The Difficulty of DMs

I have started wondering how much emotional capital I’m burning every week trying not to snap at people doing a cold opening. Lots of people want to ask me questions, and we both know you aren’t just saying hi. Ask the damned question.<p>Half of my output comes from trying to maintain the balance between accessible and productive. Some months are better than others, and the last couple have been bad. Too often I have my normal work, the surprise bit I didn’t think about, the nasty, low quality, test that’s making that take four times as long because I can’t see why it’s red, someone trying to figure out if we’re having a production or preproduction issue, and someone sending me “Hello” “…” in too close a proximity. It’s a recipe for burnout, and rationally the former should be the ones I focus&#x2F;fixate on, but the last couple are outsized, as later insults often are.<p>Then again, managers work with people, so they should expect to deal with people problems, not dispassionate problems based entirely on objective reasoning. Objective reasoning doesn’t need to be managed.<p>I do try to move a lot of things to the Wiki or code docs, but there are inflection points where everyone doing a little starts to add up, and if you don’t have that critical mass it can be glacial and unrewarding. In those environments your reward is being summoned to the meeting because you have the info, and many people enjoy that feeling way too much.

I think team culture means a lot, and you can change it even as IC.<p>We have Slack and sometimes people DM me... but I have been trying to push them to more accessible locations (like a team channel). Simply telling, &quot;I think this discussion would be interesting for many people, let&#x27;s continue in thread in #some_channel&quot; works surprisingly well!

I think Zulip is pretty good at avoiding those problems.<p>If you have a new spontaneous question, you just create a new topic. It&#x27;s never too crowded.<p>I&#x27;ve used DMs on Zulip a few times, but it was mostly to set up 1-on-1 meetings or ask for personal advice, not for sharing information that might be relevant to other people.

&gt; In a physical space a couple of people can start chatting and then call someone else over really easily to get their input. (...) Yes, you can broaden the discussion into a different channel, but that involves losing the entire existing history of the discussion.<p>As if you can call someone else over in the physical space and they immediately have all the context of what y&#x27;all were already talking about. You&#x27;ll have to give them a summary at least. Which is the same that happens when I pull them in on Slack DMs. Like with rubber duckying, it may not be a bad thing to gather your thoughts on the subject, and re-articulate them when you pull in a new person.<p>More generally I do agree, though, that DMs should be avoided by default.