[rethab]

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.

By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating yourself even more. While it can be distracting to jump on a call while you actually meant to focus on some coding, it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review (yay! asynchronous!).

[Quothling]

I agree with your take on working remote and how it can hinder spontaneous "group creativity", though I'd argue that the loss of the smoke break did a lot more damage to this than remote work. With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time.

It's always some project manager or business process or whatever person who wants to talk about something they don't quite understand on behalf of someone from the business. I regret never doing the statistics on it, but if I had to guess I'd say that 9/10 times they could have simply forwarded the email from the "someone" instead of being the middleman. I have no idea why anyone would ever want to do a "quick call" without telling someone the reason first. I'm perfectly fine with taking a call with a co-worker who wants to discuss something they're not sure about, but then they'll ask me "hey, can we talk about X because I'd like your input". Which isn't a "quick call" in my book. I don't mind meetings either, but I dislike meetings which are solely there to make pseudo workers or bad middle managers feel like they accomplish something. If there are more than 3 people attending a meeting then you can be pretty sure it'll be a waste of time. If there is no agenda you're going down the road of the "quick call" which is essentially that initiator hasn't done their due diligence beforehand.

[bartread]

> With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time.

I don't know about that. I tend to find that incoming "quick calls" with peers, even where they've turned out to be anything but quick, tend to be at least reasonably useful. People do always ask first as well, rather than calling out of the blue.

Overall though, I find working as an engineer at home to be an isolating, and increasingly depressing experience. I really like team I'm working with at the moment but we're scattered to the four winds and barely get to spend any time together, so I'm keeping half an eye out for any roles that are local and might involve a bit more facetime.

When I left my last role for the last 3 - 4 months I was going in 2 - 3 times/week after a handful of us made a pledge to do so and, honestly, it's the happiest I've been at work since the beginning of the pandemic.

I wouldn't say I regret leaving - it was definitely time to move on to something new - but I think that experience, versus how I feel at the moment, is somewhat telling.

[Quothling]

I'm almost always in the office. I basically only work from home when I'm going to do something that isn't work where it would be inconvenient for me to leave the office. Like if I have a dentist appointment at 11 am, or the daycare has some event at 2pm... That sort of stuff. It's not that I mind working from home, it's that I prefer working with people. That doesn't mean I don't get "quick calls" though. Even from people in the building... I guess that maybe some of the "quick calls" from people who work from home may actually be because they're a tad lonely now that I think about it.

It takes 15 minutes on a bike to get to my office though. When it took me an hour I worked from home quite a lot.

[tankenmate]

Indeed, when I want to do a "quick call" to get pointers on something, or to clarify possible implications of technical choices I'll always send a message on a platform / channel that can be muted with some text like "i need your input on X, give me a call when it suits". That way the callee can chose to mute and/or choose a time that doesn't interrupt their workflow, but also give them the opportunity to contemplate the issue. This way the other person is in the right frame of mind to get to the meat of the issue, get a quicker call, and most importantly get the right direction / decision without hampering productivity.

[doix]

> though I'd argue that the loss of the smoke break did a lot more damage to this than remote work.

Eh, coffee breaks serve the same purpose as a smoke break in my opinion. I'd guess nowadays the amount of coffee drinkers is probably the same as the number of smokers back in the day.

Interestingly, in my experience, a "quick call" has been something where the other person doesn't want an email to get forwarded. That's why they don't include the subject in the message/meeting invite. Usually some political maneuvering to try and get ownership of a project or push off a failing project to another team/organziation.

[Quothling]

I guess it's down to personal experience but I've never gotten much out of "going to the water cooler / coffee" breaks. There was something magical about the smoke break where you had to go outside and talk for a few minutes. I've never been a smoker but I usually joined people on those breaks. You can do the same with a short walk and talk, but those aren't something you do every hour or two.

> Interestingly, in my experience, a "quick call" has been something where the other person doesn't want an email to get forwarded. That's why they don't include the subject in the message/meeting invite.

I think there is certainly some of this.

[sensanaty]

First off: Are water coolers even a thing still? At least in NL we just bring our own bottles and use the tap to refill it :p

Second, I've not once in my life had a productive "water cooler" conversation. Not a single time, it's pretty much always just socialization about literally anything other than work. Same with lunch, people don't want to talk about work during their free time, and they don't. I've certainly never heard of anyone having a sudden eureka moment spontaneously like that either, and if they do these days they'll just post it in slack so that people can refer back to it rather than it disappearing into the ether as soon as the convo ends.

As for the idea thing, I can't say I've ever had many such a drastic PR where the approach was completely 180 degrees from what the PR is doing, and even in the rare occasions those do occur, both parties are usually more than okay with then hopping onto a short (meaning max 15 minutes, not some hour long monstrosity of a "quick chat") call to align.

[js8]

> Second, I've not once in my life had a productive "water cooler" conversation.

I just realized it's worse than that. If the old adage on innovation "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" is true, then water cooler simply cannot help much. Then, what you need for innovation (and not just a warm fuzzy feeling of a possibly good idea) is actual time to work on it, not a water cooler.

[dta5003]

On the other hand, with "99% perspiration" the water cooler is essential to prevent dehydration.

[probably_wrong]

> First off: Are water coolers even a thing still? At least in NL we just bring our own bottles and use the tap to refill it :p

I know of two cases where office water coolers are super useful: in areas with high temperatures where cold water is much better that the warm water coming out of the tap, and (if your model supports it) for getting a cup of hot water for tea. I've also seen them used in areas where the tap water tastes funny, but that's more of a patch.

[goralph]

I’ve had plenty of productive “water cooler” conversations. Especially with people from other teams, as we don’t interact with each other much. Cross pollinating ideas in a large organisation is conducive to spontaneous creativity.

However, neither of our statements are very useful as they are just anecdotes, a result of our personal experiences.

[stevenAthompson]

As you say, these are just ancedotes. There have been studies though.

Even if you subjectively "feel" that spontaneous creativity is increased, these chats don't make companies more profitable. So I'm guessing that this "creativity" doesn't have much actual value, and forced in person work certainly has a high cost to the employee and society.

Hard to justify the cost/benefit.

[prmoustache]

That is not incompatible with adding some context in the "quick call invite". Even when I was working from the office, sometimes I would have to say no to someone who was reaching out to me or bumping into me in front of the water fountain because I was in the middle of something. In that case I would just ask to send me a message with some context and I would go back to him/her when I had more time to dedicate on that.

[repeekad]

Maybe not incompatible but certainly diminished, the idea is you randomly stumble upon someone’s work or ideas who you wouldn’t have otherwise talked to if it needed to be scheduled, personally I think lunch in person is where this shines the most

Productivity doesn’t go down with fully remote work, but I think the kind of creativity that organically comes from ideas being constantly shared and discussed does

To be clear, I don’t think it’s always people’s job to be creative, and company’s should absolutely have roles for people who can work remotely who just join scheduled meetings and execute “the plan”

[Olreich]

Innovation is about attention, not ideas. If you want to encourage that, you need to give folks a forum to share their ideas that they feel safe and supported. If your team is good at that in person at lunch, then having an “ideas” meeting with the folks who would be at lunch would work for that. If your team is bad at that, there’s likely some folks who don’t embrace the new ideas at your ideas forum and until you get them fixed, the folks with ideas aren’t going to bring them up for fear of looking dumb or whatever.

I’ve worked remotely and had a great time innovating, and I’ve been in person and had a terrible time innovating. It has always come back to giving folks a comfortable forum to share ideas and not rejecting them.

[prmoustache]

Many fully remote teams or companies host regular more laid back online events.

Where it doesn't work is in hybrid offices because people showing up at the office won't want to connect to some random videocall to do what they do all day every day.

[space_oddity]

Exactly, providing context in quick call invites can make a big difference, even in a remote setup

[mewpmewp2]

The problem is all of those acts take you out of flow state. I don't want and I can't randomly brainstorm when I am deep into coding. Even if I have to go take a quick water I would try to do it as quick as possible to continue with the problem I am focused on and I couldn't pay attention to the random conversation or brainstorming at a cooler.

[prepend]

Flow state is really powerful, but it’s not constant. I don’t want to be in flow for 40 hours per week. And to tell the truth if I get a few hours of flow a week, I’m lucky.

So I don’t want to shut the door on any interactions in the unlikely chance that it interrupts me in my optimal state.

What I like to do is block off “deep work” in my calendar a few times a week. Then people can think about if they want to interrupt.

This has let me look at these “quick call” or “hi” messages as just part of being human and having a pleasant team where people are happy to interact rather than dings to maximum team productivity.

[mewpmewp2]

Unfortunately as of lately my professional life has been terrible for flow state due to various reasons related to working in a corporation. So I might consider switching jobs. Interruptions, blockers, depending on others, etc.

But I love being in flow state, luckily I can still do it with my side projects. With side projects without being interrupted I can easily spend the whole day coding and at the same time building 10x to 100x as much as at a corporation job. Of course it's less realistic in a large company to have it, but I just wish my actual work was like that.

Maybe if I could make one of my side projects to bring in enough, I could just do that. I would say that would be a dream.

> This has let me look at these “quick call” or “hi” messages as just part of being human and having a pleasant team where people are happy to interact rather than dings to maximum team productivity.

It just depends on the human type I guess. Extraversion vs introversion.

[ath3nd]

> But I love being in flow state, luckily I can still do it with my side projects. With side projects without being interrupted I can easily spend the whole day coding and at the same time building 10x to 100x as much as at a corporation job. Of course it's less realistic in a large company to have it, but I just wish my actual work was like that.

Unpopular opinion: a very small team of skilled programmers that have experience working together and are often/continuously in flow (whether alone, or pair programming), can 10x/100x outpeform multiple teams in a large corporate setting.

[mewpmewp2]

I definitely agree with that, and I have been on both sides of the coin, with a little team doing a lot of projects very quickly and also a corporation job where things move very slowly. Also having done so many side projects.

The unfortunate usual thing is though that the jobs that pay a lot usually involve a lot of people. Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not proven yet, but when it actually is proven and will start to make a lot of money, there will be a lot of people hired and which breaks what it had initially.

And the more people and teams you put on something the slower the pace will be per developer, for sure.

There are moments in time in a lifecycle for a start up or a business, where there is that golden point, but it always seems temporary.

[ath3nd]

> Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not proven yet, but when it actually is proven and will start to make a lot of money

What if we stop at making a lot of money in a proven business, and don't hire more unless absolutely necessary? Keep the team small and lean, retain the talented people who brought you here via profit sharing, and just...relax?

I am surprised that this model is almost non-existent.

[jakupovic]

This is much better and normal rather than the bs the original author is proposing where they are the main character and everyone caters to them

[RamblingCTO]

Maybe "flow state" is not the most important thing?

[mewpmewp2]

To whom? For my sanity and productivity that's the most important at least.

I only enjoy working when I am in that flow state captured by the problem without having to worry about interruptions.

This is when I provide most actual value and also get most enjoyment out of work myself.

Everything that takes me out of it feels like annoying and frustrating interruptions. And usually I have to then try to not show my frustration and act like I am happy to do small talk or whatever, so I wouldn't seem rude.

[DannyBee]

"To whom? For my sanity and productivity that's the most important at least."

Optimizing for you vs the team is often not the goal.

"This is when I provide most actual value and also get most enjoyment out of work myself."

In most companies, it's much more valuable to have a team productive than a single individual, even if it comes at a cost to the individuals.

IE Assume a team of 10, and that working like you suggest provides 1.5x productivity for you, but you working like this cost 0.15x to each other person on the team because you are slower at responding, etc. If it had no effect on anyone else that would be super weird (it would mean nobody depended on anyone, etc. Basically that being a team didn't matter).

Let's assume when you don't work like this, it cost nobody else anything, but is really crappy for you (0.6x)

With you working like this, team productivity is 1.5x+(9*0.85x)= 9.15x. Without you working like this, team productivity is 0.6x + 9x = 9.6x.

Obviously it's different at different numbers and tradeoffs, but optimizing for individual productivity, when it costs things for teams, can often end up a net loss. Not always of course.

You can argue it costs nobody else anything but i think that would honestly be a silly argument. We should admit there are positives and negatives to the tradeoffs here, and sometimes the aggregate works out and sometimes it doesn't.

[ath3nd]

For a developer, arguably "flow state" is arguably the most important thing. Provided, that is, that requirements are clear and people are in sync what should be worked on.

What do you think is the most important, if not flow state?

[satyrnein]

Well, you kind of assumed it away in your second sentence, but alignment is more important than individual productivity. And unfortunately, meetings, interruptions, and other communication are the best tools most teams have for that.

[ath3nd]

> And unfortunately, meetings, interruptions, and other communication are the best tools most teams have for that.

In my experience, once people know each other well (whether via direct face to face communication, or via observing each other's slack messages and PRs), it's much more efficient to put things in writing.

Then everything is in the open, for everyone to see and discuss/comment on. People can go back over previous decisions, people can see the context over why something was done, people can check previous votes. And, most importantly, people can do so when they need to do so, preserving their individual flow state.

By the way, when I said "flow state", I also mean the team's overall flow state, not only ICs.

E.g if we break down a feature in two parts, can we efficiently sync so the parts we make fit well together. Do we pair program, do we each take our chunks, how often do we sync and how, that's also "flow". My point is that "flow" here is still the most important thing for developer productivity. If you want to be doing your own part of the task, but I keep interrupting you with "hey, got 5 min", obviously something is wrong in our flow.

What is more, I can't be convinced that allowing these interruptions is the proper way, the price of achieving flow. I see that more as a symptom that we didn't agree on the ground rules, and that's where our flow goes wrong. Maybe we can batch the multiple 5 min interruptions into longer planned sessions, with agendas, where we go over your concerns and questions, which you spend the time to formulate and put on paper. That way we have a focused time with an agenda and we both can prepare for it, and there are no context switches for the rest of the workday.

I think the problem is that you consider "alignment" a thing on its own, but to me it's merely one of the components needed to achieve a good flow. In experienced teams where members are attuned to each other's communication styles, and respectful of each other's time and attention span, alignment doesn't necessarily need to be attained by meetings and interruptions.

Hence my point still stands that flow (individual and team) is the most important thing for developer productivity (and happiness)

[DannyBee]

Team and organizational productivity.

Teams are not a simple sum of independent productivity of individuals. (If they are, it implies they don't need to be a team, since nobody is dependent on anyone else)

[danaris]

You say that like it's not possible to have a balance—have enough meetings and communication to properly coordinate the team, while still leaving each individual enough uninterrupted time to get plenty of flow-state work done.

The posters above advocating for flow state aren't saying anywhere that they don't want to have any communication with the team. They're saying they need the flow state to get their own work done. That's fully compatible with agreeing, as a team, that there are certain times when you don't interrupt your teammates short of an emergency—and other times when everyone's fair game, and still other times for regular scheduled meetings.

So many of the "quick calls" could just as easily wait until tomorrow, or a scheduled block of "interruptible time" at the end of the day. Saying "But I need to interrupt you now!" during a time designated for deep work means that you're optimizing for your individual productivity rather than the team's; instead, you could write your question down for later, and switch to a different task for the time being, or work around it, or research it yourself, or a dozen other possibilities.

[ath3nd]

While that is true, good team members don't interrupt each other and make sure they maximize both their individual and team interactions.

"Hey, you got 5 min" all the time is a symptom of bad communication and bad team flow. It means lots of things are not clear, often, things that can be put in a knowledge base, or batched into a longer conversation.

The price we pay as an organization when team members switch context is high, and if your culture is a culture of constant context switch, then it's not a good culture. Let's not normalize interruptions as "the price to pay" for being in a team. We can be in a team with better dynamics than that.

[LunaSea]

In my experience forced online water cooler talk has never worked and was always incredibly awkward and boring.

[axitanull]

Surely the C-suites of the company will employ whatever brilliant ideas that we talk over the water cooler. The water cooler is the fountain of innovation after all.

Perhaps they should put all the water coolers in the executives' offices, so they can listen to all the brilliant conversations that take place at the water cooler.

[DannyBee]

To be fair, when i worked at IBM Research (Watson), there were collaboration areas at the end of each hall.

They got used quite often, and there are plenty of times where someone noticed another team or person working on something and discovered it applied to what they were doing and collaborated.

One example from an area i know well - if you look at static single assignment form for compilers, which is the basis of all optimizing compilers these days, two people came up with the static single assignment part, but had no idea how to create it fast , and ran into some others whiteboarding control dependence for other reasons, and realized that it solved their problem.

This is why the paper (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCyt...) has five authors and reads like one written by two different teams :)

I think the better argument is that it's not how newer generations seem to collaborate or operate, not that it never worked at all.

It definitely did work in the past.

[LunaSea]

Paid work holiday trips or conferences could simulate this missing social element for remote teams.

Ironically enough it would be by bringing them back together (but maybe in a more fun way than a regular office).

[refurb]

You've never been in an office and had a productive, random interaction with a coworker?

Like, never?

I've had it happen on a regular basis. I see someone and suddenly remember to tell them "oh, I did some work on that long ago, I'll share it with you" or you overhear a conversation about a topic you didn't know they were looking at?

[LunaSea]

> You've never been in an office and had a productive, random interaction with a coworker?

I absolutely did have these interactions but simply not online.

[alex_suzuki]

Same. I have fond memories of working in a small team (~8 engineers) in a single room around 2010-ish. We'd often just walk to each other's desks, read the body language and ask each other "what are you working on?" and just engage in these unscripted, natural discussions that may have resulted in a pair programming session, or a cigarette outside accompanied by some good old-fashioned complaining about management.

Don't get me wrong, I think working remotely and home office are great. But something was undeniably lost, at least for me.

[Yizahi]

Walking to someone else workstation is a different thing from the so called "water cooler talk". When you go to or simply turn to the nearby team member (or even far away) you initiate a conversation one way, so you judge when a person is not busy and ask him/her. And then discussion happens. This is not unlike a call to that same person (you can ping him in chat to clarify if he is busy) and in general is a close enough substitute for office, at least remembering that for that small quality of life improvement every person mush pay with full 30 awake days per years of wasted time for commute.

But the original proposition by the RTO managers is different. They posit that such spontaneous talks happen in a place different from any workers workstation, e.g. watercooler or kitchen etc. That is a two way conversation which to happen much check the following - both (or more) persons mush happen to go to the same place at the same time, and they both must have a topic to talk about in that particular moment. And those linkedin propagandists claim that a lot of such talks are supposedly highly technical about the project itself. Which is honestly never happens in my limited anecdotal experience.

[makeitdouble]

I think the biggest change with online communication is moving these random encounters into peering into what other teams are doing, or what they're discussing.

For instance we had someone from a completely unrelated team bump into a project thread discussion our firewall rules, and coming up with the proposed changes he was working on and wanting to brainstorm something that could work beyond his team.

You'd need an incredible level of luck to bump into that precise discussion at a water cooler, and it would require a super broad call to get people to gather on that subject the "normal" way. But having most communication in Slack, indexed and accessible cross-team gives incredible opportunities for these kind of interactions that would be just impossible on the previous office culture.

[Yizahi]

Random - yes. Productive - no. Also never observed it on my big project. How would it even work with a member of a separate team working on totally different subsystem of the project?

[TeMPOraL]

IDK, I spent plenty of time around a watercooler and I don't recall something like this happening even once for me or people within my earshot.

The one thing I saw that actually works like that metaphorical watercooler is going to a bar and drinking together, or engaging in a similar activity that involves relaxing and unwinding. Of course, that's not something people feel comfortable about, plus it comes with its own set of issues and exclusions around time, family and alcohol, but that's the one type of situation I saw where people actually have those serendipitous productive interactions managers dream about.

[theshrike79]

You missed the "online" bit in the comment you replied to.

[prepend]

Forced is horrible. But consensual is great.

[Vinnl]

I think they meant "forced" as in "artificial" (as in: "hey, let's start a video call to pretend we're at the watercooler"), rather than "mandated by management".

[Vinnl]

Yeah, I know there's people who are able to make it work, but not me, in general.

I can get a fairly similar experience on the org chat, though, and sometimes at the start or ends of meetings. And just meeting up in real life every now and then helps a lot.

[axitanull]

Why is it that every time someone tried to push RTO agenda in a thread, "water cooler talk" has always been pushed like it is one of most important thing in a job?

Is "water cooler talk" the new "open office layout"?

[thyristan]

> Is "water cooler talk" the new "open office layout"?

Yes. It used to be that "water cooler talk" was considered an unproductive waste of time. But for people pushing an RTO agenda, it suddenly became the go-to argument for RTO. Very often, the same PHBs use this to push RTO, who back in the day complained about people doing "water cooler talk" on company time.

At the same time, open office or cubicle layouts are proven to be detrimental to work output, concentration, health and happiness. But same as RTO, it is not about any of that, nor about collaboration. It is about PHBs fearing their loss of purpose and control.

[dijksterhuis]

Sorry, PHB?

[gvurrdon]

A manager who behaves like this character: https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss

[RestlessMind]

> .. been pushed like it is one of most important thing in a job?

because it is actually one of the most important thing in a job. During Covid, work was boring as hell because there were no spontaneous interactions or small breaks to chit chat with other people.

And guess what, most of the colleagues I have talked to mentioned that they missed those kind of interactions. Barring some super introvert ones who just want to be left alone, but those are a tiny minority.

[soco]

The post is about requesting context and preferring long lasting traces for a technical interaction. Not about socializing.

[Gravityloss]

I notice I often breathe deeply after a telecon. As if I was holding my breath during it. Even if the telecon was quite laid back. It doesn't happen in water cooler talks. Have there been studies about what causes this, or even how to alleviate?

[lvncelot]

Absolutely the same for me, as well as having extremely tense legs during/after online meetings.

I think the general phenomenon is often talked about under the umbrella term "zoom fatigue" - besides the fatigue this also encompasses stress and anxiety. (https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue)

[makeitdouble]

As sister comments are pointing out, it's a pretty common thing ("zoom fatigue")

Personally the best improvement was closing the camera feed, and that has been my team's experience as well.

There will be extremely few meetings (mainly HR and meetings with external vendors) where we set the camera, and even for those you can do the opening and presentation with camera on, and just shut it after that for the meat of the discussion.

The biggest part is we're presenting documents and slides either way, so seeing the person's face somewhere just doesn't help. In particular we want to check the meeting transcript realtime to be sure it matches what we're talking about. Overall I've seen no downsides doing it since the pandemic, and don't see going back to camera on meetings by default.

[cdrini]

Yeah it became a big topic of interest during the pandemic when everyone went remote. It's colloquially referred to as "zoom fatigue". That should find you some of the research.

It's become a bit of a meme now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460

Personally I've yet to find a cure :P

[liveoneggs]

stand during the meeting instead of sitting

[em-bee]

i don't think that helps.

i believe one problem is that in online meetings and phone calls pauses are more awkward and uncomfortable. that means people avoid pauses to think before they speak, which makes online meetings more rushed. which would explain the feeling of GP after a meeting.

the question is how to make online meetings more relaxed.

[ctm92]

There's no problem with socializing, but this can also be a special appointment where everyone is free to join and can talk about stuff that is not related so a specific issue.

We do a weekly fixed appointment where we gather together and smalltalk about whatever is on our minds.

[RestlessMind]

> We do a weekly fixed appointment ..

We also have something like that. But since it is not spontaneous, not every participant in the same state of mind and hence those meetings are a dud. Whereas participants in water cooler conversations are there because they want a break and want to chit chat. So conversations are more natural and hence enjoyable.

[cdrini]

I've had trouble implementing this in the past. We have biweekly social calls with my team, but a lot of people don't take part! And even when they do, when we have the full team (~12 ppl), usually maybe like 3-4 people dominate the convo and it's not super satisfying.

Have you found any tricks/ideas from the implementation at your org that has made it more successful for you?

[repeekad]

I was one of those 3-4 people who felt compelled to drag the conversation forward just to avoid awkward silence and fill the time slot, ugh how I hated that period of time with remote work

[repeekad]

Scheduled social time over zoom is not social time, it’s work prescribed team building

If anything these kinds of “meetings” felt like they made the culture on my team worse because they felt so forced and inorganic

[whateveracct]

I actually "bump into" way more people on Slack than I ever did in an office. In threads, various interest channels, random DMs. And the quality of discussion is generally higher too (because of text and async reasons)

[rumblestrut]

I am so glad to be in the office.

For instance, every morning when I come in there is a person on my team that will talk about their family, their kids, their life, and that goes on for about 15 minutes. In the spirit of team building, I entertain it for awhile. But that does come with a cost.

Someone came in a few weeks ago not feeling well, but decided not to stay home. Ended up having covid and spread it to others. It's hard to be productive when half the team is out sick.

Every day I have to be in the office with others, I truly hate it. The pandemic was hard, but I absolutely miss being able to work from home every day.

[quectophoton]

> We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.

To me this sounds like neither you nor your coworkers... talk? Like you're not used to communication unless the photons you receive in your eyes are the same ones that bounced off someone's face (or unless there's a face at all).

I still took coffee breaks to unwind for a tiny bit of time, and I still talked with teammates during those times while I was taking a moment to unwind. Async. The conversation would either stop after a few exchanges, or continue for the next minutes.

Not much different from, say, IRC or Discord. Obviously there will be professionalism in the "real" channels, but other than that it just happened that sometimes a teammate would just send me a DM like "hey, have you watched this series?", or I would post in a shared channel something like "yooo look at this thing I built last night".

I don't really need any specific medium to talk to a person. I can have my preferences, and other people can have their preferences as well, but there's still not much difference either way when it comes to getting to know each other. There's some people I only know through text chats that I'm on better terms than with some I know in person. There's some people I know in person that I'm on better terms than with some I only know through text chats.

[pbrum]

The water cooler thing is a myth. I've spent my fair share of time in tech company offices and have never seen, nor cannot think of, anything worthwhile coming out of those encounters. Like other posters said, a shared meal with colleagues is a different story, though it will typically increase social connections rather than generate new productive/business outcomes

[Yizahi]

While there are of course frequent chats and interactions while in the office, the called "water cooler brainstorms" is a complete and total myth propagated via soulless linkedin seo and ceo posts. Like this stuff never happens on random and the few technical discussions I've seen or participated in a third place (i.e. two+ coworkers meet at any place which is not their workstation - kitchen/watercooler/smoking area etc.) were never resembling anything productive for the project or innovative. That in my not quite humble opinion is an utter BS perpetuated for the misguided RTO policies.

PS: disclaimer a) I do support short spontaneous calls and like them, but try to never initiate them on my side, because I understand they ARE very disruptive. disclaimer b) I actually like working in the office in some aspects, but it is totally not worth 30 full awake and unpaid days of my life per year wasted on commute. Like not even order of magnitude close in benefit compared to the waste of time.

[altacc]

People are fixating on the mention of a water cooler but I think the key point is:

> it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review

In my team we work mostly remotely and have a lot of ad hoc calls about issues, after an initial exchange of messages introducing the problem so that it can be loaded into memory. In my experience talking about a problem on a call is almost always better than text tennis. You're focused, our minds work better and are more engaged when we're talking and it's quicker easier to summarize then question ad hoc ideas, etc...

[jdhzzz]

I still have PTSD from pre-COVID days when I would be working at in my cubicle and have someone "drive-by" with a quick question and plop their laptop on my desk.

"Can I ask you a question?" (Ugh) "Sure."

It might only take five minutes. Then I'd reconnect to _my_ work. That and getting over my, admittedly emotional, irritation at the interruption would take another 5 minutes.

I really liked being able to delay those folks to when it was convenient for _me_ while working from home.

[haliskerbas]

> rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review

This is my biggest frustration when working with new people. Too busy to explain context, then let me do it my way, then in PR review tell me to flip the whole thing based on specific context only few people had along with team specific style nits. Finally, manager asking why it's taking me so long to complete the work.

[sirolimus]

Agree, this blog post is primarily for hermitic autists.

[bravetraveler]

Counter: when this says 'no', it really means, 'modulate'.

Working remotely gives us the ability to have infinite water-coolers any hour of the day. Great power, great responsibility.

People take this personally completely forgetting there is a much larger world than theirs.

[throwawaysleep]

I like my isolation. As an employee with minimal stake in the outcome of my teams, I don’t ever want to discuss ideas in the workplace. I’ll walk the other way around the office to avoid such a chat.

[PickledJesus]

Well, that's honest! But presumably you can see that it's at odds with the interests of the business..

[axitanull]

Having employees unionize is also at odds with the interests of the business.

[PickledJesus]

OK? But I'm not arguing that there don't exist tensions between employers and employees, of course there are. I'm saying that liking isolation and not wanting to interact with others isn't good for employers, and don't be surprised if they push back on it. It amounts to saying, I only want to do the fun parts of my job, not the boring but necessary bits, like co-ordinating with other humans.

[creesch]

It could be that you are working for a very healthy organization where having a quick call is no big deal as they don't happen that frequently. In that context, you are entirely right. If all the quick calls are just that, quick calls from direct team members then this entire article does not apply to you.

However, there are many, many, many (really a lot) of organizations out there that are in various degrees but continuous state of chaos. Things like constantly shifting deadlines, goals changing, roles being poorly defined and various other things.

The sort of company where anyone who cares about their work will find themselves in a boiling frog type of scenario if they are not careful. They try to take up extra work that is not technically part of their role description, or simply by being knowledgeable attract attention.

In those companies where everyone is a continuous state of mild panic it isn't just one "quick call" it is a steady stream of them, interrupted by unannounced actual calls. Or, if you are in the office, people constantly walking by and "quickly" asking for things.

Certainly, when you find yourself in a situation where the documentation is always lacking. If you then make the mistake of writing the few pieces of documentation that actually are useful you suddenly might find yourself in the position of "knowledge holder" where everyone flocks to for their questions. In companies like this knowledge holders then get over asked (with questions often covered in the documentation), making it difficult for them to focus on their work.

In that sort of situation you need to be competent at setting boundaries as companies will often not do that for you. They happily take advantage of someone running 100% of the time, so they don't need the expense of another FTE added to payroll. Or if I'd have to do a slightly less cynical take, because they simply do not realize they are missing an FTE. Or, to go back to a more cynical take, they are filling roles with seat warmers instead of competency.

In a previous organization, I have had to actively enforce what the article suggests and more. Even then I eventually decided to leave as I simply couldn't see a path forward with the company getting their structure in order in time and me keeping my sanity.

A few of the things I started doing (some overlap with the article):

- Set my teams status with a message encouraging people to ask the question, not just greed me. Eventually, I did include a link to one of the "no hello" websites. I think https://nohello.net/en/

- Refuse unannounced teams calls from most people except a few people. I'd hang up and just leave a message along the lines of "hi, bit busy with something at the moment, what was it you are trying to reach me about?".

- Decline meetings without a clear agenda.

- Decline meetings with a clear agenda, but where I was simply not needed. Sometimes it was not related to my responsibilities, I would let them know and if I could, I would forward the meeting to a person that was responsible. In other cases, I simply was not needed in person because the information was already written down somewhere. In that case I'd provide them with the information.

- Decline meetings during my lunch break.

- Decline meetings that overlapped with other meetings in my agenda, specifically stating I was not available due to another meeting.

- Block a few moments in the week in my agenda as "focus time", set those to private meetings. To the credit of the company, they eventually did recognize that a lot of the IT engineering staff was sitting in too many meetings and then as a company policy blocked of two afternoons for everyone as focus time.

- When getting general help requests about things I knew for a fact were written down in documentation, I'd refer them there first. Ask them to go over the documentation first and then let me know if they had specific questions.

To be fair, this was an extremely chaotic and continually panicked company, with a lot of extra things compounding all of this. But it isn't that rare either as I know plenty of people who actually burned out over similar things at various different companies.

[pdimitar]

lose**, not loose, I really don't get why so many people can't learn a few basic English gotchas.

[maleldil]

Second language speakers, careless typos because HN is not that important that you _need_ to check everything…

[EasyMark]

Most people don’t mind the occasional “hi” ….. What they hate is 10 an hour.

[space_oddity]

Does it really foster collaboration and innovation?

[dijksterhuis]

I completely disagree.

I’ve done plenty of meetings in a remote only setting where at the end I say “if anyone wants to hang and chat about things further, or just hang out and socialise, feel free to stick around”.

People get to choose if they stay. It’s at a natural context switch (end of meeting). It’s deliberately informal and not organised (“hey, let’s just hang for a bit”).

The opportunities are there to achieve the same goal as the water cooler.

When I see people lamenting what has been “lost” I usually read it as “I don’t want to look for alternative solutions”.

[philipwhiuk]

A quick call isn't socialising - it's solving someone's problem. It's not ephemeral happenstance, it's a planned interaction.

I'm not sure you understand the water cooler moments if you think the 'quick call' is in anyway a replacement.

[toomuchtodo]

This is ideology masquerading as data.