I'm trying to imagine a future where we all write this kind of user guide for ourselves - the first place that comes to mind for a depiction of such a future would be in a bookshelf between 1984 and A Brave New World
Just because you don't like an idea and can't articulate why doesn't automatically make it dystopian. IIRC the regimes in those books were denying individuality. This is the opposite of that.
The reasons that make me not articulate things in an obvious manner in my comment are pretty much the same reasons that caused my comment in the first place - thought processes are a very personal and intimate thing to me.
It came across to me as a pretty good idea. To write this well requires a certain degree of introspection, and it allows co-workers to gain an understanding of how you work.
I think there is a risk of coming across as inflexible. A good manager adapts to the needs / strengths of their team members, and publishing a "this is how we do things here, deal with it" memo might send the wrong message.
I wrote something about this pretty recently - a pitch/anti-pitch to these sorts of guides. I do think the tl:dr is that you need a high level of psychological safety in the team to make it workable. Although I think the act of writing one can be a useful exercise in itself, I certainly hadn't thought deeply about what my preferences are for work. It also gave me some ideas of what I could work on personally.
No, but I have seen several highly diverse workplaces homogenize into wall-to-wall straight white men, and it was due to a lack of awareness about the kinds of questions in the article.
Some of that is probably my age perspective though. I'm only in my mid-thirties, so most offices I've worked in have had anti-bullying policies that swung to the draconian side.
Good relationships of any sort are founded on trust. You develop that by actually interacting with a person over time and getting to know things they wouldn't be happy to post to the front page of Hacker News.
