How Staff+ engineers can benefit from lurking in many chat rooms

This post assumes you’re working in an environment with heavy use of chat applications. If the majority of your team collaborates in person, this advice is not applicable.

Pros:

• Exposes you to numerous discussions, allowing you to piece together macro context that translates into shipping more correct software and architectural designs.
• You have opportunities to share context with (or unblock) engineers and non-technical folks, answer questions, route folks to subject matter experts, and connect with folks you haven’t met.
• You become a go-to on particular domains because of your exposure and acquired knowledge. Some folks read a lot of RFCs for a similar purpose.
• You’re able to piece together problems (tech or people) affecting multiple engineers or teams, which allows you to uniquely identify issues that could affect the delivery of cross-team initiatives.

Cons:

• This can take up a considerable amount of time if you’re not careful.
• Prolonged exposure to many streams of discussion may make it hard to focus since you’re so reactive to conversations. You may become hypersensitive to new messages and want to jump at the chance to see what was discussed.
• You run the risk of solving problems that others should solve. You might step on the toes of subject matter experts or have the folks become reliant on you to unblock them.
• There’s a lot of noise. You might have bots sending messages, or alerts going off in the room, or nuanced chatter as an offshoot from a meeting you weren’t in.

Despite the dangers/risks, having broad exposure of what’s being discussed in your org is a great way to keep a pulse on the business and find opportunities for impact.