Communication: explain Perlow better

[amyjko]

I think the paragraph about the example ethnography that was conducted by Perlow could be explained better.  I had to reread that paragraph multiple times to understand what was going on.  To make it more clear, I think more specific details would be helpful, such as explaining that the expert members were called away from their team which was another problem in itself.  I also think it is important to explain whether those expert engineers were less productive in their original tasks or making the company less productive overall.  I still am unsure. I think the answer is both but I would have liked that stated more explicitly.  Additionally, the concept of stress was just thrown in at the end so possibly more elaboration on that.

For me, the big thing I'd like to have further explained is the short concept about how to locate the information that you might need as a developer. The example given was that it's easy to find out who wrote a certain piece of code or when it was completed, but it can be nigh impossible to figure out why that code was written. It essentially talks about how difficult it can be to find information that is inside someone else's head. While examples of knowledge sharing tools are later given and issues within modern communication practices is brought up, I would have liked to read about how to effectively communicate person to person; perhaps tips or examples of successful pair programming or meetings with cross-disciplinary experts that did well. The issue of interrupting and fire-fighting was one aspect that can be improved, but how to actually have that successful meeting is something that I think could be leveraged to make the contrast in quality that much better.

After reading Chapter 3 : Communication, I kind of wished a certain part of the paper had been talked about more / better explained. It was about having expert engineers fight the fires (immediately addressing critical problems). It was stated that when the experts were interrupted immediately to “fight the fires”, it made them less productive and actually disincentivized the rest of the organization. It deterred them from finding effective ways or preventing future disasters. I don’t really understand why that would happen and was hoping that this part could be better explained. Wouldn’t getting the critical issues out of the way as soon as possible help, why would it be ineffective?