[mr_tristan]

I'm in a similar boat, working remotely since 2017. I don't even have kids, and just enjoy my local parks with my dogs, my wife, etc. My social interaction tends to not involve work, which I actually think is healthy, and gets me away from the echo chambers I've experienced in major tech hubs.

My biggest wish, or obstacle, is finding a team that truly values writing. So many times I've sat in meetings where the discussion largely focuses on everyone just clarifying their own ideas. Or status meetings. It's led me to believe that a lot of "in office is better" folks just value the instant gratification of face-to-face conversations.

I suspect HN's a community of early adopters, but I'd be curious how that actually plays out over time.

[sleepychu]

My team values writing . We killed our meetings for 2 weeks to see which ones were too painful to live without and retros are the only ones we took back.

We've shifted our work discussions almost entirely to async threads on our ticketing system, we frequently hand tickets over between timezones and our manager types can find out what's going on to the nearest couple of hours in a few minutes any time they like. If we need sync conversations (which does happen of course) we record the outcome for async consumption.

We do frequent pairing, it can be quite pleasant to spend quite a while on the phone doing work when you don't need to sit in 15 hours of meetings a week!

Honestly I'm not sure I could go back. Standups for sure would be a huge turnoff for me at any new job.

[mr_tristan]

That sounds about ideal to me.

Any tricks or issues you've had to figure out while pairing? My thought was just "assign a couple of people to a non-trivial ticket and see what happens". But I'm curious if that's really naive.

[sleepychu]

Biggest trick is taking breaks, it is so easy to push past when you'd really have liked to stop for lunch because you think you're almost there or skip your usual break for a coffee. Set timers if you need to. I tend to rely on my partners to remember to ask for breaks or suggest breaks when they seem distracted or like they are flagging.

We update assignees to reflect when more than one person is working on something but we never assign work to individuals or pairs. We use an aggressive WIP limit of engineers/2+1 to prevent a ton of in flight tickets but other than that we're quite free to move around as long as we're moving the stuff on the board right-wards.

I think that's a thing that contributes to our success at pairing actually. Since we all value schedule flexibility quite highly we get on well with pairing a bit when we happen to have synchronized working time and working on independent subtasks when that is more convenient for us.

https://tuple.app/ - this tooling helped a ton, it's expensive but worth it to reduce the friction to start a pairing call to 0. Pairing on zoom, slack, meets, etc. is all much more painful. VS Code LiveShare esque things are free and can probably work as well with some discipline.

[alphanumeric0]

I have a coworker who creates work tickets for me and a fair bit of my work time is spent deciphering what they meant in their tickets.

It's not uncommon for me to interview him on almost every ticket, writing extensive notes with clarifications on his instructions and to fill in gaps.

I don't see anything necessarily wrong with having to write notes. I think that's part of a healthy work process. I just think it happens too often.

It's partly due to the fact we do not have a very organized system, but also due to him not valuing writing as a tool to enhance his work.

[Scramblejams]

FWIW Amazon emphasizes the importance of good writing. Not so remote anymore, though.

[intrasight]

"writing"? They no longer teach it in schools and no longer value it in the workplace. And the two are likely related.