Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 125: Brainstorming sessions and Slack Ettiquette

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey guys! Do you have any tips for making ““brain storming sessions”” more bearable? In my experience, I’ve found that it’s very hard to keep this type of meeting productive. I don’t think this is necessarily anyone’s fault, and I love the idea of making sure all sorts of folks have a path to contribute, but many times when I’ve seen these types of meetings organized, many participants don’t have enough context, or subject matter expertise to produce genuinely helpful ideas. I think it’s really powerful when cross-discipline teams collaborate well on a project or feature, so I guess I’m wondering if there are practical ways to generate the culture of trust and mutual respect that is needed for this to actually work. First time question asker, long time listener here. We have a Really Important Problem at work: in Slack, people tend to use @channel instead of @here. What are some strategies for educating everyone that they should be using @here and not @channel? I especially don’t want anyone to feel shamed or called-out in the moment. Thanks!

It takes more than turning your stable monolith into an incomprehensible, expensive, and error-prone distributed system to be a great software engineer. This is episode 125 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host and microservice orchestrator, Dave Smith. Hey, have you had experience taking one node and turning it into 500 nodes running on Kubernetes and then having it not work anymore? It's great.

No, but I am hopelessly expensive just like that. distributed systems are only better than your stuff already being broken soft skills engineering is a podcast where we talk about all the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical field of software development um all the stuff unlike distributed systems and monoliths and we do talk a lot about complaining and distributed teams yeah that all applies technically and non-technically we have some wonderful patreons or patrons patreon didn't like invent the idea do you want to talk about those people dave uh i will talk about them right behind their back okay this week we'd like to thank the people who are contributing at a level

that gets them a shout out every week they are david jackson dustin coats ken howard matthew wotowicz nick kantar sean clayton and zach grannon thank you for supporting the show if you would like to contribute financially to the show we would very much appreciate it go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon thank you so much we actually had a question come in where can i order stickers so i can put it on my macbook and spread the word about this great podcast two square inches of podcast logo would be awesome swag yep four square inches would be twice as awesome two well that and that's actually what we have is a oh wait we have about no we have about two square inches i think they're two inches tall and one inch wide oh right i don't know what

if we just make them like a single strip one pixel high that's really long two square inches in single pixel have you seen the one dimensional wolfenstein 3d thing no wait maybe well it's like that basically anyways okay we should answer this person yes uh okay if you want stickers um you can do what we asked people to do on twitter which has been awesome which is send a direct message to us on twitter at soft skills emg and all you have to do is write a haiku about the show and we will send you stickers in the mail if you also include a mailing address and bonus points if your mailing address is a haiku i'm trying to figure out the cost of moving somewhere so that my address could be a haiku versus the effort of writing a haiku one two three main street could be the first

line i'm just saying that's not a real address that can't be only movies all right we should answer some questions i'm gonna go ahead and read the first one this is from a listener named shane hey guys do you have any tips for making brainstorming sessions more bearable in my experience i've found that it's very hard to keep this type of meeting productive i don't think this is necessarily anyone's fault and i love the idea of making sure all sorts of folks have a path to contribute. But many times when I've seen these types of meetings organized, many participants don't have enough context or the subject matter expertise to produce genuinely helpful ideas. I think it's really powerful when cross-discipline teams collaborate well on a project or feature.

So I guess I'm wondering if there are practical ways to generate the culture of trust and mutual respect that is needed for this to actually work. Thoughts? You need to have unuseful ideas so that the useful ideas stick out otherwise how do you pick you know there's a grain of truth to that you know uh i can't remember oh yeah i read this great book i think we've talked about it on the show a few years ago three or four years ago called multipliers and it's a it's basically a leadership guide for business um i know don't don't pinch your nose right away but one of the key like character traits of what they call a multiplying leader is to be a debate maker and sometimes it means looking stupid by tossing out obviously bad ideas but which can seed a

conversation that turns into good ideas you know so there you go bad ideas are good ideas i think i think you've mentioned this book enough times that i should probably read it i think this is your most mentioned book on the podcast i'm not sure i've mentioned any other books he's read one book in his life i i've read so many books and i don't remember anything from so maybe i'm worse off since reading that book i have only read fiction so i don't know okay you're like what could be better nothing i've learned all the business knowledge i need yeah i i wonder what makes them unbearable i feel like the ones that i go to that seem unhelpful there's usually one person who's using the meeting to just like show off in front of people

and it's an air quotes brainstorming session but it's really just one dude up front who's like check out how smart i am then just writes down a bunch of smart stuff on the whiteboard and everyone's like uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh and and they it's it's like in their service almost not not just trying to solve a problem it's like trying to vet that they are the smart person it's like a self-esteem booster yeah yeah that's that's the source of most of the discomfort for me another source of it's not discomfort it just makes it unhelpful is if i just have no idea what's going on the question asker mentions um making sure everybody can contribute people have enough context i feel like that's that has to be the beginning when you start the meeting right

you have to start with a clear definition of the problem that you're trying to solve and if you don't then people will come in with wildly different expectations of what you're doing and the context imbalance is a huge problem in these meetings because you know you could be going deep maybe you and someone else are going deep on some topic because you happen to have context and everyone else is just like no idea what they're talking about you know that happens to me all the time yeah some of the time it's even not my fault um yeah i think you have to start off there's this really good book i'll we're gonna turn this into a business book battle have you read good strategy bad strategy no it's really good one of the things it proposes is that a

strategy has to start off with a clear description of the problem and this isn't i don't know it's not you don't have to come up with a strategy in a brainstorming session but having a clear description of the problem is pretty essential for evaluating whether these ideas are any good or not because if you don't understand the problem like i don't know how what what makes a good idea whoever like the highest status person that proposed an idea is just like the good idea or something or the tallest person or the loudest person the loudest person those are often all the same person as a short man i shake my fist at the world and it's injustice you shake your fist upward toward the heads of the others yep a short balding man even worse oh no

yep um yeah so i think starting with context and and also um maybe a little bit of priming of how you expect a brainstorming session to work i think a way i've seen these fail is people move on to exploring a specific solution too quickly in in my mind part of the purpose is to create a bunch of potential ideas or solutions and if you leave that mode too quickly you leave a bunch of things unexplored so the the ones i've been in that seem most effective there's some maybe a time limit or we need like this many solutions or there's some constraint to make sure we don't just dive down the one that people get excited about really quickly like you generate ideas and you keep generating them not until you arrive at like the first one that

a couple people like so you're saying like a breadth-first search yeah i think so i think that that makes it easier to compare ideas too and maybe you'll see more themes emerge or something like that but like especially with engineers we we just love to solve problems it's it's like oh it's so hard not to just go solve it you know and so often i feel like the first solution that seems reasonable people like okay well what are the what are the consequences of this what other problems are going to pop up because of this and how do we solve those and you just like spiral yeah into like designing that solution where implementing it basically yeah yeah it turns into yeah an implementation meeting which i there's a time for that but the first idea is

not always necessarily the best idea or even the first good idea so i think making sure you feel like you've you've come up with enough breath first is important and it's hard to rein that in like i do that myself completely i get sucked into that all the time because it's actually fun yeah it is it's super fun yeah it feels like you're making progress you're a manager you know and it's like hey cool technical discussion let's do this i remember this i i think i think that what you said was a clear definition of the problem uh is great is a very good first step and then the next step is making sure that everybody has equal levels of context or at least meets a minimum context bar because if you jump one

layer deeper than people bring context to understand then they're just out it's like it's like a pro wrestling match they get tagged boom they're out you know that's it on the sidelines yep um you can tell everybody brings their laptop to meetings yeah yeah email time there's a lot of stuff you could do on that laptop besides listen oh yeah and oh man when i see people check out of meetings like that i just feel so bad because i'm like okay i i actually don't know whether you're not interested whether you lack context like what do i need to do to get you on track and the eight other people in this meeting that are also checked out you know yeah that's hard so how i don't know how do you do that how do you bring context or

how do you ensure that people have the right context hmm i think it's helpful to do preparation here maybe you talk to a couple representative samplings of people and see what they already know about it you for me i i usually have to explain more than i think i have to explain i i sometimes assume that everyone's head is the same as my head and stuff that i know they already know in all kinds of ways but especially it applies in this where i think well i understand this well other people do too so reigning that in a little bit and and uh just having a little more empathy with what people actually understand maybe just asking them to if they're the kind of person that would say like no i do not understand this thing that you're talking about some people

might just that's very rare and then yeah yeah it's very hard to to find out what people don't know because for two reasons like they don't know what they don't know especially on the spot in front of other people in the meeting oh yeah for sure like okay who doesn't know what's going on all right everybody knows okay good we're moving forward i see no hands all right please place this cap upon your head if you do not understand all right no dunce is here everybody's on board huh looks like all the ideas came from me weird i guess i'm the smartest one give me the smartest person hat it's it's an inverted dunce cap it's just like a point

that goes outward so that's one reason i think why it's hard to figure out what people don't know but the other reason is like you're talking about unknown unknowns some in a lot of cases in these brainstorming sessions where it's like i may come to the table not knowing that this team has already tried three different implementations for this problem that we're brainstorming about and i could just start blathering about one of those and then everyone will be like uh we already did that and it didn't work for these reasons you know and so it's like oh how could i have known i didn't even know that that was something i could have known yeah so it's hard it's hard to figure that out i think one key here is to limit the size of the meeting or the number

of meeting participants pretty aggressively you know when you start getting over five or six participants at the same time it can be hard to have an effective meeting where everyone participates yeah i think that's pretty true it's also easier to figure out what people know in a smaller group and it's also more comfortable to admit not knowing in a smaller group yeah for sure and it's more comfortable to give your ideas out in a smaller group because you're less worried about it's a smaller group of people that can point and laugh at you yeah right you're like i could conceivably beat all these people up but there's like 30 people not a chance i don't know i've seen some martial arts movies and like the hero does it so it's possible

but it'd be hard but that hero was using special powers that i don't have yeah yeah um one of the things just real quick on this topic is that i think some people are hardwired to thrive in this kind of environment and others are not and i mean i would venture to say that at least half the engineers i know if not more do not thrive in a real-time face-to-face brainstorming session with three four five plus people you know um i i do i love these kinds of environments i i process things i process audio quickly and i in a face-to-face environment i I love, I don't know, I can go fast. I can internalize and move quickly in that environment.

And I actually kind of languish and do poorly when I'm sitting in isolation trying to figure out a problem. I do better when I can talk it through with someone. But I think that more engineers are not that way from my experience. I do okay when it's about generating ideas. but I don't do well when it's when it dives into solving the problem in in real time in front of people I definitely like time to kind of sit back and write it up and some of it is like I'll write down a thing and then look at it and think oh that's wrong and then go change it right and it's it's easier to do that in my own private little cave instead of in front of other people but also

some of it is i honestly have a hard time keeping up i feel like i'll i'll be in a meeting and people will just kind of like start running ahead of me and i'm i'm trying to process the implications of what's going on and then suddenly they're like four decisions down the line like wait but but all these other things and i don't know it just it feels like it moves on often yeah maybe my brain is just a little slow so what's our conclusion here besides your brain is a little slow well take your time to think of an answer i i think i stand by my original points that i think you need to make sure people have context that you need to make sure you have a definition of of the problem that you're trying to solve and you need to generate a bunch of ideas

before you try and solve them i think your your points are really good too around limiting the size and making them that that all seems around making them more comfortable to participate in right yeah is there a case to be made for asynchronous brainstorming sessions have you seen any of the open source rfc processes no i don't i don't think so a bunch of projects have adopted them uh ember and react to on the front end there's there's a bunch of other ones too and then some of it is even i guess technically that's how like the ecma script committee and to some extent web standard stuff works where people will just submit a proposal and it'll kind of get worked through asynchronously in in code or documentation or a spec or or even like a

formal grammar or something and then after it churns through a bit there's some discussion about it and that's not really brainstorming that's more about solving the specific problem But there is this period of, like, submit a bunch of less detailed proposals, and then some of them will kind of move on. I imagine the tradeoff there is that that process is a lot slower. Yeah, it's way slower. And it is, I think it requires quite a bit of effort even for an early process or an early proposal. Yeah. It's not just, like, say a phrase.

Yeah. So you're saying, like, there's more documentation rigor and stuff? Yeah. even if there weren't though you can imagine it requires a significant amount of of exertion to keep the thing rolling with momentum like it could fizzle out pretty quickly yeah yeah like in a meeting i could just say like kubernetes on the blockchain and someone will go write it on the whiteboard boom proposal accepted all right yeah i've contributed to the brainstorming doesn't matter what problem it is there's a solution there are no bad ideas here um but i if it were that's

it i would have to like write it up and i would write up nonsense and then and then convince yourself this was a terrible idea i never submitted yeah but okay all right to help people who who struggle in this kind of environment we could make a web app that will just generate brainstorming ideas for them you put in a few keywords and it will like have an ontology that it can trace to find semi-related words and construct you know grammatically correct sentences for you that could go on a whiteboard that sounds like a lot of work to commit to a joke i was hoping it would be like a lot easier that sounds hard um okay so that's the real solution barring that i feel like we've talked about some good ideas

yeah i think so good luck best of luck to you shane do you want to read our next question dave sure this comes from lydia lydia says first time question asker long time listener here we have a really important problem that's capital r really capital i important capital p problem at work in slack people tend to use at channel instead of at here what are some strategies for educating everyone that they should be using at here and not at channel i especially don't want anyone to feel shamed or called out in the moment thanks i know lydia i'm pretty sure i think we met at a conference a while ago oh cool hey um so i am in a slack channel with about 30 000 people in it The general channel has about 30,000 people.

Wow. And actually, people don't do at channel as much in that one as they do in some of the other ones I'm in. So I dare you to do an at channel right now and just see what happens. I can tell you what would happen. You know how you can add custom emojis to Slack? Someone added an emoji that just says, do not at channel with a grumpy face after it. and every time someone at channels a bunch of people react to their message with that so lydia said i don't want anyone to feel shamed or called out in the moment the solution is basically shaming

and calling people out in this passive aggressive emoji reaction way and i can't tell if it works because there are 30 000 people so even if it worked at that one person like there's 29 999 people to mess up again just waiting in line to take his place yeah yeah and i don't know maybe at that number there's enough turnover that like it doesn't matter that there are always new people joining who haven't oh man i haven't seen that at that scale if every person makes the mistake just once every five years you still are gonna have that happen every day yeah it doesn't happen every day it happens more in in topic specific channels but i think there's even more chatter in those channels too there isn't too much chatter in the general channel okay so hold on one second

Yeah, I think we got a little deep here. For those of our listeners that don't use Slack, we should probably describe the difference between app channel and app channel. Yeah, our modern assumptions, right? Like, yeah, what's Slack? Everybody uses Slack. So what's the difference?

So app channel notifies everyone, even whether they're logged into Slack or not. If you're not logged into Slack, you might get a push notification on your phone or next time you log in, you'll see a little number. and it's if you're like me you'll be compelled to go click on the number to make it disappear and read the thing that they sent and at here notifies people who are currently online like with their slack app open okay so it's a so a smaller number of people theoretically people

that are kind of around already so you wouldn't like rouse someone out of bed or bug them during dinner or whatever if they're if they're not online on slack right now Great description. I appreciate that. Thank you. I thought you were going to ask, what is Slack? Slack is a chat app. Good point. It's like IRC, but it costs money. And if you talk to people that like IRC, they'll tell you it's worse.

And if you talk to people that like Slack, they'll tell you it's better. Yeah, because they bought it. As someone who only uses IRC and only uses VI key bindings in IRC, I have no idea what Slack is. You could just shorten it to say, as someone who's better than you. um this is i mean this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek question but i think there's a serious thing here around how do you communicate etiquette and and what is the correct like asynchronous communication etiquette theoretically one of the benefits of text communication like

this is it can be asynchronous and you can look at it whenever you want and like maybe everyone channels everyone all the time and you just customize your notifications so you don't get bugged and then when you log back on you see you see all of it but i think realistically that doesn't happen yeah and most people have a little bit of that slack mania where you got to make the numbers go away um i have one potential actual good solution that i haven't looked in to see if it's good but i think you could make a slack bot that dms people and says hey maybe don't do that unless it's an emergency or whatever the language you want to use just to tell people because then you're not calling them out publicly that's bad and i don't think you would be shaming people if

you phrased it right you have you can make it some friendly phrasing of like yeah i don't know whatever but um that would be automated so you wouldn't have to remember to enforce it i guess the downside is it's only after the fact so it's kind of too late but they probably wouldn't do it again yeah i think it'd be memorable yeah oh i typed at channel and this robot started talking to me i mean alternatively the the slack bot could at channel them back and say like hey channel this person screwed up real bad wait wait wait that violates one of the constraints on the question yeah that's true that was a bad idea i do like the idea of a slack bot that says hey just wanted to let you know everyone does this once or twice here but at our company we've

decided that the best policy for slack is to use at channel and not at here for info on the difference here's a link describing oh dave you irc ignoramus it's the other way around use that here not at channel oh dang it dang it sorry it's too hard to keep them straight when your brain is full of all these vi key bindings i know i only have room for vi all this useful knowledge when i first got on these modern chat systems just a slight tangent here i remember being so amazed that you could get messages that happened while you were not online i was like oh that's a good idea yeah remember when it seemed so good yeah yeah it's it's interesting that it feels like our understanding has evolved a little bit and there's there's now some

recognition of a downside of persistent always on communication you mean like how we're all responsible for scrolling back over the whole day's conversation every day to figure out what we missed yeah every time chat stuff comes up i always think of that 37 signals article about some of the downsides and these are people who created campfire one of the early kind of irc replacements and one point they had was that it's kind of like meetings but worse because they happen a line at a time and it only depends on like if if you're there reading them in real time then you kind of get the context and if not you just find out later there there's some interesting thoughts in there about the downsides of it yeah a tangent be gone tangent what do you do to solve

this problem so i i really i liked your idea of the slack bot but i would add to it one thing where maybe you could create some onboarding documentation that's kind of like a enshrined policy of etiquette at your company that as a team you can debate you know what you want that etiquette to be and then you put it up on your company website or wiki or whatever and then you can link to it and just say hey here's how we've decided to do slack etiquette and also code reviews and also you know other team communication things here's how we roll yeah i like the idea of making this implicit thing a little more explicit and it seems like it'd be helpful in general just to take some time to define your communication etiquette that that seems like it could pay

dividends like um when are you expected to respond to emails right like maybe there's some late night emailers but they don't expect people to read them until they get back in the morning or or maybe you maybe the expectation is nobody sends emails after work right or respond all the time or yeah i could see that there there is some culture that you kind of pick up through observing people that it might be nice to explicitly decide on what it is instead of just let what happens happen. It seems like kind of a pain in the butt to try and get people to actually follow that, though.

Yeah, and you also don't want to be the person who's constantly sending a link to the etiquette doc and being like, uh-uh-uh. Yeah. Tsk, tsk. Make the Slackbot do that. That's true. So just make the computers be the bad guys.

was it con academy i think they made their whatever their version of slackbot was in their chat system i'm pretty sure they made it just periodically post stuff from their engineering handbook well that's clever some of their values and culture stuff to try and keep it on top of people's minds so maybe you could do something like that in general hi i'm your slackbot i'm just here to remind you that we've decided not to write bugs at channel hey remember not to add channel people because it's against our communication guidelines yep you know this this just this the comment about uh shaming and calling out this just highlights to me how different the industry has become for the better frankly than it was 15 to

20 years ago when i got my start back in the days of the lart on irc i don't know if you've heard of lart jameson i have not oh it's a it's an acronym i'll just have you look it up because it's kind of ridiculous but um you know it it goes right in the vein with the bofh and other acronyms that you can look up on the jargon file um which basically were exactly that they were tools for shaming and public call outs so like we've just really changed when it comes to etiquette i think the industry as a whole is moving to a more softer average yeah i i agree in the past i feel like irc etiquette would be like yell at this person and call them stupid right and i don't know that that's a healthy attitude to have so i think it's great to try and figure out a

a thoughtful way to do this i i'm trying to figure out if i've ever dealt with this directly i've honestly probably been the person at channeling people too much yeah is there is there a way just to disable that channel no i think you can i don't even know if you can turn off the notifications that come from it you can like have them not go to your phone but i think you might have to get rid of other notifications to your phone too i don't know i'm not a slack maestro slack wizard slack mechanic senior slack configurer uh i don't know i just close slack a lot i just quit it and do other work and then open it back up sometimes because i am i am yeah i'm just in thrall of getting rid

of the little notification badges me too i think you and i i don't know you may have predated me on this but over the last few months i've just aggressively turned off anything that can put a number on my phone or a number on my computer's desktop oh it's horrifying i i look at my wife's phone and she has like 8 000 emails on ram like exactly and i just like shoo it away like it's a spider doesn't it just make you want to go open the phone and just tap on each one you know it does clear clear yeah it it does it's like a productivity trap it makes part of my brain feel productive to get rid of numbers but it doesn't actually get anything done i don't know that's so i'm sure i know lady knows all about this we're on a bit of a tangent now but i remember

the instant when my brain switched from the mode of not caring about the numbers to caring so much that it like became a burden and it was i had my email open this is probably 10 years ago and i had a bunch of folders that had numbers by them representing like messages that had been sent there by by virtue of a rule an automatic like forwarding rule to my folder it was like mailing lists and stuff you know it's how i organized my email and one of my co-workers saw that and he said to me oh look at all those numbers doesn't that bother you and i looked over them and i was like oh yeah i guess it does and ever since then i had to clear them all to zero like anytime i saw one that was above zero i had to clear it and it took me probably 10 years to

realize what a how that had just taken over part of my brain and now i aggressively shut all those numbers down there's a movie called pontypool it's it's like an interesting movie i don't know if it's a good movie it's a zombie movie where the virus is spread by words if people say certain words it kind of infects you turns you into zombie makes you killer or whatever normal zombie stuff but you don't have to bite them you have to hear them say it and i feel like we just did that with notifications right like someone told you it really bothers you then it bothered you you just said it really bothers me and all the people that listen that haven't been infected yet are now infected I'm so sorry.

It's okay. All right, we'll just have to mute out that part of the conversation. Okay. Does that help? I don't know. We only discussed a couple solutions. Well, I mean, it's kind of par for the course. What do you expect us to do, solve your problem?

I mean, we don't do that. We just ramble and then say, we've answered this question. Good luck. I mean, I guess you could quit your job and get a new one where they don't use Slack. Go back to IRC. Find a company that's so old school they have an IRC server.

Yeah. We went to the Computer History Museum in California and it made me realize that there are times people worked before you could send someone a message of any kind without physically writing it down or typing it out. You could only send it to one person unless you had someone like manually copy it for you.

And I don't know, communication must've been so different back then. It was like months. Yeah. But now everyone gets to hear everything we say all at once. All right. I hope that helps Lydia. Sorry.

That's all I have to say to sum it up. What else, what can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and at the top of the page, You can click on Ask a Question where you can fill out a form, put in your name if you want. You can be anonymous if you want. And thank you so much to everyone who has written in. There are just so many questions in our backlog, and more come every week.

Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. You are the lifeblood of this show. I got it. What? Minority Report. You know how they have the precogs who can see crimes happen before they happen? Uh-huh.

You need the Slack bot to tell people before they at-channel. Oh. Like, either. I mean, you can assume everyone is guilty every day before they join. Tell them, don't add channel. That's the high recall approach. That is, yeah, yeah. You would not have a false negative.

Or there's got to be some weird API to detect what people are typing. Slack has to know what you're typing. So just ask them if you can see all the keystrokes people type but do not send, and then detect add channel. Yeah. Anyways, okay. Now I feel a lot better about the solutions. Just throw AI at the problem.

Yeah, or magic. Same thing. Okay. I thought AI was actually paying a bunch of low-wage workers to do things by hand. Oh, like Mechanical Turk? Yeah. Isn't that AI? No, that's actual intelligence.

Oh, is that what the A stands for in AI? Actual intelligence. You've solved it. Okay, thank you so much for listening. We will catch you next week.