Oh, an absolute mantra at VaccinateCA: “explicit > implicit”
It’s easy to misread things and have communication gaps in short text messages. Favor being direct and almost pedantic.
Since pedantry is disfavored in most places, you can excuse it by saying “(explicit > implicit)”
It’s easy to misread things and have communication gaps in short text messages. Favor being direct and almost pedantic.
Since pedantry is disfavored in most places, you can excuse it by saying “(explicit > implicit)”
(Those sort of cultural shortcuts / memes are a godsend. Be careful about which you establish; be equally careful about which you don’t.)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
