I remember Jeff Bezos said that something like promoting more communication/collaboration is wrong.
And managers should focus on making people working independently.
dblohm7•43m ago
I'd love to see the original source for that one! Kind of ironic given RTO+bullpen approach we're seeing now.
sfn42•39m ago
I would say both are good, but collaboration should happen naturally. You cant force it. If I want help I'll ask for help, if I want to brainstorm I'll ask a colleague to brainstorm.
Most of the time I just want people to leave me alone so I can get stuff done.
jerome-jh•17m ago
When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.
I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.
SoftTalker•45s ago
Pretty similar to my first couple of jobs. We didn’t even have email. To document when something was done, we printed a diff and wrote a memo.
deepsun•47m ago
And managers should focus on making people working independently.
dblohm7•43m ago
sfn42•39m ago
Most of the time I just want people to leave me alone so I can get stuff done.