Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Would you elaborate why?

It came across to me as a pretty good idea. To write this well requires a certain degree of introspection, and it allows co-workers to gain an understanding of how you work.



I think there is a risk of coming across as inflexible. A good manager adapts to the needs / strengths of their team members, and publishing a "this is how we do things here, deal with it" memo might send the wrong message.


It divulges a lot of one's personality. This kind of openness would require me to feel really at home in a company.

Coincidentally, that's also the reason I feel the piece was so interesting, when I'm normally more drawn to technical articles.


I wrote something about this pretty recently - a pitch/anti-pitch to these sorts of guides. I do think the tl:dr is that you need a high level of psychological safety in the team to make it workable. Although I think the act of writing one can be a useful exercise in itself, I certainly hadn't thought deeply about what my preferences are for work. It also gave me some ideas of what I could work on personally.

https://medium.com/better-programming/personal-user-manuals-... <- scroll down for the pitch/anti-pitch :)


Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Is this a company-wide thing at your workplace?


> This kind of openness would require me to feel really at home in a company.

Still, it's probably better to be upfront about this stuff than wait and hope other people will make the right assumptions.


Have you ever shared an office with a bully? I have, and any personal information will be mercilessly used in an endless stream of not-funny jokes.


No, but I have seen several highly diverse workplaces homogenize into wall-to-wall straight white men, and it was due to a lack of awareness about the kinds of questions in the article.

Some of that is probably my age perspective though. I'm only in my mid-thirties, so most offices I've worked in have had anti-bullying policies that swung to the draconian side.


Good relationships of any sort are founded on trust. You develop that by actually interacting with a person over time and getting to know things they wouldn't be happy to post to the front page of Hacker News.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: