Accidentally in Code

My latest in Quartz…

With a few other people, I run a Slack chat group for engineering managers. We’ve made some deliberate choices—for example, we don’t have a channel for #inclusion. Every so often this comes up, and we invoke our argument: Inclusion is central to good management, so all channels are inclusion channels.

We do, however, have a channel for #advice. This came out of trying to manage the way people are so ready to dispense advice in general, often lacking any context (which is why I personally try to avoid giving advice). We encourage people, in our code of conduct, to use the Gestalt principle (a way to communicate with people in a non-threatening way to support an environment where people can share and learn). But sometimes, people want advice. So we allow it.

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