The Unsaid Reason VCs May Not Back You: Resource Efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2009/03/the-unsaid-reason-vcs-may-not-back-you-resource-efficiency.html

<comment><USER2> This is really just a long way of saying that services companies get lower multiples (1.5x-2x) than product companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Okay, what he says sounds plausible - I guess consulting is an example of a business with linear "resource efficiency". But he doesn't explain the _faster than linear_ resource efficiency case very well. The obvious answer is a case where you get x% more customers per unit time then your effort on your product produces x% more value. Okay, so how do VC's identify businesses that will have X% growth in the number of users? Inform please.

Also, just a pedantic gripe, but someone should really inform this guy of the meaning of exponential growth. His definition that an "exponentially" growing firm the next million nets more value than the previous million would also apply to quadratic growth.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure he'd look at you blankly if you tried to tell him that. Innumeracy is embraced by business people. They made "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" a best-seller.

<comment><USER5> > Innumeracy is embraced by business people

A good businessman uses his numerical intuition far more than his numerical literacy - math is a way to prove intuition as it relates to business.

A good mathematician also operates in this way - a proof starts out as intuition. People with poor business/social/numerical intuition often point to this as a flaw, but it's really an advantage. That's why the best engineers eventually end up as business people. Look at the partner roster and board members of any top flight VC firm in the valley - a high proportion of them are former engineers.

You're not going to find many former accountants or statisticians in the bunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think VCs in general will be backing less companies in the next year or two. Part of this may be that limited partners who have pledged a certain amount of investment capital will be trying to delay VC funding rounds until the economy stabilizes. Other has to do with the fact that there was a drastic reduction in IPO and M&A activity in 2008. In 2007, there were 86 venture-backed IPOs. In 2008, there were only 6, and 5 of those were in Q1 2008. On the M&A side, there were 360 venture-backed M&As in 2007. In 2008, there were 260. So in other words, VCs aren't getting their money back.

Out of the less number of companies being backed, I guess by this article's argument, these "exponential growth" companies are more likely to be funded. But isn't that obvious? If you were going to invest your money, would you invest in a company that "grows slowly" or a company that "grows really fast"? I guess it's safe to say: don't try to start a venture-backed service company...

</comment><comment><USER7> Build/Make/Do it once, sell it many times. However, fixed costs (non continuous function) increase as customers increse in numbers. Consumer products have variable costs ($/unit) and a non continuous function for fixed costs too. At full capacity you have to build more physical capacity (investment + fixed costs) in order to supply more customers.

So trying to find out what this Mark is talking about, you can think the value added as a function that is trying to scape toward the infinite (in the y-axis). Web based services has no variable cost (or this is tiny) so value added is pulling down only by fixed cost, which at some point jump to other value (we have to increase capacity to continue serving current and new customers!). It seems that web-based services value added function can reach farther points. This makes sense on a paper but real business is harder.

</comment><comment><USER8> There a lot of people chasing the kind of opportunities that he advocates: ones that have strongly superlinear scaling. That kind of investment comes with a possibility of an explosive gain, but there are many opportunities out there that are profitable but don't grow quite as dramatically. If investors didn't put money into them, they'd be (i) leaving money on the table and (ii) impoverishing the development of a wide range of goods and services that people want and need.</comment>


A Plea for Product Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/product-engineers <comment><USER2> so much this</comment>


Work or start your own business? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody,<p>I have studied computer science, and I have worked for 2 years. And now, I have changed the country I live as I get married. I'm in Qatar now, and I have been there for 2 months. I couldn't find job ( to be honest I didn't look for it seriously as I didn't know many people in Qatar, and unfortunately the only 2 interviews that I took were not successful because I haven't worked on the website too much)  sometimes I think that to start my own business working in the internet rather spending too much time applying for jobs that will not come. Really I don't know what should I do! <comment><USER2> It depends on a lot of things.

In general, building an online business usually takes longer than the founder expects, which should be considered when you think about how long your savings will last.

What about getting a part time job/freelancing online and building a business at the same time?

Part time job/freelancing should cover at least some of your bills so your savings last longer until your business start turning profits.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for replying, maybe you are right. Do you know how to start a freelance on line, if there is a website or people you know?

<comment><USER3> With all due respect, Doudowa, you should be able to get this level of basic information by browsing business sites online. I'm puzzled by your questions because you mention that you have both studied Computer Science (so you should be relatively tech savvy) and that you have time to surf online.

If you feel that you have skills are that valuable and can get you paid, then start off on freelancing sites such as ODesk or Elance.

<comment><USER2> I also suggest to check out Ramit Sethi's material on freelancing at <http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do both until either one pays off...</comment>


A Developer's Guide to Surviving the Coronapocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://degoes.net/articles/coronapocalypse <comment><USER2> _Cloud infrastructure and costly web services can add up to hundreds of thousands or millions, even for relatively small companies. There will be increasing pressure to minimize these costs, and to replace high-priced services with those that have low total cost of ownership._

I'm usually a cloud true believer and choose to emphasize letting someone else do the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" so developers can concentrate on building new features instead of spending extra hours babysitting infrastructure. But, since most software engineers are salaried, this is the time to trade time for money instead of the other way around if your company is struggling.

I'm fortunate to work at a B2B company where our clients are large health systems so for us it's business as usual. We actually think we will grow.

<comment><USER3> I'm most likely wrong (I hope I am), but I'm worried about the long term economic effect this virus will have on the hospitals. Not right away, but over the next year. We have a large number of people needing hospital care for extended time (1 to 2 weeks), and a large number of unemployed. This will result in a lot of bankruptcies (even for people with health insurance). Will the health insurance industry be able to pay out all these clamps as well?

Anyway, I'm half expecting to see another massive bailout for hospitals, or the government just buy them outright in about a year.

<comment><USER4> Like you I also hope to see bailouts, but the biggest bailouts happen because industries that receive them have an army of experienced lobbyists.

Hospitals for better or worse have negligible presence with lobbyists and won't receive the windfalls that fossil fuel, airlines, airline manufacturers, and cruise lines will.

<comment><USER2> I am the last person who thinks the government will choose the people over the lobbyists. But something as obvious as your local hospital closing can't go ignored by politicians.

You notice that now Trump is talking about expanding Medicare, increasing unemployment benefits, and reopening ACA enrollment and you don't hear a peep from conservatives talking about socialism.

It's true, the definition of socialism is when the government is helping "them" - not you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is almost no actionable advice in this article. It all comes across as something someone would sell as a seminar.

The end goal isn't to tell us any useful information, it's just a list of vague best practices that could be packaged up into a motivational swindle - in this case, piggybacking a global pandemic with content that isn't particularly related.

And of course it's targeted at the audience that has the least amount of likelihood of having any significant trouble due to the pandemic.

Software developers:

In high demand (and not a healthcare worker?) Check!

Can work from home? Check!

High income? Check!

Making a guide for that kind of person's "survival" is pretty much an insult to the doctors and nurses who are fighting not only for their patients' survival but their own.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice, a guide for how to survive an unique and ongoing crisis! It must be full of battle tested advice I'm sure!

For example, they suggest moving to someplace with lower cost of living, surely sage advice!

<comment><USER7> Similar articles just show how spoiled and priviledged the authors truly are.

I've seen some baffling things here on HN too, such as people _preferring_ to only be informed using push notifications about the crisis, personalized for their area, nothing else, because that's more _convenient_ than looking up information, or the other day, deciding to block COVID-19 related news entirely, instead of selecting a trusted news source and rationing their exposure to the media.

<comment><USER8> Is it so baffling that people are getting tired of reading about COVID-19 though? I mean, I've been in quarantine for at least 1 month now, and gonna be at least 2 more weeks. I'd like to read about other things than COVID-19, especially since I can't really take any other action than to stay at home, especially because it would be illegal for me to not be at home.

So yeah, I'm one of the people who have started removing and blocking things that are mentioning COVID-19, since I can't really do anything about it. Once something actionable comes up, I'll hear it in the official press conferences from my country's government.

I guess luckily, my HN blocker only blocks mentions of COVID-19 and "corona virus", so the keyword "Coronapocalypse" managed to get through, and here I am...

<comment><USER7> I think it again comes down to one's priviledge. If you have the possibility to isolate yourself for months and you don't have to worry about anyone else, you may be able to afford to block the news entirely.

Everyone else needs to read the news (5 minutes a day is enough), because it may contain important information. Consider how you may miss a changed bus schedule announced on a local news site with "due to coronavirus" in the title. Same thing about the local supermarket, you may get home without food while exposing yourself and your family to additional risk. You may also be fined for failing to present specific papers when you leave your home for groceries, for which the requirement may have been announced a day prior.

Reading the news is crucial for most of us during this period, we just have to do it responsibly.

Here's also a great explanation for why reading the news could make a difference for you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783044)

> Plus I learned by the news that losing sense of smell and taste was a likely > indicator of Covid-19. I got tested and discovered I was positive.

<comment><USER9> I would never know about bus and local supermarket hours and changes through the news in any of the two cities that I lived in my life (Sao Paulo and Los Angeles). I would (and I did) find the supermarket and the bus company websites. That's not "news".

Cutting all news is a good strategy for some people for improving mental health. Just like anyone can have a cabinet full of chocolate and just control themselves to each a small piece twice a week, but it's much more efficient to just not have chocolate at all at home.

Also, the general tone of people that don't want to read news anymore is that they personally don't want it for themselves only. So, that's unrelated to people that consider it crucial and want to do it responsibly.

Lastly, I've seen this desire of consuming less or no news in a lot of people that are not the "HN crowd" or privileged people in terms of money.

<comment><USER7> > I would never know about bus and local supermarket hours and changes through > the news in any of the two cities that I lived in my life (Sao Paulo and Los > Angeles). I would (and I did) find the supermarket and the bus company > websites. That's not "news".

That was your experience before this crisis. I've got hold of such information from a local news site a week ago, while official sites remained unchanged for a couple more days. I'm sure there are places where everything is well oiled, but for most of us things don't just snap into place and we need to be aware of our surroundings as much as it's tolerable for our mental health.

<comment><USER10> Checking the news once a day for 15 minutes is more than sufficient. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people aren't on Twitter, don't know what push notifications are, and really don't need to do anything other than stay at home, wear a mask, and avoid others. Constantly refreshing media sites really isn't productive or helpful.

<comment><USER7> I agree and that's what I'm advocating too, checking a trusted news source once a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And of you happen to still have a secure income: spend, spend, spend. Keep your income moving so it can be income to others.

<comment><USER12> Very altruistic. Possibly to ones own detriment

<comment><USER11> That's not how economies work. They are not zero sum games, they are networks of cash flows which create more flows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Finding a remote job as a developer has been next to impossible. Hopefully that will change after this. I also hope that we will see less centralization in general.

<comment><USER14> The strongest companies that will emerge from this crisis, will be those tech companies that focus first on remote collaboration.

Your workforce doesn't get killed. But most tech engineers are young anyways, so they should survive this virus.

And your workforce is decentralized, so you can have business continuity in a disaster scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bird doesn't trust the branch, she trusts her wings.

1\. Build skills

2\. Have cash

3\. Network

<comment><USER16> That's very true. I'm also a software professional looking for work, and so far my network has been a good source of promising leads.

On the cash front, in addition to the importance of having reserves, I'd suggest that the importance of having multiple revenue streams has never been clearer.

<comment><USER2> Having multiple revenue streams doesn't help when the entire economy is screwed.

During the last recession, I was a full time software engineer, a part time fitness instructor/personal trainer and had real estate holdings.

Guess how my alternate income streams worked out when no one was spending money? I sold off all of my rental real estate (in an area that still hasn't recovered), I stopped trying to get personal fitness classes and scaled back teaching to just a "working hobby" and doubled down in software engineering, building skills and a network.

When the company I worked for finally did collapse in late 2010, I was able to get a couple of contracts until I found a full time gig.

<comment><USER17> _Having multiple revenue streams doesn't help when the entire economy is screwed._

This is true. A couple on my block are an architect, and a yoga instructor. Two very diverse income streams.

Now both are unemployed.

A guy I sold a web site to was one of those people who was big on diversity of income.

His portfolio covered everything from hotel services to restaurants to antiques restoration to a couple of small factories. All are closed. His diverse income is gone.

<comment><USER18> At least his chances were bigger than the average Joe's. Probably he made a solid runway to last till his streams can recover.

<comment><USER2> While I understand the "average Joe" is not in the position that software engineers are in, I'm just going to address software engineering since we are on a technical site.

In software engineering, you don't need "multiple income streams" to stay solvent. You just need a set of skills that are in sync with the market, good interviewing techniques, a strong network, and cash to tide you over and keep your expenses reasonable. This time is not a recession. It's a true worldwide epidemic. But during "normal" recessions, if you have what I outlined above, someone somewhere will hire you at least as a contractor at some rate.

Of course if you overly specialized it might be harder.

The dot com bust wasn't that bad if you were just a regular old enterprise developer working at a profitable company that wasn't directly or indirectly dependent on VC money. Even in 2008, there were companies hiring hired gun contractors at lower rates.

<comment><USER19> I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. We have the privilege of working in an industry in which we can gain experience in nearly any sub-field using online resources. If you were laid off from your $oldTech job, there are dozens of $newTech that can be learned in your newly-found free time for next to no cost.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Written communication is remote work super power - <AUTHOR> https://snir.dev/blog/remote-async-communication/ <comment><USER3> Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it's harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle.

For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it's a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out. A remote meeting can work too.

The problem with meetings are those which are not well prepared. There shall be an agenda and proper minutes should be produced.

For most complicated matters actions/investigations are supposed to be followed up. In a way that's how you mix async with sync communication.

<comment><USER4> Recently, I was so frustrated with some folks poor reading comprehension that I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules:

\- No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high.

\- The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing).

\- The reader has to retype the original communication themselves before they can respond....

\- Timeout value, if no responses that pass the above tests in a given time frame, whomever asked gets to complete the task with no input and nobody can change the outcome for ... a week or so and everyone has to live with it.

\- Anyone who wants to change it after the timeout value better explain why they didn't ask before hand... no idea how this would work, yeah we're getting into the weeds here.

Of course, these are all unworkable in a modern business environment but man ... I can dream that some folks would who make demands or provide input at least put a minimum amount of effort into things before they throw their given wrench into the works.

<comment><USER5> Bullets 2 and 3 combined are actually recommended for spoken communications as well. As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you.

Probably over half of the communications problems I've seen at work are because people don't follow this basic practice. They respond based on what they understood, not based on what the speaker was saying.

As one book I read put it: You should be able to reflect their world view back to them as if you yourself are advocating for it (even if you completely disagree). When you do this, they'll believe you understand them. For many people, only then will they listen to your critiques.

<comment><USER6> > As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I > understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the > original speaker an opportunity to correct you.

I find a practice like this is also helpful for following up after a meeting. For meetings that warrant my taking notes, I like to type them up immediately afterwards, send them out to the other attendees, and solicit corrections or confirmations while the meeting is still fresh on everyone's mind.

It was a bit scary when I first started doing that since I'd fear that I might have misunderstood something and would be revealing my ignorance. But to the contrary, I've found that it tends to encourage others to share their notes for comparison and elicit further discussion. (If there's something I've misunderstood from a meeting, usually someone else was confused too.)

<comment><USER7> I've been doing the same for the past 10+ years.

The problem that I found with it, is that a recurring receiver (let's say a client) will eventually start trusting your minutes so much that they don't even bother to read them and just answer with 'Looks good' and basically you lose the power of minutes.

To counter this, recently I've been trying to insert one wrong bullet point from the beginning, making the receiver pay more attention down the line. I don't have yet enough data points to see if this approach works.

<comment><USER8> That last point is pretty hilarious!

I find writing up the minutes during the meeting and distilling to "are these the most important points?" works to grab folks' attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Real-time, spoken communication is on-site work super power.

When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enforced by a moderator, at the expense of speed), and the communication become slower, less efficient, and more tiresome.

I _love_ neatly written logically organized texts. But to produce such a text, a lot of the questions it answers should be already understood, answered, and arranged in a easy-to-consume order. There are situations when this is not possible, and _finding out_ the scope of the problem and its structure is exactly the task. Here's where face-to-face verbal communication rules.

Of course, providing some written output after such a meeting is important, too, be it nicely written minutiae (a shared document on a large screen works well), or just a photo of the whiteboard.

So, _both_ written and face-to-face types of communication are important. None can efficiently replace the other.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you partially. I found something interesting, with this everyone work from home: I'm able to communicate with certain people more effectively via zoom.

I think it boils down to with zoom, you are literally in someone's face, and it's very obvious when you aren't fully focused on them.

Perhaps the new way, with zoom, gave some people an opportunity to reset their manners? Not clear what the real reason behind it is, but I noticed it immediately.

What a great bonus it was.

<comment><USER11> In a natural conversation, it is rare to have someone stair you in the eyes for more than a couple seconds.

Hadn't considered that for some, this constant stair feels like they are finally being recognized. This makes a lot of sense. You wait for your turn to talk and the stage is yours. In some sense, everything is fairer.

<comment><USER12> You can look all people in their eyes at the same time

(But impossible in real life)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actually funny this question. Because come to think about it, text is by far my preffered way to communicate.

That goes for work and for serious-private matters.

The absolute strengt with text is that it gives you history by default - <USER2> can save it.

While you can save text it's also eaiser to the search.

The mental model around writing and communicating is the mental proces that goes into it, and which is also the reason i disagree with people that believe you should be good at writing - if you haven't thought about what you want to communicate you can't write it nor speak about it. Why would you be better at communicating by speech rather than text? Sure it's faster to speak or video, but does that give a better result? I say no way

<comment><USER14> It's worth noting that some people specifically see verbal communication's undocumented-by-default nature as a feature.

When I was younger I found that idea very offensive. I considered people who held that viewpoint to be suspect (engaging in political machinations, or using fluid recollections of conversations to their advantage). I still think there's a grain of truth to my suspicions, but I've learned to recognize that there are acceptable reasons for undocumented conversations.

<comment><USER15> There's still phone calls. Any co-worker you trust enough to have an "off the record" conversation with wouldn't turn down a "hey, can I call you?" request. They might think it's weird at first, but would understand later I'm sure.

<comment><USER16> I've called coworkers literally just to rant to someone before. Sometimes, you need to complain, but having a record of that is not helpful in any way.

<comment><USER17> Private chat works for me. Corporate IT might be able to see it, but I'm not saying anything there that my boss isn't already aware of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Did this guy just re-invent memos?

There's a lot of history here, going back centuries. The military has put much effort into designing written communication. There's the classic 5-paragraph operations order format. There's the "bottom line up front" style, which for information rather than orders. The military makes a very strong distinction between info documents and orders.

Diplomats have some traditional formats, too.[1] Most correspondence is formal. Sometimes there's an "appreciation of the situation" attached to correspondence from a mission to its state department. That's an informally written summary of what the writer has observed and what they think is going to happen.

An amusing read is "How to Live though an Executive", which is nominally by L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology guy, but was really written by Richard DeMille. This is from 1953. It's someone trying to invent Slack, before computers. It's done with wallboards, clips, carbon paper forms, tear-off tickets, and people called "communicators" doing the paperwork. It was never used. Too complicated pre-computer. The basic concept is a trouble ticket, with an organized system to insure that handing off the problem to someone doesn't mean it gets lost to follow-up.

[1] [https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications- pro...](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications- program/files/pp_sri_kulkarni_and_yotam_goren_4_10_17.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> Yep, this article rings true on a number of levels, particularly regarding asynchronous work and lack of interrupts.

Anecdotally, I'm working on a software project at the moment with a small team of volunteers.

To explain some context: I'm the sole developer currently, and I'm treating communications to the team as high-value for us, now and in future - the same way that I'd like to think that I treat the code (I write this with the awareness I've recently cut some corners; but cleanup is on the cards).

One observation is that I'm _really enjoying_ only using email for that communication.

Sometimes I code for a couple of days before checking or answering emails, simply based on what feels most productive or compelling at the time.

As a result I never get distracted by pings while working, and feel much more comfortable taking time while writing messages and replies, generally allowing me to be a bit more thoughtful.

And there's only one communication platform. My attention's not split between instant messages, emails, and other organizational tools.

This situation's probably an edge case based on the small team size and my personal preferences, but it's been an interesting experience.

I don't know how well this approach would scale* -- and an open question based on my experience and also raised by the article is: how and where do you organize that content so that it can be discovered by newcomers to the team?

*Example: crisis moments, such as technical outages, would be tricky to manage for a multi-person operations team

<comment><USER20> I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working well is if we'd work on larger amounts of releasable code at once, but then there's more chances of conflicts, reviews get longer and harder to do and there's more risk releasing.

I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.

<comment><USER21> That's an interesting idea regarding rotating external request handling. Do the team members not currently on call forward requests to those on call? How do you manage continuity of communication once the rotation has shifted?

<comment><USER20> We usually sync out of hours on-call with the "handle requests from outside the team" so that while you're at work you're the same person, everyone in the company knows to go to a specific slack room for these requests to our team, or they can straight up create a "change request" ticket in our jira board if the request can be done few hours/days later.

Usually there's nothing (in almost 4 years I think less than 5) that goes across weeks that's still in progress. We have a very low volume of actual incidents, and external requests that are sizeable enough get turned into actual prioritised stories by the next planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Peter F. Drucker, influential author of countless books on management, once made a very simple argument: there are reader types, and there are listener types. If you are dealing with a partner you better know which type they are.

It doesn't make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn't make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written argument.

We should perhaps just accept that an tolerate each other where our strengths are.

[1] Peter F. Drucker: Managing Oneself. [https://www.amazon.com/Managing- Oneself-Harvard-Business-Cla...](https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself- Harvard-Business-Classics/dp/142212312X)

Edit: Online: [http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Dr...](http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Drucker%20Managing%20Oneself.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Whatever people's preferences in terms of reading or listening, I am inclined to think teams get better results when a high quality meeting summary goes out ahead of time.

I don't claim this is an absolute truth, but I also don't think many organizations have given it proper try.

<comment><USER24> I agree, but think the virtue is as much as in the actual process of writing the summary forces the summoner to clearly work out ahead of time what the meeting is actually about and what it is aiming to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment.

One of the reasons I didn't work out on my first remote job is because I refused to treat Slacks red icon as my #1 priority in the world. Coworker needs my attention immediately? Call me. Is calling too much of a hassle? Then it's probably not as urgent as you think. I understand it's very arrogant of me but I cannot bear the thought of losing all of my focus to answer a question that was really not that immediate. It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say.

I'm working at a new place now and we've gotten so good at asynchronous collaboration that I haven't exchanged a single message on Slack with one of my coworkers since they joined the team. All of our talks are done through Github and our weekly meeting on Friday where we plan the next week and spend an hour or two chatting. This is nice because it gives me time to reason about discussions, and even makes me look forward to the next meeting to have some fun with them, while previously I got so sick of my coworkers that I had literal nightmare-induced panic attacks over constant meetings.

I'm really glad I managed to find a team that enjoys working on the same way I do.

<comment><USER26> > Coworker needs my attention immediately? Call me.

I despise unsolicited phone calls. It's figuratively kicking in your door. I can delay a Slack response for a few minutes. I can't delay some jackass barging into my "office."

<comment><USER27> Second that. Phone calls - and they're all unsolicited as far as I'm concerned - aggravate me far more than a barrage of IMs, though both are undeniably aggravating.

There's a small irony to this since I've been in the VoIP industry for about 15 years. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think a big part of this article is that the author doesn't like being interrupted and therefore has defined this as the problem. I don't like being interrupted either - but often the interruptions I experience are the best opportunities I have to communicate ideas, have creative back and forth, and importantly, communicate the details that are going to get me shouted at for saying on the wiki.

The problem with asynchronous communication is that I need to predict what information you're going to need, before you need it. The result is huge amounts of documentation work going on - 90% of which is useless, and the other 10% is either undiscoverable or could as just as easily be solved with "has anyone touched the db" in chat.

The example is great - because it's absolutely something that I've seen happen. You post on the group chat "did anyone touch the db" and someone replies, "Oh Johnny mentioned something about it the other day". Suddenly you're not searching through thousands of jira tickets and wiki pages, and most likely not finding what you want anyway - since no one can predict how they'll scre up. You just ping Johnny, and if Johnny isn't there? Well he'll reply when it's back. It's fine. _That_ is part of flexible working. Flexible working isn't "I get to pick up my kids at 12" it's about everyone having flexibility, and everyone giving flexibility.

To me, this asynchronous communication plan sets an unacheivable goal, because you're never going to know what it is other people are going to need to know, and documenting everything exhaustively is an uneconomical.

</comment><comment><USER29> When writing you are not getting feedback (give more context, go faster, what concerns to address). A back and forth can be a much faster way (both in total time elapsed and time spend) to resolve something. At GitLab we recommend async by default and jump to sync when you start going back and forth. [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all- remote/asynchro...](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all- remote/asynchronous/)

</comment><comment><USER30> In our business, async communication is at the core of how we deal with clients. We design UI/UX for tech companies ([http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)) and in the 10+ years of trying out a dozen of ways to work, async email conversations were by far the most effective for us.

Email over Slack, why? Slack and other chat environments still create the expectation of realtime responses. Also, messages you type there are short and often of a lower quality.

Email is usually more longform. This forces us and clients to think first, write second.

The quality of feedback and communication is just so much better.

</comment><comment><USER21> I also find keeping a log of work helps provide the right communication at the right time. Especially when remote I find it is easy to forget all the things I've worked on in a given week. It doesn't always make sense to interrupt somebody with updates on something the moment it is done. Colocation provides so many more cues to communicate progress, ideas, etc. in the collocation context the work log is less important as a communication tool.

It so happens, (shameless plug alert) I built a tool [0] that asks me what I did on a daily basis via sms, the responses are organized in my work notes folder. I use this for keeping track of long-running projects that depend on lots of other people for input. I also use it to build a monthly description of work to include with my clients' invoices.

0\. [https://www.tatatap.com](https://www.tatatap.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> I am a firm believer that written communication is the best way to sustain a productive team.

Talking, especially in person, might get you the result you're looking for faster. Look, we decided what we needed to make and skipped the overhead of opening a ticket and capturing the back and forth.

But then you have to revisit your decision and your reasoning behind them 4 months from now. Why didn't we just do that other thing that seems more efficient? Or even worse, someone picks up your work after you leave and they have to do that, without the potential ability to recall the context. Or then you leave a meeting about making any sort of decision and start working and a few days later realize you're not on the same page.

I get that writing might not be some people's best skill, or even their preferred way of communication. We all have to put up with things we don't enjoy and learn skills to work, why should this be any different?

I work for company that is in the process of going remote first, without embracing a culture of writing first and writing everything and it's not very pretty.

Previously, I worked for a company that despite not really prioritizing remote workers, because teams were distributed across the world, had to capture a lot of the things I mentioned in the tickets created for each task. And it was really empowering to have a lot of context as someone who was tasked with maintaining those things.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think emotional intelligence coupled with integrity are the real super power wombo-combo, no matter the role.

It helps if you have the technical skills to go with it but to be honest, having those skills should be a matter of training, not expecting people to be learning on their own time.

This should be fixed on the company level - every employee should receive regular training, not be expected to magically keep up their workload _and_ learn new technologies in their spare time.

Another issue that makes projects go side-ways is people relying on a paycheque for their livelihood. If you want people with integrity to practice it in the workplace, don't place them in impossible situations where they have to choose between their integrity and their family's financial well being.

This should be fixed on the government level.

This is all to say that this endless stream of blog posts about what an already over-worked, under-paid worker ought to improve upon, are not helpful - highly educated people used to be Aristocrats who fine dined and wrote poetry. Today we are expecting people to pay for their own training, spend the best years of their lives studying to pass tests, be hazed trying to get a job, for the privilege of getting worked to the bone for the benefit of a corporate entity. I thought only dystopian novels could think of a system so counter-productive and insane, until I read Brave New World and thought hm, this might be an upgrade over the life I'm currently living.

Anyhow :)

</comment><comment><USER33> If I were to ever hire, I'd optimize first for clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication, second for ability for the job at hand, and anything else third.

Having hired some freelancers recently, I've found that there is a world of difference between those who can communicate clearly and those who can't.

<comment><USER27> Oh, indeed. I think this is the single most underrated dimension of actually being able to extract value from someone in a commercial organisation.

Also, having run into it a number of times, I feel compelled to mention those who are quite capable of clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication as a matter of skills and abilities, but seem cholerically averse to doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Video calls are like single-room IRC 20 years ago, before PM, threads etc within same room were added. Probably just matter of months when we will see subrooms, side-channel whisper, history of transcribed logs and many other additions also in video calls. Just current software limitations.

<comment><USER35> Pretty much all of those features you call out are available in modern video chat software - at least the one I have to use daily (Zoom).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have a day where everyone else in on flex (basically their day off every two weeks).

I have already cleared two large tickets because I can address the comments they left when I am done another task (because they wrote out their entire thought instead of waiting for a conversation).

I would bet I am 2-3x as productive as I now have hours of uninterrupted time.

</comment><comment><USER37> In my team if someone needs to pick up the kids he just says it in chat or even in a video meeting and gets them. I think webex meetings work better than real live ones. If they are tiring that's positive because meetings last too long. If only one person can speak at a time it prevents people from interrupting and makes them conscious not to hog the mic. Async communication? How would you do that? If you have a question and can't find an answer, what do you do? Make a jira user story to document this specific scenario and put yourself as the reporting too? Then assign to a colleague and hope he does something with it? I mean it could possibly work if everyone is accustomed to it, is of a very high level and is also a high level technical writer. But it just seems to me that in practice junior might be too dumb to understand seniors writing. Or senior just writes something that's not legible. Or senior ignores his new assigned story because junior created it and not the product owner. Or scrum master sees the story and thinks: that's not part of sprint goals and throws it out of the board. It seems really slow to work this way.

<comment><USER38> I think it really depends on the project size and the kind of work. If you're more in a waterfall model, where the specs are clear and you just got to do it, I can understand how being able to work uninterrupted is a nice-to-have.

But if you work very closely with the business and often run into things that could be done or understood in different ways, having to wait a day or more to get a clarifying response would not work. And this is know-how that can't be written down easily if at all, since a lot of decisions are purely based on experience and historical knowledge.

I used to have this illusionary vision of how everything should be neatly documented, but if you operate on a constantly changing code base, it's really hard to find a good balance. Documentation gets outdated every few weeks and sometimes days, plus most of the time, you don't even know that said documentation has been written. As such, you can't fully trust the documentation and you always have to check out at least part of the code.

What seems to work for me, is documentation that gives a broad overview of a topic and then gives certain pointers into the code. That way you capture the essence of functionality that is likely to remain for a longer time and the transition from documentation to code is made easier.

And finally, if someone is stuck or doesn't understand something, I find it problematic to have the expectation that nobody may be available to read your message for the next few hours or whole day. What is more efficient, someone spending a couple of minutes to provide assistance or someone googling/search Jira/wiki/Confluence for half a day and not making any progress?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Chat is only problematic if all you have is slack, with the lousy threading UX, and the prevalence of DM and private channel.

Still, slack is miles better than wiki pages (go staled immediately), emails (even more broken threading interface), and heaven forbids google docs (impossible for collaboration, may work for bosses).

I think the best solution is something like zulip chat, complemented by wiki pages for "immutable" information.

</comment><comment><USER40> I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the _metadata_ of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was useful for us to see when we were asking questions in slack, what the patterns were to improve our team training:

Ticket comes in -> we don't know -> we link to ticket in X channel. Tally the channel links, look at chart, identify patterns.

In an office, this would require me to be an EXTREME micro manager, whereas remotely, I just paid attention and used the meta data to drive our training.

In an office, you could ask the team to keep track, or to tell you what they noticed, but by having a direct tap into the data stream, the team just does the work.

(This requires a high degree of trust, and we were looking _inward_ so it wasn't something that was met with disdain. If we were using this to compare what teams were more responsive and being outwardly critical, well, I don't think that will go over well anywhere.)

</comment><comment><USER15> > participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it's harder > than it sounds)

In my experience, around 1/3rd of developers are not good typists. Writing code isn't really about typing, so it's OK, but when participating in an active conversation in a chat room with multiple people, not being able to type well hurts.

</comment><comment><USER41> A strength (and weakness) of async is that it comes with a higher expectation of writing quality.

When the expectations are too high, it's likely that people won't get things down in the first place.

My team has noticed an unintuitive approach to communication that seems to work better than alternatives. Write better private notes.

Private notes are low-friction. You know what's worth writing. You don't need to worry as much about if it's a mess.

Our approach is to help you make your private notes a little better organized. And to make it fast to share these notes when they might be helpful to someone else too.

It's bytebase.io. Would love the community's feedback.

</comment><comment><USER42> We're finding it quite effective to record short 2-minute videos and circulate those. Everyone can talk and point things on the screen, not everyone can write or even read attentively.

<comment><USER43> > Everyone can talk and point things on the screen

I think you may be making some unconscious assumptions about everyone having the same abilities. Deaf or mute people can't talk. Blind people can't point at things on a screen. And even people who _can_ talk might be more comfortable writing, e.g. people who are self-conscious about their accent.

For these reasons, I think that the recent increase in remote work, though forced on us by the pandemic, gives us an opportunity to better include people who might be inadvertently excluded in an on-site environment.

<comment><USER43> On further reflection, I believe I responded uncharitably to the GP, by taking the quoted part of that comment out of context. The GP most likely meant that everyone _on their team_ can talk and point at things on the screen. In that case, doing videos like that is fine, except that the team should be prepared to adapt if anyone who can't use that method of communication joins the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've noticed the biggest difference between junior developers and more experienced individuals is their written communication abilities. This has led me down the path of trying to find resources to help teach communications to those that I mentor but since this isn't my area of expertise (teaching communications) I'd love if anybody had resources to share.

<comment><USER45> I'm not an expert on teaching communications but I personally don't believe we need to be an expert to figure out how people can increase their communications skills. Its like anything else. They have to practice, and get correction when they do something wrong.

A big part of it is habit or level of effort.

Force them to read books. Maybe something fun like a genre of novel that they like. Because the fundamental level of literacy is going to have a big impact on writing ability.

Have them find a forum of subreddit that they like and then regularly participate in it. And then offline or in a private message, fix their grammar and point out the problems with their communication.

Or just have them use written communications at work rather than in-person meetings etc. And then when the communication is lacking, point out the specific flaws.

<comment><USER44> Practices is great and all, thats how I learned, but I'd know there have to be resources out there to help people learn beyond simply "figure it out as you go."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Communication is a super power. Full stop.

The key to communication is to remember: "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." (Note: say can be written, and hear therefore read.) The mantra works either way.

Ultimately, the responsibility of the communication belongs to the sender. Improvement still takes work, but you'll progress faster if you have this foundation.

</comment><comment><USER47> People ask me what do they need to be good at to work at Google. I jokingly (but kind of seriously) tell them it's just like grade school - reading and writing. 80% of the job is reading, editing and commenting on docs people wrote or writing docs people will read.

</comment><comment><USER48> I agree with this so much that I even wrote about it recently!

[https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote- productivi...](https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote- productivity/)

Snir David writes well. One point that I think is missed in the "chats and video calls" is that you don't have situational awareness of whether the other person is busy like you do in person.

It's the same as the problem with taking phone calls when driving a car as compared to talking to people who are in the car with you. The people in the car with you can see when you're in a tricky traffic situation. The caller, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER49> "The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history. It started with the unification of Mongolia in 1206 and territory of 4 million km² ruled by Genghis Khan, to have 35 million km² in 1279 under Emperor Kublai Khan."

"Here is the thing: all that remote work in one of the biggest empires in history was accomplished without videoconferencing."

 _Why Videoconferencing Is for Rookies_ [https://medium.com/swlh/why-video- conferencing-is-for-rookie...](https://medium.com/swlh/why-video-conferencing- is-for-rookies-8a03f0ed534c)

</comment><comment><USER50> In my experience, the people most averse to writing stuff down are usually the remote engineers. Remote workers don't typically have the same cultural influence as local employees, so they tend to be somewhat alienated and therefore have fewer expectations put on them. I think this disincentivizes remote workers from fully assimilating into the culture and leads to less interest in communication. Inevitably, this ends up affecting their willingness to properly document.

Just my opinion built on my anecdotal experience.

<comment><USER51> I have the exact opposite anecdotal experience. Remote engineers I've worked with have put a lot more effort into their writing because they understand that it's one of their only avenues to participate in the company communication culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Picking the Slack / Chat argument: I don't think it should be expected to reply immediately. It's more like a lightweight inbox (when being tagged / DMed) that's easy to reply to (no greeting/regards required). Channels are a great place for async discussions that can be linked to and are kind of public so noone needs to decide beforehand whom to engage, and everyone can decide to join or leave the discussion without being cc'd forever.

</comment><comment><USER53> I have been thinking about the same problem as the author, but I've reached vastly different conclusions about how to do remote work better.Polar opposite.

I wrote my opinion here: [https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for- distributed-tea...](https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for-distributed- teams)

However, I think his points are thought provoking, and it's interesting to see how someone else thinks about the problem.

</comment><comment><USER54> Async writing is powerful but unfortunately, it requires also dedicated time slots to achieve it.

When you have the constant pressure from management to do X instead of writing on Y in a limited time, then you have no chance to write beautiful, centralised information. And so, the company itself accumulates technical debt, looses history and precious information that might be speed up people in the future.

</comment><comment><USER55> There's a reason Technical Writing is a class offered in engineering courses in college. When you've read good documentation (HP user manuals from the 90s) and bad documentation (most open-source projects, no judgement, they're crowdsourced and we're lucky to have contributors willing to document things at all), you really get a sense for how valuable this skill is.

</comment><comment><USER56> The super power I see is not so much written communication as intentional communication. I try to get myself to communicate intentionally by having command-enter send my Slack messages. But sometimes you need to Do the Thing. And you can't afford to Intend to Do the Thing first. In those situations the speed of spoken-face-to-face makes the organizational debt worth it.

</comment><comment><USER57> The problem is, most people don't have enough literacy and practicing to communicate via text. Most of them appear to be able to read and write text, but they are not. They simply recognize the few keywords and pretend they understand it.

That's why most of the people, after remote work become the norm, fallback to inefficient video chat rather than efficient text chat.

<comment><USER58> It is possible to convey much more nuance through speech.

I like to think of myself as an effective writer. Nonetheless, it is incredibly difficult to express nuanced emotions through writing. This is particularly true in "professional" contexts, where an informal message may be perceived as rude. In many situations, I suspect that the same message, delivered verbally, would not even warrant a second thought.

The reality is that few people are taught to write in a manner that allows them to actually express their feelings. The fact that we even need to learn this indicates to me that speech is a far more effective way of getting our thoughts across

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Written communication will also give you RSI though

</comment><comment><USER60> I am surrounded by people who love to do voice and video meetings, and I find them taxing and not very efficient. I've been hearing a lot about communication in this remote work covid world, but I've seen that turn into more of these comms that I don't want.

I need to find a way to tactfully say I prefer text...

</comment><comment><USER61> We found it faster to call and speak

</comment><comment><USER62> My biggest issue (and it is an issue that has been brought to my attention), is the old "Emperor Joseph" issue:

 _" Too many words."_

I trend prolix. In my essays, this can be corrected by post-edit, but it is not so easy to do that in realtime.

</comment><comment><USER63> So, writing rfcs, standards, articles and Usenet (boomer's tech, you know) was not that bad after all?

The absurdity of synchronous realtime communication is most evident when taking to an extreme of online coding. Nothing but crap is being produced.

[https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote](https://karma- engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote)

</comment><comment><USER64> Nonwritten communication is unreliable. People often have different interpretations of what was said and what exactly should be done. The only way to reliably manage work is to have everything written down.

</comment><comment><USER65> Fundamentally, it's faster to write and type than it is to talk and listen.

<comment><USER9> It hugely depends on one's competence in writing, and one's style of thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The author did a really good job of articulating why I've spent the last several years working on Zulip despite there being a thousand Slack clones to choose from.

Asynchronous communication is essential to being able to focus, at least if you do enough communication that it matters how you communicate. And it's very inefficient to do asynchronous communication at scale in Slack or any of its copycats. This leads to the Slack cultural issues detailed in the post; they're the result of people working around the bad core workflow of a beautiful, masterfully marketed tool.

Consider "Everybody expects an immediate response" culture. In my view, that is people adapting to it being unpleasant to be a busy person waiting for a reply in a Slack channel. (Which is because it's miserable to make sure you don't miss things in busy slack channel, so everyone does, so anyone who wants to be sure of a response spams PMs and mentions and otherwise applies pressure to get a reply now now now so that they can mentally move on to their next task).

Zulip aims to make asynchronous communication so efficient that such adaptations are unnecessary. The core innovation is that all messages in channels are organized within "topics", which work exactly like the Subject field in email. This model works great for enabling asynchronous communication in email, and it works even better in Zulip (mainly because of topic editing and linking features).

The main goal of Zulip's interaction design is to make skimming hundreds or thousands of Zulip messages (and replying thoughtfully to the ones where you can add something!) pleasant. This enables a better way of working. Personally, I read and respond to 500-1000 Zulip messages sent by dozens of people across 50+ topics every single day, and I get compliments on how responsive I am, despite the fact that I do focus work in multi-hour blocks most days, Zulip's development community is all over the world, and I lose hours of productive time every day due to a chronic illness. This wouldn't be possible with Slack.

And this isn't just my experience; I've heard from so many people in organizations that switched to Zulip that they love how Zulip makes better use of the limited time they have (whether busy managers at companies or participants in part-time communities).

> "You'll lose your history"

This is the other major bundle of problems that Zulip's topics solve. Zulip can be a valuable knowledge store because of the organization provided by topics (combined with features like permanent links and topic-powered search workflows).

Zulip is 100% open source software (Not open core! We're intentionally not VC- backed so that we can prioritize our values; see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430)). And we sponsor free hosting on zulip.com for open source projects, academic research, and other non-commercial organizations.

</comment><comment><USER67> Sometimes you need instant answer. You just can't move forward. Then it requires documentation written 'properly'.

Honestly finding programmers with good writing skills too is difficult.

</comment><comment><USER68> How do you get your coworkers to start proofreading what they write?

</comment><comment><USER69> _Effective_ written communication is remote work super power

<comment><USER70> that! I wrote something on the same lines [https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote- work-communication/](https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote-work-communication/)

<comment><USER69> I read it and I like it, thanks for sharing. Though I do hold the unpopular opinion that slack is antithetical to effective communication methods/mediums.

<comment><USER70> yes I agree

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The discoverability of written thought decreases with its quantity.

It comes down to knowing your sources, not relying on some Bacon number of reinforced echoes.

</comment><comment><USER72> Not everyone finds written comms as easy as everyone else.

absolutely +1 to keeping records, but as a form of communication it's not terribly equal.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I follow that statement. I can see an argument that text is not strictly better than verbal communication but, at worst, I'd say it's equal (for people as a whole, not for one person in particular). Some people are better at written communication while some are better at verbal.

<comment><USER72> For most people, I'll happily agree with you. From a dyslexic's perspective, being forced to only ever present one's ideas and thoughts in text is pretty restricive.

<comment><USER16> And that's fair.. for a dyslexic, written communication is worse. I wasn't trying to imply that, for all people, which medium is better varies for each individual. I was trying to say that, over the set of all people, which medium is better tends to vary by person. That neither medium is "better" for everyone.

<comment><USER72> +1 - we're in complete agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Except no one actually reads emails anymore.

</comment><comment><USER74> Finally, someone came up with a good wording for 'Slack is #1 productivity killer'.

</comment><comment><USER75> i find that i spend 3x more time explaining something through writing than through a quick chat

</comment><comment><USER76> except for Slack | Teams | its ilk

next question.

/me: an expert writer who sees no change on the horizon

</comment><comment><USER45> Agree with the headline. Good written communication is a requirement for a software development project. But I am not sure about all of his ideas in all circumstances. In particular in relation to a very small dev team and small client group. In terms of something different like for example an open-source piece of software on github, issue trackers are key.

However, for a small sort of private project. For example, if you have a very small team and can get people in a chat room consistently so that you can have solid conversations every day in there, that has worked better for me than using some kind of issue tracker. Especially in terms of dealing with clients or business-related team members. And maybe its really only for very small projects, like one or two developers, I don't know.

But for me, with most of the projects that I have been on my own building a product or tool for a client, the issue trackers and things like that worked against me and the project as far as I could tell:

\- People would seem to think it was their job to fill the board/tracker up with as many things as they could think of. This caused extra stress and tended to make me want to rush through things to get them out of the way. The biggest problem with that was that it took time away from the really important things. And it is very difficult to get people to give realistic priorities.

\- Sometimes, people would write critical information in the issue tracker or board, and I did not realize it had been updated or how critical it was. And so they operate with the assumption that they have communicated something, but actually I didn't see it until two days later.

\- When they have a place to put an infinite number of tasks, it encourages them to increase the scope of the project, without having a real discussion or necessarily even thinking the feature through.

For me when doing projects on my own (or maybe with a designer) for a specific small group, there is just a limited amount of stuff that I can realistically finish in a given time frame. So I actually will not allow an issue tracker or board and try to get everyone to show up sort of simultaneously in a chat room. Sometimes people cannot or will not do that, and in those cases sometimes a phone call can work. Or maybe they actually are capable of reading and writing async messages in the chat room (not very common).

Basically every few days I meet in the chat or phone or whatever with the client and discuss what I have been working on in the last few days, walk them through the updates to the application. So something is being delivered and tested by the client every week or even every few days. Then we specifically talk about exactly what is the priority for the next few days. If there is development work that needs to be caught up on, then there may not be any new features to work on. Or there may be a feature that has been in progress, and the client gets an update on that.

Often the client has ideas for new features. Instead of putting them in a board or issue tracker to pile up, when they bring them up, we decide whether they are now higher priorities than other existing items and will fit into the work load of the next few days. Or, I tell them to remind me later. There is no such thing as a task that I will "get to when I have time". I have the client focus on the next most important priority and/or I explain the ongoing dev work, and we work out like 2-5 days of work and that's it. There is no infinitely expanding list of things to get to later. If something he has been thinking about is really important, it becomes a priority as soon as the previous task is completed. We check if I implemented something correctly as soon as it is implemented. We don't have to refer to a database of things, because we just talked about it a couple of days before.

</comment><comment><USER77> Interestingly, I've been thinking about organization at work and I feel like there are many forms of async communications that should or could be merged, because of how common they are. We need to communicate announcements, ask for opinions on changes, document a process, list relevant steps to a change that is happening, ...

In my mind there are multiple goals a perfect system should have:

\- Must be easy to create a new "conversation" \- Must be possible to write long form content in a "post", where "post" is the first item in a conversation \- Must be able to have a meaningful conversation with replies to specific points \- Must be able to change the content of the "post" based on the discussion that happened (such that a "post" can be a poll, participants discuss options, and the final decision is summarized) \- Must be able to easily enter and exit the full conversation \- Must be able to easily link the full conversation, for referencing \- Must be able to set metadata (dates, relevant people, status, stuff like that)

We have many systems, but none really fits the bill:

\- Email is probably the worst, because you can't modify the original message, you can't link to it and you can't transparently enter the conversation if you weren't part of it initially. We've all seen the "adding XYZ to the loop" that provide 0 content to the conversation. There's also the whole issue about top- posting and lack of proper threading that make having a conversation difficult. Probably just a client issue rather than a protocol issue though \- NNTP is a step above, but ironically because it has remained niche the clients and the etiquette help having a proper conversation. Still doesn't fill the bill \- Ticket systems are paradoxically pretty good for this situation. They do contain the necessary structure for incorporating metadata, in all the various forms ingenuity can come up with.... sometimes too much ingenuity, such as the labels and fields and knobs that were needed for that project years ago are still here, cluttering a lot of space because most aren't actually needed anyway. Imagine using such a mess \- A wiki is nice, but the emphasis on structuring is detrimental for flows that go outside of documenting. Sometimes you just want a linear list of conversations ordered by date \- Google docs and associated are good for really long forms for the initial "post", but are not very good at structured conversation

Perhaps the best software, for all those use cases, is a forum software. I'm partial to the (old) reddit UX or the HN UX; remove the useless voting and it's almost the perfect way to communicate. The interface gives you the space to actually take time about what you want to say and properly articulate it. HN is a bit terse here, reddit gives you formatting helps to nicely present your ideas and makes reading it easier.

Only drawback is that they are text only, and sometimes you need to include non-text (a screenshot of the planned changes, a video of the flow to document, a map of the place you're discussing about, ...)

(If it is not clear already, I'm still sad at the death of Google Wave. 10 years later and it's still the future: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw))

</comment><comment><USER78> would be nice to use "they" or alternate between "he" and "she" in the post. Otherwise, it's a great post

</comment><comment><USER79> I wrote Emergency Remote[0] for companies thrown into remote due to the situation.

From my experience, it seems that the reason companies use sync communication and "emulating" an office is not because they don't understand the benefits of async, but because of the required discipline.

Fortunately, that discipline is required vastly more of the initiator of the conversation. This allows the recipient to quite easily refuse sync communication. This way employees can help each other out and get used to async.

[0]: [https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf](https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf)</comment>


Things that I can do to get the first 10 users for a free product - <AUTHOR>

There are a lot of material online ( in witch my Y Combinator contributed to significantly ) on how to build a product, grow a start up , hiring people , etc... I didn't find enough material on how to get the first 10 users to even land on your webpage( You need people to land on your page before they decide if it is a good product or not ) Some obvious ways are:
    google AdWords,
    facebook ads  ,
    sending it to friends and family,
    physically approaching people ( your market ) and telling them about the product.<p>Can you please share your experiences/ways on how get the first 10 users? <comment> c-rack There is a good list of places where to post your startup to get your first users:

[https://github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup](https://github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup)</comment>


Bing doesn't support SSL - <AUTHOR> https://bing.com/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: bing SSL certificate is wrong.

<https://bing.com>: subject=/CN=*.bing.com

<https://www.bing.com>: subject=/C=US/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: Bing doesn't support SSL on www.bing.com and has never publicized it as a supported feature. The submitter had to manually type <https://www.bing.com> into the address bar to generate this 'error'.

Bing does support SSL on ssl.bing.com and publishes various links on that sub- domain, such as <https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/home/mysites>

The fact that the <https://www.bing.com> redirects to the HTTP version should be enough to show that this a known, unsupported case on the primary domain. The behavior has been like that for years.

<comment><USER4> >TL;DR: Bing doesn't support SSL on www.bing.com and has never publicized it as a supported feature. The submitter had to manually type <https://www.bing.com> into the address bar to generate this 'error'.

Or use HTTPS Everywhere. Personally, I'd also like it if in future, web browsers would try HTTPS first and HTTP second.

<comment><USER5> I don't think browsers should assume that <http://blahblah> and <https://blahblah> refer to the same resource.

<comment><USER6> Why not?

<comment><USER7> Because it's up to the individual website administrator to ensure he published them both the same way.

I can construct a web server that sends version A of a site over normal HTTP, and version B of that same site over HTTPS.

In fact, sometimes I do that by accident. :)

It's a bad assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I made a site that checked for SSL cert expirations and misconfigurations, but I couldn't acquire any customers. I still think there's a business there somewhere, although maybe it really only sells as part of another product.

Edit: If anyone wants a script to check their certificates, here you go: <https://gist.github.com/bretwalker/5420652>. You'll just need to add in some sort of notification logic, especially for expirations, since they need to happen before a problem arises.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like something you could license to companies to use as a lead generation tool - like HubSpot's Marketing Grader <http://marketing.grader.com/>

<comment><USER8> That's a very interesting idea, Simon, and one that didn't even cross my mind.

I've since moved on to a new project. If anyone wants to talk about taking over the site, shoot me a message at bretwalker /at/ Google's email. It's Django and has some branding and a domain: [http://static.nyquistrate.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/certcia...](http://static.nyquistrate.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/certcian_logo.gif.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bing is important. It's a good search engine, comparable to Google's quality and size. And it's the only competition Google has in the US and most of Europe. (Sites like DuckDuckGo and Yahoo pass queries on to Bing). Dumb errors like this SSL problem are embarassing, but the larger frustration is how despite years of having a good product, they have so little market traction.

<comment><USER11> I didn't know that DuckDuckGo and Yahoo pass their queries onto Bing. Does anyone else have any information on that, it sounds really interesting.

<comment><USER12> If I recall correctly, DDG used to solely depend on Bing's Search API but now they use various sources including their own to compile the search result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neither does Hulu. <https://hulu.com/> Amazon redirects to HTTP: <https://www.amazon.com/> Netflix redirects to HTTP: <https://netflix.com/> Etc... Etc... Etc... Why pick on Bing?

<comment><USER14> I understand Hulu and Netflix but I have a hard time understanding why Amazon wouldn't support SSL. It does put a heavier processing load on web servers but you would think that if someone wants to encrypt their shopping traffic Amazon would be open to accommodating that.

It is not, by any means, trivial to find out what products someone is looking to buy and could be the basis of a social engineering hack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real question is, why were you on bing? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find something on google, so I decided to give it a try. Can't hurt. I wanted to find out if anyone has done a study on language confusion(the effect where Russians have a hard time getting good at Polish because they confuse Polish words with Russian ones). Still can't find it ;)

<comment><USER16> Try googling / binging "L1 interference".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks like someone pushed the wrong SSL cert to production:

      www.bing.com uses an invalid security certificate.

      The certificate is only valid for the following names:
        a248.e.akamai.net , *.akamaihd.net , *.akamaihd-staging.net

      (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

<comment><USER18> Australian Ebay (<https://www.ebay.com.au/>) has had the same problem for months, although I appear to get no response for <https://www.ebay.com>, so I'm not sure what their policy is on SSL access to the homepage.

I expect that Microsoft will fix Bing much more quickly.

<comment><USER19> Passed this on to relevant team to look into for you (I'm with PayPal myself, so not sure about eBay's SSL approach).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow. This has been going on for an hour now. It's such a simple fix, especially since one would _assume_ that they already have a valid cert somewhere (or that Akamai does). Yet they've had an hour of SSL downtime.

Does anyone know if Bing has any SSL-only clients? Like do any of their toolbars or built-in search widgets in Windows use SSL by default?

<comment><USER21> Easy fix? What the hell?

I don't like or use Bing services but when you get as big and complex as Bing, nothing is easy, it's not like you can open your text editor, modify one line, commit and push.

There so many other variables to take into consideration, by hurrying to fix, you could face all sort of vulnerabilities / other issues.

I'm not saying this error is acceptable, I'm saying it's ridiculous to say it's and easy fix without actually knowing anything, it might or it might now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've gotten a certificate error for over a year with Bing on HTTPS. I always just assumed that they, somewhat surprisingly, just didn't support HTTPS yet.

</comment><comment><USER23> Slightly off-topic: what's a good way to handle cases such as this where you have a wildcard certificate?

I'll be getting a wildcard certificate for a project and, never having used one before, I had assumed the certificate would be valid for an entire domain.

I understand from this situation that a wildcard certificate is relevant only to <https://*.example.com> and not the subdomainless <https://example.com>.

Assuming that to be the case, is having a wildcard certificate for *.example.com and a second certificate for example.com the solution? It'd be nice to have the entire domain covered by a wildcard certificate and not just all subdomains.

<comment><USER24> Typically a certificate issuer will grant you both when you buy a wildcard one.

This can be achieved via SAN (alternative names): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcard_certificate#Limitation>

<comment><USER25> Comodo's been good to me in this regard.

Incidentally, beware of RapidSSL and their "free www." SAN; they only grant it in certain specific and undocumented circumstances.

<comment><USER26> With RapidSSL if you order a cert for www.domain.com then it will also cover domain.com. But if you order a cert for domain.com or sub.domain.com then it will NOT secure the www.domain.com.

So basically make sure your CSR request is for www.domain.com if you want to also secure the root domain.

<comment><USER25> Bizarrely, this only works for second-level domains however, and isn't disclosed in advance.

Really, CAs shouldn't be throwing in "free bonus" SANs without customer authorization ever. It would be much better to have a place to enter the SANs, or a checkbox asking if I want "www." as well, or to apply to the parent also, or whatever. That would also make the process more apparent to the user in addition to being more secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not just Bing. I'm always accidentally going to <http://stackoverflow.com> & getting an error.

<comment><USER28> Shh, only MS bashing can go on in this thread

<comment><USER29> SO uses a MS stack so it's not too far off...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why should we take Microsoft's Internet efforts seriously when they continue, perpetually, not to do so, themselves?

(Actions speak louder than words.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Bing is normally not served over https, so this probably only affects a tiny percentage of the users, even though it looks bad here.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is the second major flub this year. Azure's cert expired in prod not many weeks ago.

<comment><USER33> Well, it is not really a flub of this year. Or even something specific to Bing (try <https://www.nba.com/> or <https://www.jetstar.com/>)

Basically Akamai is using the same ssl certifate on (most?) of its edge servers. The reason for that is that traditionally it is difficult to decide for a server that is serving multiple domains, which SSL certificate to show for a client -- the HTTP header, which contains the hostname is sent way after the certificate information has been exchanged.

A certificate can contain several hostnames (in the SubjectAlternativeName extension) - but that does not scale if you have a big number of sites for a number of reasons (re-signing the certificate all the time is a nuisance, browser behavior with certificates containing several thousand hostnames is kind of fun, etc.).

Nowadays there are solutions to that problem (using the Server Name Indication TLS extension -- which basically sends the desired hostname in the TLS exchange before the certificate is exchanged). However, the number of sites actively using SNI is very low - google is the only site known to me that is doing it (try accessing google.com with/without SNI and you will get completely different certificates).

The reason why SNI is not yet that much used is that client support is still a bit flaky. Afaik it is supported by all recent desktop browsers. However, I think the XP TLS stack does not support it (and there are still enough users on that), android only supports it starting with version 3.0, etc.

So - at the moment you basically still need a separate IP for each site (or at least one IP for sites that can share one certificate).

I don't know if akamai also supports custom SSL certificates. Facebook seems to use kind of an interesting mix between akamai and self-hosting - facebook.com itself seems to be hosted by facebook. However, if you use facebook over ssl and check the url of served profile pictures, you will see that they go to <https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net> (or similar) -- hence to one of the hostnames that is mentioned in the akamai edge certificates.

<comment><USER34> Akamai isn't using the same certificate on its edge servers, unless you mean the same customer certificate being replicated (in which case you are correct). Basically, Akamai maps each ssl certificate to a slot on the cache server, which is assigned to a map similar to the standard edge CDN. Each edge machine thinks itself the site. Each time a new certificate is issued by an Akamai partner CA or the customer's CA of choice, it is pushed out by Akamai to the ssl edge network.

SAN certs are an entirely different ball of wax. Akamai does support them, but there are some challenges getting them deployed.

Unfortunately, the deployment for any type of certificate with Akamai is a very manual process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- bing.com doesn't do SSL, never did except at ssl.bing.com (which doesn't actually do SSL anymore).

</comment><comment><USER35> Looks like it might be related to the reddit DDOS: [http://www.reddit.com/r/redditTraffic/comments/1coaer/201304...](http://www.reddit.com/r/redditTraffic/comments/1coaer/20130419_crazy_fucking_night/c9igsc4)

<comment> SG- No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Google should start a "don't get Bingle Berried" campaign like Microsoft's Scroogled.

<comment><USER37> Don't get Fucked in the ass by Microsoft _

<comment><USER36> No, not that. This => <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dingle+berry>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The real question is, is bing.com even supposed to be served over https?

<comment><USER39> With very few exceptions, everything is supposed to be served over HTTPS (or other secure protocols). Certainly something as sensitive as search traffic. Tell me your search queries and I'll tell you your interests, health problems, relationships, if you're happy in your job and what kind of porn you like.

<comment><USER40> That last one is where they get ya

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This just means that there is no redirect on www.bing.com via SSL. Bing.com (ssl) has a proper re-direct to non-ssl www.bing.com.

Most-likely an oversight, but it does suggest ssl isn't supported.

</comment><comment><USER42> Short Microsoft.

25000 more employees can't fix this kind of incompetence.

<comment><USER40> There's gotta be some kind of organizational size:responsiveness inverse metric for stuff like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is pretty embarrassing after their Azure SSL certification expirations issues just a month or so ago.

</comment><comment><USER44> For what it's worth I alawys had problems reaching bing.com when using openDNS.

</comment><comment><USER45> The extra cert dialogue box will really drive up traffic. #not

</comment><comment><USER46> People use bing?

</comment><comment><USER47> why would you use bing?

</comment><comment><USER48> HA!

</comment><comment><USER49> back up as of 8:42 CST

<comment><USER50> I'm still seeing it 9:50 EST

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I sincerely hope that this not some sick and twisted joke by Microsoft.

<comment><USER52> I think you're in the clear.</comment></comment>