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For work, I communicate mainly through...
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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Email: Even though it's admissible in court. (Score:2, Interesting)
Penn State reference worth mod points?
I'd LIKE it to be all email. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd LIKE it to be all email, but unfortunately, my co-workers prefer to drop in, or worse - call me on the phone.
Re:Email: Even though it's admissible in court. (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends (Score:4, Interesting)
Video Chat (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not often I represent one of the tiny minorities on these polls, but video chat is really the only option for long-distance engineering.
HQ is across the Atlantic, and discussing technical details over the phone is hard enough without having to explain verbally what part of the drawing I'm pointing at. Email works, but it's slow. So we hooked up the document camera to a video chat and couldn't be happier. Except for time zones, screw them.
Never use casual chats if detail is important (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a superior (exact chain of command never clear) a little while back that absolutely refused to write anything down. If there was a need for exact detailed instructions it was always "come over to my cube and we'll have a chat". If I asked specific questions in email, she would always reply back with "come over to my cube and we'll chat". Drove me ..bat.. ..shit.. CRAZY!
When speaking in generalities without a sharply defined agenda in person chats are fine. In fact, that's probably the best way to do it. But when detail is required, it is vitally important to get it in writing.
The company had other dysfunctions too. That's why I don't work there anymore.
Re:Never use casual chats if detail is important (Score:4, Interesting)
Best way to deal with this is take notes, go back to your desk, and before you start write an email stating exactly what you are going to do, what you are going to deliver, and how you will judge correctness/completeness of task.
Then email it to her.
Re:Email: Even though it's admissible in court. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a consultant. What I do is ALWAYS do meeting summaries. This has saved my bacon so often, I call the template "bacon brine" (it's so good at preserving bacon). By default it always says:
"If any of the below is incorrect or if something is missing, please let me know and I will update the meeting summary"
1) it says a meeting happened
2) It lets me control the narrative
the 2nd reason is actually the most important. by default everything I say is 100% correct. It's like a casino, the odds are always slightly in my favour. People have to work to get their points in.
If I leave things out by accident (it's never an accident), then things get forgotten.
If I need things remembered, it's right there in writing.
You didn't respond/read the email? Your fault.
If things (I) needed to magically reappear, poof it's there.
That's the power of narrative, it's not just the conquers that write the history books you know.
If you think I'm being dishonest, you should have stopped reading the moment I said "I'm a consultant".
Email. (Score:4, Interesting)
Great part is, that's totally accepted business policy here, since we need to be able to frequently shift work around and without thorough written documentation of the request, that's simply not feasible. I'm glad the management here stands behind that, too. Surprisingly little falls through the cracks, since everyone has an up-to-the-moment record of what everyone else should be working on.
Re:Depends (Score:4, Interesting)
E-mail is useful for large-scale announcements (its X's birthday! Remember, staff meeting Tuesday) but I much rather have face to face conversation when it comes to figuring out problems.
I disagree Especially for troubleshooting, it's important to get things in writing, so people know who does what exactly, don't chase red herrings, and have an audit trail of what's been done and thought of, as well as the resolution. This will come in handy years down the road.
Face to face leads to misunderstandings, and it's impossible to talk people through technical tasks like a quick patch script. Never mind that humans in general don't have eidetic memory, and you end up with dropped work because things were forgotten, as well as animosity when one person remembers differently from another.
Use a ticketing system that allows capturing e-mail, and otherwise use e-mail. Face-to-face is for management who wants a "feeling" of how things are going, not the low level details that actually solve the problems. Telephone is for customers, and professional phone talkers.
Even IM is better than facetime and phone calls, but it's still inadequate - you are limited in verbosity as well as just what survives a paste, and even with logging turned on, it's a bitch to have any kind of useful history or audit trail when more than two people are involved in different IMs.
Also, some people get overly informal in IMs, making their contributions (and I use this term loosely) unsuitable for copy/paste into tickets.
So my choice is e-mail. Preferably unmangled by Exchange.