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Comment by mjayhn | Hacker News Reader

> You'd send out an e-mail update to others who need to know. Or you'd scheduled a follow-up call or meeting to discuss it.

Just my anecdata; this is the polar opposite of what I want. I do not ever, ever want a meeting or a follow up call over an async slack message unless it must be a meeting.

Some managers really need to talk to their engineers and see what the engineers need to perform best and not make every assumption based on what they, the manager, are used to from the last 10 years of their career at 1-2 places.

Forcing a square into a round hole makes engs leave and I've worked for a lot of managers who feel like they stopped growing a decade ago or are using outdated ideologies because the people who promoted them are so far away from the real people creating the sauce now.

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This comment makes me realize that I've experienced both sides of this coin now. I've had the manager that asked for daily email updates. And I've worked in a grind silo until I was finished.

There is a balance between them. I think where you draw that line largely depends on the team. An effective manager navigates a team by helping to unblock and de-risk efforts. It's hard for a manager to do that with zero information.

Yeah I've finally gotten enough experience to feel like I've run the gamut of management styles and the best advice I can give is that managers need to explicitly ask questions to some people and genuinely work to improve their performance. Some people (especially new or those who think they're under-performing) won't want to rock the boat at all and will hold their frustrations with things like I mentioned in forever.

I used to be very bad at that. Now I'm pretty firebrand for employees to be treated right as I've finally been to companies that I felt did so (then back to companies that don't) so I recognize what I consider abusive places/mgmt pretty quickly.

You aren't disagreeing, you misread

Parent wrote

>> You'd send out an e-mail update to others who need to know.

I'm vehemently disagreeing about using email as a communications means in 2020 when omnichannels, slack, ticket-systems, etc exist. I don't want a mail client pinging me with mostly trash throughout the day between All Hand emails, tech emails, out of band sales people, etc.

That's really my point, some of us work completely differently. Ask your engineers how they can perform best..

Mail is better then slack in that it is non interrupting. It is good for usual stuff that can wait hours or few days and is neither bug not feature request. Which is quite common thing.

Slack is good for chat and quick discussion.

Both suck when you actually want any structure or have to go back later to figure out what happened. You need to structure your communication more than free form text. For example, is that email a question? A suggestion? Maybe it's a reason this is all pointless. Search doesn't really fit the bill because it only really works if you know the proper words.

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