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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

If you're stressed by typing in your team chat you don't trust your team and therefore there's a deeper issue already. I strongly believe you are wrong because all the examples you mention signal different team disfunctions. You need to understand everyone is different, yes, but your team should use public channels to communicate.

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You strongly believe that I am wrong that there is no one single way?

So, you are saying that yours is the only way? And that being flexible and working out what’s right for your team… is wrong?

Yes, if you have a team, the team should discuss work progress, discoveries and problems in a shared space that is accessible by other team members. If conversations about the work itself happen in silos because someone is not comfortable, you're doing it wrong because you're fixing the symptom instead of the cause.

So how do you propose you “fix” the cause, which is some human being’s discomfort at working in a particular way?

Do you force them? Sack them? Threaten them?

Or just send them for reprogramming?

Honestly, this is just cargo cult stuff.

It's not my job to fix someone else's dysfunction. It's their job to speak in public about work.

Being uncomfortable isn't a veto.

All your criticism is just framing. It presupposes pathological work practices are actually just personal quirks. If you can't type a question in a slack with 20 members you are basically useless.

I’m actually saying that pathological work rules will mean you don’t get the most out of your team.

This is just word salad. Youre defining pathological work rules by the subjective mental state of fearful dysfunctionals. This is backwards and incoherent.

What if the “cause” is deeper than your influence can reach? What if addressing the “cause” is a multi-year endeavor?

Do you send the idiosyncratic team member home and forgo what they’d otherwise bring, or do you adapt your process to make the most of the team you have?

It’s great to have ideals to reference, but you miss a lot when you hold onto them as rules.

> It’s great to have ideals to reference, but you miss a lot when you hold onto them as rules.

That’s is such a great way of describing my frustration with this stuff.

Indeed. It's just like when people say, "Well, if that's your problem, you need to fix your hiring process." It's amazing how many theories require perfect hiring.

I didn't mention hiring, but if you can't build trust in your teams as a manager you failed your first job. This is not like choosing kanban vs scrum, if your team members can't even speak comfortably you're not running a team, you're telling individuals what to do, which might be what you want to do, but then don't call it a team.

"it's just like" is making a comparison. I know you didn't mention hiring.

On the one hand you've said explicitly in another comment that there is only one way to do things. On the other hand, you're saying a manager needs to build trust. But in my experience, trust doesn't get built by treating everyone as identical, fungible developer-units who must do things exactly the way you tell them, and nothing else?

A team is a bunch of individuals, and working out how best to motivate everyone on your team is the manager's job. And not everyone is going to be optimally motivated by being told they have to do everything in public.

You really taking a strawman extreme example I've never met in 30 years as a counter-point to "discussion should be in public as much as possible"? The article even mention that /some/ communication can still be private, but the default rule is to be public.

Your counter-point is "there are a miniscule contigent of people who can't function at all in a team". Weak.

For my part, all I’m saying is that I’m sick of people coming up with golden hammers.

“The problems in your team can be solved with this ONE STUPID TRICK”

Good luck with all the alcoholic types you're going to be generating as a side effect of forcing people with anxiety issues into talking in a public space. You'll be seeing self-medication for gaba dysfunctions as people try to keep their job. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4303399/

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