by Serguey Shinder
I was in forty four channels and I swept all of them four times a day. Nine in the morning before starting, once after lunch, once at about half past four, and a last look in the evening, usually standing in the kitchen. It was not procrastination and it did not feel like a waste. It felt like the minimum diligence required to be a senior person in a company where things get announced in odd places.
Out of curiosity rather than suspicion I ran a timer on it for three weeks. The average was seventy minutes a day. Five and three quarter hours a week, which is a working day every fortnight and most of a working month across a year.
So I went back through a full quarter and looked for the occasions when reading a channel had produced an action I would not otherwise have taken. I found four. Three were minor. One was not: a database team announced a column type change in a channel I had joined for an unrelated reason, and our overnight import would have failed silently on it from the following Monday. I caught it because I happened to read that channel on a Thursday evening.
That one is the reason the habit existed. I had been running an insurance argument without ever once writing down the premium. Two hundred and eighty hours a year to avoid four events, one of which genuinely mattered. Put that way, it is not obviously a good trade, and it had never been put that way, because the cost arrived in three and four minute instalments and the benefit arrived as a story I could tell.
The actual fix took one afternoon. I worked out which four teams can break the things I am responsible for, went to each of them, and told them specifically what I needed to hear about, which is schema changes, endpoint removals, and anything touching the overnight import. All four said yes immediately, and two of them said they had assumed somebody was already being told. I left thirty five channels, kept nine, and read those twice a day in a fifteen minute block with the sweeping habit dismantled.
Nothing has been missed in the four months since, and I am fairly confident about that because the things I care about now arrive addressed to me.
What I underestimated for years is how reasonable the watching felt. Scanning is not a decision, so it never gets weighed against anything, and it feels like responsibility while asking almost nothing of you. Now, whenever I notice myself doing something so that I do not miss anything, I try to name exactly what the thing is, work out who already knows it, and ask them to tell me. Almost every time, the watching was standing in for a conversation I had not had.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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