[anal_reactor]

I'm a junior.

First I worked at a small company that was oriented towards remote work. At the beginning I would show up in the office, but the company had a policy "instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue I'll get back to later?", which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person. So I spent two years working remotely. Not gonna lie, that was amazing, I had work on one screen and porn on the other at all times.

Then I moved to a much bigger company that's remote-friendly. I make a point coming to the office every day, although never for full 8 hours, more like 3, and I'm slowly making some friends. There's people I can talk to beyond "howareyou howareyou", which is a huge thing, because we're social animals and as an immigrant, I just don't have the out-of-office social network most people do.

What I have noticed is that I'm always on much better terms with people I actually talk to, and in the office it's much easier to have these random chats about everything and nothing. These chats are incredibly important because they allow us to see coworkers as human beings rather than API calls.

A friend of mine lives with her boyfriend who's working fully remotely, the company doesn't even have an office in his area. She complained to me about the guy just not doing well in general. His entire social life is her, and that's not a healthy dynamic.

[mlrtime]

"instead of talking to me, can you write a message on public Slack channel, or even better, make a github issue"

Right because context switches are very expensive, and you are just one person. If everyone did what you did, the other end would be busy talking and not doing.

Instead, file your bug/report and give some indication of criticality. I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.

[anal_reactor]

> I understand why you don't like this approach but think of it from the other side's perspective.

I did and my opinion remains unchanged.

[ryathal]

A minor delay in progress for someone else to be unblocked is generally a win.

[atmavatar]

That depends on a lot of factors:

* How minor is the delay?

  The more senior the person being asked, the more likely they're working on something complex enough such that the delay incurred by an interruption is non-trivial.

* Is the person asking actually blocked?

  Often times, people get into a mode where they will interrupt others to ask questions they could have answered themselves with a little additional research.

* How important is the blocked task relative to the delayed task?

  More often, the person asking the question is more junior, making it likely they're working on more trivial tasks.  The person being asked, often more senior, is more likely to be working on more valuable tasks.  It's possible even a slight delay in the latter's task is a greater cost to the business than leaving the former person's task blocked.

As an extreme example: you don't want an intern interrupting someone trying to resolve a downtime event just so the intern can get unblocked on a throwaway project.

[anal_reactor]

Fantastic.

The problem is, having a well-organized and cooperative team massively outweights having a bunch of rockstar developers each pulling in their own direction, unless we're talking about the tiniest of organizations. And I'm not going to be on friendly terms with someone I'm not allowed to talk to.

[vundercind]

> which made me furious because I'm a naturally talkative person.

Huh. Every “I’ll just come over” or “can we hop on a quick call?” for something I’m 90% sure can be sorted out within 20 messages makes me want to go take a walk instead. Writing’s great because I can refer back to it. If it’s in a channel with the rest of the team, it keeps them up to speed on what’s happening. Unless we really need to screen share or something (it happens!) turning a few messages into a call or an at-desk conversation drives me nuts.