Had a few conversations with ex-colleagues about company culture and challenges we face in our special domain of knowledge work. Also Kris posted a collection of thoughts he had shared on Mastodon on his blog about the current wave in resignations we see in management of tech companies.

Project Finalization

This week we made the final cut-over on the migration project I’m working on for the last 6 month. Feels good to finally finishing this thing off.

But of course the work isn’t over yet. There is quite a bit of aftermath that we’ll have to take care of. And there are side projects that have been neglected which will need attention now. There is definitely no shortage of work.

I enjoy working directly with people and solving their problems again in this project. They also seem to appreciate talking to a real person who knows about the stuff and not just conversing with a ticket system.

Of course we’re using tickets to track the work as well. But also engage with the people directly via Chat and Meetings to talk about their problem and how we can solve this. This in person communication leads to results much faster for both parties. Because often times its really just a matter of getting on the same page and understanding the problem. The classical tale of: once you explain your problem to the admin it solves itself 😉

Another observation I made is, that people don’t take the time to think about their problem. Something doesn’t work and they jump to a support channel and blur out: “X is not working, can you help?”

How am I supposed to help here? There is no useful information provided on what the person was trying to do in the first place, nor what error message they might have gotten etc.

It takes a few rounds of questions to figure out the person is using either the wrong system or the right system in a wrong way.

But then you also have to experienced engineer which will prepare their question in the most helpful way. They did their homework by double checking they are using the correct system (providing information about this), provide detailed log messages of their problem, naming exact times including timezones and sometimes even provide further information in a machine readable format for further processing.

My point is: it’s a pleasure to work with professionals. And user support is rather time consuming because the average user can’t be bothered to read even the most simple documentation..

No Hello

The page nohello.net summarise a common digital communication problem. I’m really just ghosting people which start conversations like that. Get to the point!

It really boils down to be mindful about people’s time. If you want something from someone else, help them to help you by providing the information they need to fulfil your request. Don’t waste their time with chatter. Do you homework by checking whatever your can upfront and provide the information in an easily consumable format.

Put yourself in their shoes: would you be able and willing to work with the request you just received?

Long table public Dinner

On Saturday we had our 2nd long table public dinner. This is where the people from the village meet at the central place in front of the church and have dinner together. Everyone brings some food to share and their own tablecloth, plates and drinks. This is low effort to organize but really delicious and fun.

We had really good food and plenty thereof. I love the variety and the ideas people come up with. Of course we had interesting conversations and fun as well. Really looking forward for this event next year.

Random Pics from the week