Felt good to know that stuff is neatly documented somewhere, but since no one ever knows where that was, it was of little value and few ever read it. People still tapped on shoulders and repeated the same mistakes.
It baffles me that an established company like Atlassian can’t get something as fundamental as search right. I can’t even find the content I myself created at times.
We have since switched to Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com) and so far are having a better experience. It's as feature-packed, but the basics work as expected and are a lot more user-friendly.
Re-establishing a proper documentation culture in the team is still a challenge, but that’s not something a tool can solve.
> It baffles me that an established company like Atlassian can’t get something as fundamental as search right. I can’t even find the content I myself created at times.
i agree, indexing and searching could be improved a lot. their editing experience extremely good though.
We used to use Confluence but it always felt too bloated and cluttered. It was a pain to get people to contribute and even harder to find stuff because of how slow and broken the search was.
We have since switched to Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/) and are pretty happy so far. Refreshingly simple, lightweight, and focused on getting the essential features right. We are now moving away from Google Docs as well and trying to consolidate all knowledge in Nuclino. It's almost perfect for our needs, only a few nice-to-have integrations are missing (and will hopefully be added soon).
Finding the right tool is only half the battle though, getting people to actually use it and keep the content up-to-date is usually the real challenge. Switching to a more user-friendly tool certainly helps, but it isn't enough to create a culture of documentation.
I actually don't know if that detail is true or if it was added for dramatic effect in the HBO series. The official record seems to state that they simply didn't follow the approved procedures for the test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
There are all sorts of ways they messed up with that test, the design of the system in general, etc.
A lot was learned, some of it costly stuff that we as a species really didn't need to pay for again, and some things that were new and valuable as a result of failure that ethnically could never be intentionally replicated.
One of the better lessons might be to avoid deviating from pre-planned test procedures, and for every major step to have an 'abort' path (or two) for safely entering either safety or normal operating procedures.
I know what you mean. The Basecamp approach applies even if you don't have a physical office - we work remotely most of the time, but have similar "library rules" in place for Slack. Took some time to get people to follow them but it's not impossible.
I wish we could quit Slack altogether. It makes it too easy to people to disrupt each other's work. Unless the office is on fire, send me a well-formulated request instead of doing it one line at a time and flooding my screen with popups.
That office is mostly empty space, and with all the effort to noise damp one has to ask - why bother? Just add offices at that point. At Microsoft you could always chat in the halls and people would just close their doors.
That office plan, and 'Library Rules', are particularly stupid in a world of lack of thought. That is, it's worse than just not thinking about it at all.
3-5 people in the office at any given day? Just build offices, christ.
One of the founders must have had a particular itch to scratch is all, and it has cost the company money so that they could have the worst of all worlds
The 'Library Rules' are dumb because one of the prime reasons you need to make noise in an open office is to share a screen with someone, as you collaborate or problem solve or whatever. This is hard to do if you have to move to a quiet room because you can't move your monitor setup with you, or have the comfort and access of the things at your desk.
Even non-code discussions are easier at your own desk, with kbd and mouse for notes vs laptop and trackpad.
Not being able to talk above a whisper, or at all, at your own desk is a disaster.
I mostly work remote these days but "library rules" in anything but a limited area is silly. If I'm in the office, I have phone calls to participate in and people I want to chat with. If I want to have an extended conversation with someone, I'll (try to) find an alcove but there is zero point to my being in the office if I have to go somewhere private every time I open my mouth.
Yeah, I wonder how much of the disdain for open offices is more of a company culture issue rather a problem with open offices.
What causes people to whisper in libraries but talk loudly and disturb others in an open office plan?
Perhaps some segmentation of open office plans would also be interesting -- a "loud" zone, a semi-quiet zone and a silent zone. I don't know how workable this would be for teams unless you had hot-desking, which is something else people seem to hate, but still. Engineers who need to work on a difficult problem for a while can use the silent zone, while groups who need lots of communication and the perennial extroverts are free to use the louder spaces.
But its fun to talk in the halls! Or debug something verbally with someone at your computer. This is the worst of both worlds. All the drawbacks of a large open space and none of the communication benefits.
Even minimal noise damping would be awesome. We're in a big room in a bigger warehouse so add to the usual loud conversations a team of forklifts honking and beeping until 4PM every day.
Also gives me a pretty poor impression when I hear other sales people shouting over whoever I'm talking to. Feels like they are in some kinda boiler room selling me vapourware.
I think the experience with Confluence depends entirely on how it's run but I agree. Still not as bad as SharePoint.
I've recently discovered Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/) and rolled it out in our team in place of Confluence.
It's a pretty neat markdown wiki built on top of ProseMirror. There are some trade-offs (such as the lack of a self-hosted solution) but so far it made my life a lot easier: the UI is better, the search works as it should, the setup and maintenance are minimal.
If you're looking for a self-hosted solution, MediaWiki or DokuWiki might be better options.
Could really use a Dark theme. But so far looks pretty good.
We need something we could eventually use company-wide, and not many wikis are designed with non-technical users in mind. I'd be happy with just Markdown but a WYSIWYG editor is nice to have. Will keep testing, thanks!
Felt good to know that stuff is neatly documented somewhere, but since no one ever knows where that was, it was of little value and few ever read it. People still tapped on shoulders and repeated the same mistakes.
It baffles me that an established company like Atlassian can’t get something as fundamental as search right. I can’t even find the content I myself created at times.
We have since switched to Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com) and so far are having a better experience. It's as feature-packed, but the basics work as expected and are a lot more user-friendly.
Re-establishing a proper documentation culture in the team is still a challenge, but that’s not something a tool can solve.