Comment by 3eb7988a1663
3 days ago
We communicated the same information through multiple channels: weekly emails, Teams, wiki docs, team presentations, and office hours. The rule: if something was important, people heard it at least 3 times through different mediums.
If only this were standard. Last week I received the only notification that a bunch of internal systems were being deleted in two weeks. No scream test, no archiving, just straight deletion. Sucks to be you if you missed the email for any reason.
I feel this.
Every month or two, we get notifications along the FINAL WARNING lines, telling us about some critical system about to be deleted, or some new system that needs to be set up Right Now, because it is a Corporate Standard (that was never rolled out properly), and by golly we have had enough of teams ignoring us, the all powerful Board has got its eyes on you now.
It's a full time job to keep up with the never-ending churn. We could probably just spend all our engineering effort being compliant and never delivering features :)
Company name withheld to preserve my anonymity (100,000+ employees).
Even with this, there were many surprised people. I'm still amazed at all of the people that can ignore everything and just open their IDE and code (and maybe never see teams or email)
Alternatively, communications fatigue. How many emails does the average employee get with nonsense that doesn't apply to them? Oh cool, we have a new VP. Oh cool, that department had a charity drive. Oh cool, system I've never heard of is getting replaced by a new one, favourite of this guy I've never heard of.
Add in the various spam (be it attacks or just random vendors trying to sell something).
At some point, people start to zone out and barely skim, if that, most of their work emails. Same with work chats, which are also more prone to people sharing random memes or photos from their picnic last week or their latest lego set.
Everybody gets important emails, and it's literally part of their job to filter the wheat from the chaff. One of my benchmarks for someone's competency is their ability to manage information. With a combination of email filters and mental discipline, even the most busy inbox can be manageable. But this is an acquired skill, akin to not getting lost in social media, and some people are far better at it than others.
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If you read all the notifications you'll never do your actual job. People who just open their IDE and code are to be commended in some respects - but it's a balance of course.
In my previous company it came to me as a surprise to learn from a third party that our office had moved lol.
What we do is we scream the day before, all of us, get replied that we should have read the memo, reply we have real work to do, and the thing gets cancelled last minute, a few times a year, until nobody gives a fuck anymore.
No kidding. The amount of things that change in important environments without anyone telling people outside their teams in some organizations can be maddening.