I've worked in-person for three different startups. I've never ever witnessed one of those serendipitous "hallway conversations" that turned into a meaningful product. What I have witnessed are:

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— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) June 10, 2023

I’ve worked for startups, small companies and large companies. I’ve also never even once had or witnessed one of those almost-certainly-apocryphal productive hallways conversations happen ever. And that’s because they don’t.

This is just a ploy by the micromanagers and MBA losers to get us cooped up back in the office, doing unproductive shit like they do all day.

I’m a big fan of documentation. I think it’s my favorite boring thing to do after coding. It brings the business so much long-term value that every hour invested into documentation by anyone saves literally x100 productivity hours across the company.

When I started the department I work in had zero documentation. Not the first thing. Now we have many hundreds of pages of it, all used frequently.

It has saved countless thousands of hours. It’ll save countless thousands more. I personally have written much of those docs. All told, I probably spent a hundred or so hours on them. But it means many other people are 10-100x as productive as they otherwise would be, and don’t have to bother others to complete their work (which further reduces productivity greatly).

Everything your team does should be documented. I make it part of any new task I assign. Before a work ticket is closed, documentation must be created.