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Does anyone have some good resources on technical writing? I have someone on my team who is just hopeless and today I was giving him feedback on an ADR (in fact, ADR 1, his proposal for how we should start using ADRs) and on an incident report. He's starting to get annoyed at my feedback. I used to teach scientific writing to freshman so I am used to this struggle but looking for something more targeted to developers. I'd like to give him some focused steps for how to improve in this area -- any suggestions?
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Dec 1, 2020 17:49
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 21:58 |
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Not sure about anything specific to developers - I learned technical writing in the context of design (mostly product use instructions and copy for packaging and presentations), but we used the same textbook that the general technical writing course used. Maybe get a college textbook and highlight sections that are relevant? Also I think finding examples of similar documents that are well written would be helpful because you can point to something concrete and explain why it’s good. In my experience, I’ve learned that good technical writers are worth their weight in gold and that unfortunately, many people are just not good writers and it’s very difficult to teach them to be better without dedicated tutoring/coaching (which they may not like or want). I once ran a blog for engineering and robotics and stuff and took student submissions from tie-in courses and I quickly learned that it was faster and easier for me to just wholesale rewrite their incomprehensible garbage than to keep sending it back with revision notes that they either didn’t understand or refused to implement. And that was before I got to basic grammar and poo poo. These were otherwise smart people, too.
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Dec 1, 2020 18:58
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You know that old saying about never teaching a pig to sing? Trying to teach technical writing to developers who don't want to learn it is the same deal.
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Dec 1, 2020 19:05
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Well, he at least has expressed a willingness to want to improve, although from my experience teaching I also don't have a lot of confidence. Still, it would be good at least to have some context so my feedback sounds less random and arbitrary and maybe reminds him of something he read once. edit: I am just going to rewrite the ADR though, it will be less frustrating for both of us.
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Dec 1, 2020 19:31
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My workplace is doing "Healthy Conversation" training. One of the points when giving feedback was supposed to be "describe the situation as objectively as possible, avoid giving interpretation" but they have this rule of "use action verbs, not 'is' or 'be'" so instead it just became a language puzzle for the non-english as a first language developers on the team.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:52
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This old Joel on Software article on functional specs might help. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/03/painless-functional-specifications-part-2-whats-a-spec/
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Dec 1, 2020 22:37
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Google has a free course on tech writing: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing
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Dec 2, 2020 04:36
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today's mood: booking a daily meeting from 4-5p titled "absolutely not" to stop people from booking 4pm (when I stop working for the day) 30m attendance required meetings that turn out to run an hour  taking bets on how long it takes before this runs into the "lunch" meeting problem of: everybody knows I'm not actually busy and books meetings anyways
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Dec 3, 2020 23:01
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ChickenWing posted:today's mood: booking a daily meeting from 4-5p titled "absolutely not" to stop people from booking 4pm (when I stop working for the day) 30m attendance required meetings that turn out to run an hour Decline, edit comment, Conflict, Send.
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Dec 4, 2020 00:25
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How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. Very shortened version: Them: We should do X to achieve Y! Us:  Them: Achieving Y is important, we should do X to solve it! Us: Uh, yep. Agreed. Them: X is what we should so. Thusly, Y shall be achieved. Us: ... To be fair, it's not uncommon for someone else to then pipe up just as the conversation is finally about to move forward and ask a question that demonstrates they either weren't listening at all or misunderstood at a basic level.
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Dec 4, 2020 01:32
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Cugel the Clever posted:How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. "Moving on"
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Dec 4, 2020 01:47
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Cugel the Clever posted:How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. Once you get to the first , steer the discussion to the actionable next step(s). "We'll go make tickets" or "you go make tickets" or "I'll add that to the plan" or something to clearly move to confirmation and next steps.
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Dec 4, 2020 01:51
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Cugel the Clever posted:How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. Don't call me out in public dude.
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Dec 4, 2020 02:13
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Hughlander posted:Decline, edit comment, Conflict, Send. then i just miss the meeting though  I've noticed that the Teams meeting scheduling interface don't seem to provide any information about other peoples' working hours so that might be the issue here regardless hopefully this will at least add the minor cognitive barrier of having my name say "busy" next to it
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Dec 4, 2020 04:50
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ChickenWing posted:then i just miss the meeting though If it’s important ask for and read the notes from it. If there’s no notes or no one makes them then it’s not important. If you actually need to be there then it will be scheduled for a time when everyone is available.
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Dec 4, 2020 05:08
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captkirk posted:Don't call me out in public dude.  Trying to steer the discussion to next actionable steps sounds like a good idea that I should remember to try more often.
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Dec 4, 2020 05:41
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Hughlander posted:If it’s important ask for and read the notes from it. If there’s no notes or no one makes them then it’s not important. 
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Dec 4, 2020 08:00
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I swear, our scrum master is basically the guy in Office Space: https://youtu.be/m4OvQIGDg4I As far as I can tell, his job is primarily to schedule meetings and he isn’t very good at it.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:14
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Dedicated scrum masters are bloat. I’ve personally enjoyed the company and work-friendships of many of them. But it always points to a company that doesn’t get scrum.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:25
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We had a dedicated scrum master for a while at a previous job. All the teams had to work around their schedule, even for things like the daily stand-up, so our team was having ours at something dumb like 10:30 every day. Then, because sprint planning was supposed to take a million hours or whatever, and the scrum master just had to be there for all of them, we couldn't have all the teams start their sprints on the same day or even in the same half of the same day. It was terrible.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:53
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In games we have a producer role which where I am now uses it as a Scrum Master / Scrum of Scrums coordinator. They're responsible for Jira and running the ceremonies, but also meet 2x/day for inter team dependencies and resource constraints. Other places I've been Scrum Master was just a hat that you had in addition to developer and would rotate from those interested in it. (One of those places, also had the same as Development Manager, you could sign up to Manager 1-2 Associates in a different team as a pre-path for full time management.)
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Dec 4, 2020 18:57
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ChickenWing posted:working hours Microsoft cares not for your "working hours"
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Dec 4, 2020 20:07
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remember back when microsoft made a commitment to OSS and we collectively had a shared moment of hope that they might stop being a trash fire? https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1331221942850949121 don't have so much of that anymore
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Dec 4, 2020 20:48
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ChickenWing posted:remember back when microsoft made a commitment to OSS and we collectively had a shared moment of hope that they might stop being a trash fire? Didn't they already remove all user identifying features from it?
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Dec 4, 2020 20:54
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I'm annoyed because it's going to perpetuate the gathering of useless metrics as a substitute for actual management. None of those items in the screenshot remotely correlate with "Productivity" in any way, especially "Meetings", christ.
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Dec 4, 2020 21:08
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Hughlander posted:Didn't they already remove all user identifying features from it? That's not enough to guarantee that no one can be identified from the full data set.
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Dec 4, 2020 21:11
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A couple months ago, I asked the VP of another department if they had a role I could change into and they got me one, effective January 1st. Until yesterday, I had been waiting on a contract addendum from HR to make my new role official. They sent a contract addendum that described the new role with no mention of compensation. According to Glassdoor, my employer's two most relevant rivals pay at least $30k more than my current salary for the same title. I mentioned the salary discrepancy to HR and asked if that's the sort of offer they'd make to someone with my experience for that role yesterday. They haven't responded yet. That's a completely reasonable thing to do, right? They'd be setting me up to quit by giving me a more expensive role without at least some extra money to go with it.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:16
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rt4 posted:A couple months ago, I asked the VP of another department if they had a role I could change into and they got me one, effective January 1st. Until yesterday, I had been waiting on a contract addendum from HR to make my new role official. They sent a contract addendum that described the new role with no mention of compensation. According to Glassdoor, my employer's two most relevant rivals pay at least $30k more than my current salary for the same title. If you didn't agree to a change in pay with the VP or as part of the discussion prior to accepting then you aren't going to get anything. I would probably try talking to the VP and not HR if you haven't officially accepted yet. It's completely fair to ask regardless. asur fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Dec 4, 2020 |
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Dec 4, 2020 22:36
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Yeah it's totally fair. Maybe they don't give the $ or not enough but then you do the job long enough to quit for the proper amount somewhere else.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:36
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I'll edit that poo poo during happy hour and charge a pile for it.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:46
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Cugel the Clever posted:How do I deal with someone who makes a good and cogent point, but then routinely repeats the exact same thing in a slightly different manner several times? Everyone's on board! We don't need to spend extra time on it. Figure it out. Ask them if they want to take the lead on the idea. Try to delegate them some kind of ownership or responsibility. Eventually, when they feel like they have support, like their ideas are good enough to get everybody else on board, actually invested in the idea and working toward it, you can start to push them more towards advocating.
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Dec 5, 2020 18:53
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anybody else's coworkers getting extremely loving lazy with WFH during covid? I have one dude on my team who hasn't submitted a PR in 30 days and hasn't done a PR review in 32 days. miraculously, he hasn't been fired yet  outside of that, we have like 3 other dudes who do PR review like twice a week now. it's getting on my loving nerves. e: don't get me wrong, I slack off too, but holy gently caress it's getting bad on my team
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Dec 7, 2020 05:02
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My ability to focus has been shot since March, might be the same with your teammates. I feel lazy but like, sometimes I close the forums and say "ok I'm gonna get to work now" and then open the forums again. All I have to do is press the little button to block time waste websites and sometimes it's like I can't do it. I'm still getting poo poo done but yeah, people are struggling.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:44
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Supposedly productivity across engineering at my company has actually gone up and management appears to be extremely concerned about burnout.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:07
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prom candy posted:My ability to focus has been shot since March, might be the same with your teammates. I feel lazy but like, sometimes I close the forums and say "ok I'm gonna get to work now" and then open the forums again. All I have to do is press the little button to block time waste websites and sometimes it's like I can't do it. I'm in the same boat of finding it hard to focus. Once I'm in flow, then things more or less go as normal (with the exception of my WFH setup being slower and more clumsy than at the office), but it's very easy for me to get knocked out, and it's hard for me to get into in the first place, so my productivity has just tanked.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:07
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I've felt been more productive in discrete, well-defined tasks working from home, but am one of the apparently few weirdos who would like to still work primarily (though not exclusively) from an office alongside my team. There's a lot that's hard to quantify that gets lost in an exclusively virtual team. That perception of increased output has also come with growing fatigue, though, and I need to actually take real breaks during the day and take a few long weekends. If I weren't strictly limiting my workday to 8 hours as much as possible, I'd be in much direr shape.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:29
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Productivity's been super bimodal this year. Everyone with kids did gently caress-all for a month or two. Some people were clearly working 12+ hour days for no good reason for a while. By now people have mostly settled into something stable, and the new work environment is great for some people and awful for others.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:41
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I can see realizing your job is absolutely doing nothing for anyone having a slight impact on productivity.
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Dec 7, 2020 06:43
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Grump posted:anybody else's coworkers getting extremely loving lazy with WFH during covid? I have one dude on my team who hasn't submitted a PR in 30 days and hasn't done a PR review in 32 days. miraculously, he hasn't been fired yet I was reading this like “lol don’t doxx me” but then I got to the no PR in 30 days and.. yikes. My productivity has definitely suffered due to WFH and overall quarantine-induced malaise and lethargy, but not nearly that badly. We usually each do a couple PRs a week on average. Sometimes I don’t finish stuff in time for review but I make sure the WIP branch is pushed so coworkers can see what I’m working on. Having (very brief) daily stand ups and weekly review meetings is helpful for keeping us on track and aware of what everyone is working on. I honestly can’t wait to get back to the office where I was more productive and could actually interact with coworkers (and solve problems much more easily and quickly) and go out to lunch and stuff. And had actual work-life balance rather than having it all bleed together.
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Dec 7, 2020 07:58
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 21:58 |
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I think I've personally been more productive working from home because the office landscape is hell for me and now I can actually minimize distractions, but communication has definitely suffered. My colleagues would generally just look over at each other (and me) and ask a question or have a quick chat when we sat together, but when we're just on Teams they're way less inclined to start anything and often really bad about answering. That's probably a downside for the team at large, but honestly being spared from those interruptions is great for me. I hope I can keep working mostly from home when things settle again.
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Dec 7, 2020 08:51
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