Comment by procarch2019 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by procarch2019 | Hacker News Reader

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John?

Just kidding. Yea, unfortunately I think a lot of people are suffering in the age of overtooling. Need a notes app, department X is using OneNote except for Mike, who is using Notely. Department Y uses obscure Markdown notes app with great PKM linkage, but no one outside of their group understands it (tbh, neither do they)...

Notes are just the example that I landed on. I'm sure the bigger tech companies have experienced this for awhile, but it slowly disseminates to other industries as well.

Maybe I'm just using HN as therapy, but things seem to have gotten over-complicated and under-defined. A seemingly endless churn of new tools.

Trying to work with my team (management team) on standardizing SharePoint setup, file structures, notes, etc. but it is really hard to get everyone on the same page.

It's nice to see such a nice functional/detailed design around an organizational tool.

A friend and I applied to YC in sept 2021 seeking funding to build tooling in this space. Lots of tools exist to help generate content. Lots of tools exist to help search some or all of it. No one is really building anything to enrich and expose the data with on ramps for folks. I don't know that our idea is/was any better but I feel the pain and I know lots of others do as well.

As for this Artsy stuff... their give-a-damn is through the roof. A+

Unfortunately I think the solution is very much the users and content, not the tools. What I mean by that is you need to have documentation on processes and workflow. That needs to be drilled into peoples heads and routinely audited.

As empowering as software is it really can allow for chaos when it comes to knowledge base. I don’t think there’s going to be any amount of integration with any one tooling that would make a solution click with all users. It always comes back to who the individuals are and how they perceive productivity.

They may be right as an individual. Tool X may be way better for them. A lot of us are working on teams though and with that we have to learn to adapt to what works for the team.

Back when I worked in a software company, everything had to be in a single database. Top down control by a CEO with an engineering bent seems to be the only way the chaos gets tamed.

Unfortunately my company is relatively diverse and we have different departments that do vastly different things. I would settle for an unambiguous narrative from our director though, who manages all the silos in out department.

I think that’s what me and my team of managers are on to (hopefully)

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