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by sleepychu 1057 days ago
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.
1 comments
mr_tristan 1057 days ago
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.

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sleepychu 1057 days ago
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.

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