[hinkley]

I have basically stopped eating lunch.

I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5.

What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.

[freehunter]

I started on a remote-only team about 6 years ago. For half of that time our only chat system was a 1-to-1 and you could do group chats but had to explicitly invite people and they had to accept. When we switch to Slack (although Teams or Riot or open source would have worked too) and had always-on chat rooms, things changed dramatically.

Prior to the change, I only “knew” coworkers I had traveled to clients with and spent time with in the same room. Now I “know” everyone who regularly participates in the water cooler chat. We have our serious chat room, our water cooler room, rooms for other teams so we can ask questions, DMs, gif support, everything. It’s really brought us closer together as a team. I couldn’t imagine working remote without a watercooler, all-team, anything-goes chat room.

[janesvilleseo]

100% agree. Working remote for about a decade. When we added slack before the company had teams for our group it completely changed the dynamic for the good. The company added teams right before COVID hit and it’s been a blessing. It has forced the entire company to adapt and adopt it quickly. It worked. I connect more frequently to nearly anybody I need to. I have more water cooler talks then ever.

[Izkata]

Oddly, our shared social chatroom was most active when we were all in the office. Over the past few months it's tapered off to the point where now there's a week gap between conversations.

[ralph84]

Ours has also tapered off over the last few months, not because people are remote, but because they're afraid of being called out for not being sufficiently woke. Easier to remain silent than try to appease the cancel mobs.

[chillwaves]

What would you possibly say at work that would get an accusation?

I've worked in plenty of jobs and this has never remotely been a concern for me, including for higher ed where Title IX is strictly enforced.

Just to be clear, you are claiming that not just you yourself, but also your coworkers are silent out of fear of reprisal?

[oblio]

If I'd have to guess, a bunch of these people were jerks and they hate being silenced...

[ralph84]

Case in point: If you don’t want to discuss politics at work you must be a “jerk”.

[notadev]

I don't talk about politics, religion, money, and most current events. Still have alright conversations.

[freehunter]

Yeah it’s easier to not say hateful things than it is to try to “appease the mobs”. So I guess that means if you’re not talking to your coworkers anymore, the only thing you could contribute to the conversation before was hateful things?

My team has very nice conversations about the weather, our pets, even video games we’ve played or movies we’ve watched. Nothing “woke” about it. If you’re worried about being canceled, maybe try saying something that has nothing to do with politics?

[rdtsc]

After 5 years or so working remote I noticed a few of the same things:

* Lunches got shorter, I eat then quickly go to the home "office" to read something or respond to someone.

* Time I spend working went up on average. It's somewhat hard to stop working in the evening.

* The home "office" is right there so sometimes it's too easy to not go in and finished a few things. Two or three hours later, I am still there finishing a few things.

* Not as much small banter with the coworkers.

All that said, it is still a lot better than working in the office. I can focus better, I can turn off the messages and notifications if I need to force interactions to be asynchronous. Not need to burn gas and time and nerves commuting. I don't see myself going back to working in an office environment.

To fight the temptation to do a "little bit more work", I shut everything down, turn the laptop and the displays off. Shut the door to the office closed and that's it. It's a small thing but it helps.

To build rapport with coworkers, find one or two coworkers who you enjoy talking to and engage in some small talk. See if they want to chat a bit about a pull request but then ask about their day. If they are not interested or busy you should be able to tell, but if they want to tell you about a crazy thing that happened the other day or share something, it might be easier if it is initiated as a work call then build on that.

> I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.

There is more coldness, no doubt, however, if the company is already all remote it just becomes the new baseline. And being kind and assume the best from people is something to work on and put a bit of extra effort into. Sometimes inserting silly "ah"s, "hmms", and emojies here and there in the conversation might seem unprofessional but it helps make things more informal and it substitutes for non-verbal communication to some extent.

[kerkeslager]

You recognize the problem, now fix it.

Make a habit, each week, of spending 15 minutes making small talk with every member of your team. As them how they're doing, how work is going, how the family is, whatever. If you have 8 people on your team, that's 2 hours. That's a very small cost to pay for a happier, healthier team that works smoothly.

As a contractor I think it would be totally justified to bill for this because of the value it provides, but I've never had the guts to try billing for it. Still, I don't feel resentful about doing it for free because I don't just view it as part of my job, I view it as part of my responsibility as a human as well. We've gotta look out for each other.

[jovdg]

Funny - there was no problem, but now you created one (in assuming he should work from home).

And you create artificial solutions. I don't understand.

[jovdg]

Sorry, wrong thread

[t-writescode]

I strongly recommend ‘random’ rooms in your shared chat messenger, or a way to make random rooms in whatever communication infrastructure you have. They’re vital for maintaining social interactions

[Balgair]

Virtual Happy Hours also help. They don't have to be booze focused.

[Corrado]

Or look at another solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23928666

My team was becoming more and more remote even before the Covid-19 lockdown and a constant, real-time connection is something that we were exploring.

[schwartzworld]

I struggle to think of something I'd like to have in my home less than an always-on camera.

[codazoda]

Can you explain random rooms for those of us that are not familiar? Just rooms for random chatter, like watercooler?

[phamilton]

My favorites (company of about 100 people):

  #random
  #hot-takes
  #woodworking
  #home-improvement
  #pictures-and-videos
  #eli5-tech

And many more.

[draebek]

I like these channels a lot. I have to ask, though, doesn't #hot-takes end up getting people in trouble? Like HR trouble? Or at least stuff like starting political flame wars between colleagues?

[phamilton]

#hot-takes is pretty fun. Some recent examples:

"The imperial system is awful compared to metric, but Farenheight is a better temperature scale for humans than Celsius."

"soft-close hinges/slides are a worthless and annoying novelty in modern cabinetry. they feel worse to open and closing a drawer without slamming it isn’t that hard"

"Cartoon Network was way better than Nickelodeon in the 90s-00s. Both of them win over Disney Channel any day"

"email should be banished, just like faxes and cheques. it’s an extremely inferior and unsuitable medium for how we communicate online these days"

"cucumber is an overrated and is only good in gin and tonics"

Basically, nothing is actually of consequence there, but people get fired up and have strong opinions. It's a fun interaction.

[draebek]

OK, good deal, I am very pleased to know that it's all acceptable behavior. Thanks for the detailed reply. :)

[ace32229]

Hot takes don't have to be political. Sport (X team deserve to win more than the current leaders), food (flats are better than drumsticks), etc.

[draebek]

I fully agree, but in an office of 100 people, I'm surprised everyone else agrees.

[swensel]

Why not just chat with your coworkers on Slack or whatever your company's messaging platform is? I'm still having the same conversations online that I would in person.

[ghaff]

When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)

[griffinkelly]

One of the biggest QoL improvements for me has been not traveling. I enjoy visiting a new city every once and a while and meeting new people for work, but now in retrospect, my overall work life balance has significantly improved with no business travel.

[hinkley]

If they did a better job of making sure you got a chance to see the city instead of the inside of a hotel, a taxi, a convention center, and office, then I think it would be different. Young people get suckered into it because they don't know yet that they're in for something worse than not going at all; being moment's away and not being able to take advantage of it.

My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after.

He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.

[ghaff]

If you have the control and are in a position to spend the time (which may well depend on family situation), it's partly a function of making the time. Which I've usually done when practical. The timing is not always practical but, in normal times, I've made a point of tacking on personal time to work trips. At the moment, I'm sorry I didn't extend one or two of my early 2020 trips more, but who knew?

[ghaff]

Traveling a lot is what I really miss--for all that I complain about it. I was hoping that I could at least do personal travel relatively freely in the fall but that seems a non-starter. I definitely need to figure out a Plan B if, at some point, I can reasonably travel for myself but events are all still shut down.

[simlevesque]

I did this very often for a long time.