If you're remote, ramble

by lawgimenez • 12 months ago

976 463 12 months ago

_Algernon_2• 12 months ago

This is unreadable. Increase the contrast, please...

Edit: I may be falsely blaming the contrast, but something about the design is causing me eye strain. Im not sure what. Here is a screenshot how the site looks to me: https://imgur.com/a/LNVCMRc Maybe someone else can figure it out.

MrGilbert5• 12 months ago

Maybe there is some technical issue for you regarding the automatic switch between light and dark mode. Under normal circumstances, it is perfectly readable.

_Algernon_2• 12 months ago

I tried both light and dark. Ended up switching to reader mode.

Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.

bapak• 12 months ago

There's nothing wrong with the contrast, it's more than 10:1. For reference 4.5:1 is AA and 7:1 is AAA in WCAG

mavamaarten• 12 months ago

It's almost-white light gray on almost black. What are you on about?

baobun• 12 months ago

It was unreadable for me too initially. Quick guesstimate:

The page has a (JS-dependent) light-mode/dark-mode switch. It defaults to "light". Meanwhile a browser configured to default to dark theming will only partly apply the themed parts (the pages own function being stuck in light), resulting in an objectively unreadable black-on-dark-gray.

Even enabling JS, the button in the upper right corner still has to be clicked to make it readable.

shakna• 12 months ago

On my lower end smartphone, the font is so fine that there's dropped pixels that is upsetting my eyes.

bravesoul2• 12 months ago

A social channel seperate from work stuff is good. It lets you post the messages that otherwise be "oh won't post that as it'll bother 20 people who meed to decide if it's urgent"

bobek• 12 months ago

Mildly related are written standups [1] when treated as journal/logbook.

[1] https://www.bobek.cz/the-power-of-written-standup/

romanovcode• 12 months ago

So... basically use a private-messaging feature?

querez• 12 months ago

I think what is distinct in this proposal is that there are n 1:n channels

9dev4• 12 months ago

The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.

I appreciate any effort to increase social cohesion in remote teams, but intermingling it with one of the main stressors of my work environment—keeping up with team communication—isn’t the right way IMHO.

hk__22• 12 months ago

The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.

The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.

firesteelrain2• 12 months ago

In teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?

9dev4• 12 months ago

But you still know they are there, and that your colleagues should perceive you as at least casually interested in what the others are up to. Even if muted, these channels inevitably become another liability.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

That will last until the first person shares a link to their rambling channel or the first time a pair of team members discuss something at standup that only appeared in someone’s ramblings channel.

Every time a company has said “you should mute and ignore this channel” but also encourages relevant project discussion in that channel, it becomes something people realize they need to unmute and monitor.

The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring channels are managers and leads, because they can dictate how people need to bring information to them.

__MatrixMan__2• 12 months ago

Do you really pursue "inbox zero" on slack? That sounds like a full-time job in itself.

kj4211cash• 12 months ago

I do. At Walmart. It drives me slightly insane. Wish I could turn that part of myself off more often.

j452• 12 months ago

Slack isn't really an organized way to do organizational knowledge or communication.

At best it can be temporary or short term messaging and there's probably something missing between slack and email that needs to exist in the world.

I'm not a notification or interruption driven individual, and it shows in my productivity. Having a place to put things or share things, can be helpful.

paradox4603• 12 months ago

I love using the unreads thing in slack while I'm brushing my teeth or waiting for my tea maker to finish. Tinder for work spam. Everything is processed as quickly as possible, into either "to-do" or "done/ignore"

9dev4• 12 months ago

If you’re working while brushing your teeth, you may want to question your working habits…

rablackburn• 12 months ago

I did read the post, but allow me to also recommend rambling when you’re remote.

As in, take time in your day to wander and roam. (I would go for a ~1hr hike in the mornings as my “commute”)

It gives you a sense of distinction from being home or “at work”. The routine cardio, and musings you have while walking make it well worth it.

gwbas1c2• 12 months ago

This is also known as "driving your kids to school."

When my schedule allows, I walk my dog with my daughter and pause at her bus stop and meet her friends. Years ago it was a 45 minute walk, round trip, to daycare.

closewith6• 12 months ago

Ideally not driving, as the walk is at least half the benefit.

laweijfmvo• 12 months ago

not to be confused with “dropping the kids off at the pool,” right?

kmarc3• 12 months ago

Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never

* pick up Becky from school

* feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today)

* sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am)

* sorry "train canceled"

* will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment

While all these can be completely valid reasons, it's just funny hearing one of these daily. On a side note, I also kinda like my job and am not interested in slacking.

bagacrap2• 12 months ago

I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.

However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+

Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.

closewith6• 12 months ago

What you're describing is life, not slacking.

It sounds like those people have their priorities and you have yours. Personally, theirs sound much more sustainable than yours.

throwaway20374• 12 months ago

I am mostly onsite, but I am careful to watch for exactly this kind of behaviour from mostly remote staff. If I see it, they are moved to the bottom of my "inner card deck" of people to help, as they basically are never helpful as teammates.

IshKebab• 12 months ago

Yeah... Maybe read the post because this is complete off topic.

sergiotapia• 12 months ago

One of the best parts of my day is to put on my straw cowboy hat on, no shirt and walk around the block at around 10am to get some raw sunlight on the body. No phone just walk around.

cootsnuck• 12 months ago

I can also vouch for this. Going to the park near my house to walk for 30 mins is great just for the sake of getting out the house and moving my body when I'm feeling anxious. It does wonders for me. Important part to is that I walk for as little or as long as I want, no guilt or shame, no expectations.

skhameneh• 12 months ago

This is what things like "water cooler chat" looks like for remote-first.

This is the fundamental difference between what a healthy remote-first company starts to look like versus the soulless version historically in-person companies try to sell.

To the author, thank you for sharing your version of the dynamics.

MrGilbert5• 12 months ago

It also shows that remote work requires work to work out. You simply cannot bump into your colleagues, so socializing needs to be planned. On a small scale, a regular coffee talk might work. But I love the idea of this being more of a "pull". Like, everyone can consume it at their own pace.

jon-wood• 12 months ago

We’ve got a similar but different approach at work of having assorted channels that are around non-work topics. DIY, cooking, music, etc. It’s not quite the same as a water cooler, and we augment this with regular get togethers, but it does help give everyone a glimpse into people’s wider lives.

globular-toast• 12 months ago

Our ramble channel is literally called "Water Cooler". After reading this post I will ramble in there more often, I think.

siva73• 12 months ago

We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk.

This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.

MrGilbert5• 12 months ago

Although it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place.

I'd also argue that "scheduled meetings" doesn’t translate to "water cooler talk" automatically. So even if you'd have regular scheduled meetings, you might still crave for some socializing.

siva73• 12 months ago

I would hope so that scheduled meetings would not translate to water cooler talk. I want to talk about the agenda and not some smalltalk. People tried crazy things during covid to replicate the water cooler talk through remote tools. If we can have some laughs together about the agenda, that's what i like. People are different i guess.

scarface_747• 12 months ago

I’m not anti social by any means. Part of my job has been flying out to talk to customers, the business dinners, helping sells to close deals (I’m more of the post sales architect), etc.

There is a bar downstairs where I live in a tourist area where I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there, maybe get a drink or sip on diet soda and just talk to whoever comes down and with the bartender.

We had a regional in person get together a day before I went on vacation and the get together was supposed to be an overnight trip. I flew in the morning and flew out back home late that night just so I could attend the social events the day before the meeting.

All that and I hate remote “social” events and don’t attend. I loved our team’s quarterly get togethers where we would fly out out to one of our company’s headquarters once a quarter someone in the US. All of us are older (35+) and have lives outside of work. We come to work to make money, not to socialize.

codethief• 12 months ago

I have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.

count3• 12 months ago

We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team. It helps a LOT. We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.

stingraycharles• 12 months ago

We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.

As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.

jama21111• 12 months ago

I would honestly hate that so much. A meeting at the wrong time throws out half the day’s momentum and work is hard to get done. A _socially draining_ meeting? Forget it.

If you did this at my company, I would turn up with a smile every time, and then get hours less practical work done that day, because I would be drained and also because I know I would be shut down if I tried to say that these social meetings don’t work well for me, so you wouldn’t even know.

Just remember, just because nobody has complained doesn’t mean something doesn’t impact people.

ruszki• 12 months ago

I’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.

Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.

goalieca• 12 months ago

Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings,

.. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".

jama21111• 12 months ago

I wish they said that in my meetings. Instead I sit there for an hour whilst other people argue through minutia that doesn’t concern me.

processing• 12 months ago

any tips for a team of one and claude code?

siva73• 12 months ago

that's what this site is for.

blitzar• 12 months ago

sometimes I complain about the team to chatgpt or gemini.

swader999• 12 months ago

Volunteer in your local community.

madduci3• 12 months ago

At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use isnky own chat (where inam alone), where in post links that mostly interest me.

Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"

navane• 12 months ago

Too many typos

isnky -> is my Inam -> I am In -> I?

Funnily, the first two autocorrected when I typed then in and I genuinely didn't know what isnky was supposed to mean.

On topic though, if no one else can read it it's like writing in your own local notes files.

cheschire• 12 months ago

…I use is my own chat (where I am alone)…

madduci3• 12 months ago

Sorry for typos. The keyboard I am using (Helio on Android) hasn't corrected the typo and I was too fast with the submission.

madduci3• 12 months ago

At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use is my own chat, with my own Name, where i post links that mostly can catch my interests and use for future reference.

Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"

senko3• 12 months ago

I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code).

While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.

barnabee• 12 months ago

Yeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams

nottorp• 12 months ago

That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?

Stratoscope• 12 months ago

#random

layer86• 12 months ago

It depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.

senko3• 12 months ago

In my experience some orgs use it as all-hands (with #random for chitchat), others as water-cooler.

As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.

herval• 12 months ago

“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit

kepano4• 12 months ago

In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.

We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.

senko3• 12 months ago

Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.

That's a good point.

I think threads would help here (always reply to a thread), but enforcing this consistently can be a chore (on all parties).

apples_oranges• 12 months ago

I think perhaps counter intuitively this harms the team spirit. Those things still get voiced in chat threads and more importantly in 1:1 calls/chats, allowing individuals to bond more intimately over non strictly project related things.

Team chat is for the project.

esperent• 12 months ago

I already have fatigue from too many chats and channels. Please don't make me track and check another ten.

A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.

jelder3• 12 months ago

I use something similar, but call them “Rubber-duck channels.”

http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...

makeitdouble3• 12 months ago

Each ramblings channel should be named after the team member, and only that person can post top-level messages. Others can reply in threads, but not start new ones.

I'm trying hard to understand why it has to be a personal channel. Water coolers aren't personal, that's the whole point.

In particular you're still adjusting what you write to be OK for anyone in your team read, so the distinction with the other "casual" channels sounds thin.

OTOH if your team doesn't have a casual place to say random stuff, it would be a nice improvement to get one.

aljimbra• 12 months ago

I am conscious of double posting, and bumping other people's messages off of the page too soon. If I'm posting too much I get annoyed at myself on behalf of other people. So that would be a big plus of these channels to me.

makeitdouble3• 12 months ago

I see your point.

It might not help in all situations, but I see some people threading their posts to avoid that effect and somewhat keep a context to their thoughts if someone wants to jump in.

npteljes• 12 months ago

Common channels can also work nice, but sometimes there is a vocal few who absolutely dominates them, and then the other people won't participate at all. The idea in TFA is to everyone have their own channel, where others cannot start a topic, so they don't stifle those who communicate less.

novia• 12 months ago

The reason it's analogous to water-cooler talk for each person to have their own channel is because when you go to get some water, and see other coworkers milling about, you're going to know which coworker you're interested in talking to, who often has interesting insights, who might have something interesting going on in their personal life that you'd like to hear more about. So, in the absence of a common meeting space, you can go check out the channels of people you're interested in, and scroll through to see if they've got anything interesting going on in their life.

DonHopkins• 12 months ago

Steve Martin is a Ramblin' Guy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frcRMQ2m1B4

codesnik• 12 months ago

I've tried to create or revive a watercooler channel in every remote company I've worked in last 10 years. For some reason it usually doesn't work. Some people don't needed it, some people just call each other and vent out privately. I miss watercooler talk.

microtonal• 12 months ago

We had watercooler meetings some at remote companies I worked at, but yeah they usually don't really work. One problem is that the stream always attenuates to one person (which is good in normal meetings to not pick up too much random background noise), but it completely kills spontaneity. Also, there are always people with horrendous mic quality or background noise.

As a result 1:1s tend to work much better technically for socializing, but it of course doesn't bring the group vibe.

The idea in the article sounds really nice! Unfortunately does not really scale to larger companies than maybe 5-10 people.

makeitdouble3• 12 months ago

TBH one of the best part of watercooler talk was the limited range (only the people who're there) and no trace of the exchange (all verbal)

We also tried scheduled casual talks with the whole team, but didn't have more success than you.

I think the closest we get was the small talk before meetings start, but as we're starting to get auto-transcript for all our meetings that also became very bland.

prmoustache2• 12 months ago

At my work place we have a meeting on friday afternoon. It was initially a meeting dedicated to quick knowledge transfer or helping out a member of a team who needs help on a particular topic but is also used to chit chat a bit before wishing everyone a nice weekend. We don't do transcript nor recording of these.

paradox4603• 12 months ago

Venting privately is usually a symptom of bad management. Employees feel that they can't discuss any grievance publicly, for whatever reason, and so choose more careful means of communication

marginalia_nu• 12 months ago

This type of writing down ideas and half-thoughts is useful even if you work alone. Thoughts are very fleeting, the instant you put them to paper (or bits) they materialize and it becomes much easier to evolve them.

When doing deep work in some problem domain, often I find the brain starts to drop these highly ephemeral fragments of ideas (that are sometimes downright ingenious). Caveat is they often only come once, and then they're gone if you don't grab them.

I often keep an envelope or scrap paper next to my desk where I write down any idea I have, whether it's "I should fix this" or "what if I did that", really no matter how small I try to put it to paper.

What usually ends up happening is I somehow end up with a fairly concrete todo list of easy improvements.

ljosifov• 12 months ago

I stuff those in my logBook nowadays - a single ascii text file. Started as you say with notes on random scraps of paper. To relieve my mind of carrying that burden, when I have something more pressing to do. But yeah these half-thoughts, intuits etc have showed useful over time? Some made it into TODO, and latter even into the DONE entries. Even if mostly their final destination is DONTDO. :-)

romanows• 12 months ago

I think it is significant that this rambling channel supplements the yearly in-person meeting. Presumably, that's where one tends to form deeper social connections and get a feel for what different people find interesting to talk about? That is, if the team is varied enough so that there is little overlap in hobby interests or daily life.

junon• 12 months ago

I have a whole private discord server with multiple channels just for this, for my personal projects. Yes yes, walled garden and all, I know. But it's incredibly useful even though I'm the only one in there.

I'd imagine this is highly team dependent. I'd personally love if my company adopted this. I think only one other team member would actually participate though. We're far too busy.

dpdpdpdpdp• 12 months ago

Ramble in the panopticon?

dakiol• 12 months ago

In my experience, these kind of channels end up being filled with complaints about the company/processes/managers/c-levels… (ofc, managers are not invited to these private channels)

Like, if the ceo said something very stupid in the last All Hands, well, you use the ramble channel to talk about it. Sometimes this works (you feel like you’re not the only one that thinks X), but it could easily go south.

echo42null2• 12 months ago

Good point. You do need to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about anything, But it shouldn’t just become an endless complaint loop about the company.

I’ve seen this dynamic too: once people start venting, the channel can spiral. I sometimes wonder how to steer that energy into something constructive. Maybe it helps to let people express uncertainty or frustration before decisions are final, and to respond with context before things snowball.

It’s tricky, because most coworkers only overlap on the job itself, they might not share much else in common. so their “bonding” can easily turn into shared complaining.

Curious if anyone has found ways to keep that from going south without shutting people down completely.

sublinear3• 12 months ago

You can't "steer" people like that. Good fences make good neighbors.

bsenftner2• 12 months ago

I've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.

shortrounddev2• 12 months ago

At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication

Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool

rubslopes• 12 months ago

It's http://gather.town

JustExAWS2• 12 months ago

I would hate this. More than the commute, the reason I hated in office work are the constant interruptions. Now when I need to do “deep work”, I turn off Slack, email etc and block off my calendar.

We are all busy, when we want to talk about something or get sanity checks, we schedule time on each others calendar. I go to work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. I’m not anti social and I can carry on small talk with the best of them. But there is a strict separation between church (home) and state (work). Well I did meet my now wife at work in 2009…

bsenftner2• 12 months ago

when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too.

It was not used routine, it was for times when the entire team is looking at an SDK for the first time, we all have a group item to discuss, and times like that. It's like a non-meeting, ambient party call. Not for continual use, by any means.

echo42null2• 12 months ago

We used to have something very similar with our office coffee machine – spontaneous 1‑2 minute chats while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it was just, “Sorry, can’t talk, swamped right now,” and the other person would rush off – but even that told you something.

These micro‑interactions gave valuable context: which teams were under pressure, where things might be stuck, and sometimes where a quick helping hand was needed.

When we went remote, we tried to recreate this with a single global “coffee chat” channel. It worked for a while, but quickly became noisy.

I really like your idea of having one ramblings channel per person instead. It feels like a cleaner way to keep that background awareness and human connection alive without overwhelming everyone. We’re going to try this next.

booleandilemma2• 12 months ago

A post encouraging more performative behavior at work, as if there wasn't enough already. By the way, my scrum update is yesterday I was mostly in meetings.

jodrellblank3• 12 months ago

More performative “I’m cynicaler than thou” comments as if there aren’t enough on HN anyway.

booleandilemma2• 12 months ago

My comment isn't performative, I really mean it :)

Waterluvian• 12 months ago

I feel that part of what I’m paid for is to structure those ramblings into clear communications to be shared at the right time in the right meeting or channel.

chvid• 12 months ago

Or just show up at the office once in a while.

gwbas1c2• 12 months ago

I created a "watercooler" channel at my company to keep chitchat out of the main channel. It's a lot easier than juggling multiple channels.

OJFord2• 12 months ago

Love this idea for 2-10 person orgs, but it really doesn't scale.

I suppose you could do something similar with local sub-org/2-pizza team, but bit of a different vibe, and then if there is a #topic channel would your thought on topic go in #topic or #ramble-name?

charlie0• 12 months ago

This doesn't work top well with teammates who don't like to write to communicate, which is a surprising amount of people around me. (I'm the only one who writes tech docs)

comrade1234• 12 months ago

I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that would just ruin this. The entire channel would be just be walls of his text. It's hard enough just to understand his wall of text emails that have a big report embedded somewhere in it.

musicnarcoman• 12 months ago

I think they meant each person has a public channel of their own.

bravetraveler2• 12 months ago

Like the Confluence spaces they ignore /s

sublinear3• 12 months ago

Thank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic.

I think that's precisely why the ramblings should be a separate channel apart from all the emails and more serious communication, but I have some thoughts why this still might not work.

I used to be guilty of leaving walls of text in our "random" channel, and we weren't even remote back then. My reasons weren't entirely irrational. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't taken seriously because of the way the business was run and it was the only chance I had to speak "out of turn". These workplaces that encourage a lack of boundaries are usually small startups that hire inexperienced people. Ultimately whatever anyone said was used to manipulate them or for the rotten parts of middle management to "steal" ideas.

I'm not a fan of this concept either and I think it's easily abused by all.

anal_reactor• 12 months ago

I used to work for a small company, and I'd sometimes write short essays about things in general. It was rarely even related to programming, but people seemed to love that. Then I switched to corporate and I quickly understood to shut up because whenever I say something, someone might get upset over it for whatever reason and then it's going to be a problem.

layer86• 12 months ago

Common topics include:
- ideas related to current projects
- musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback
- “what if” suggestions
- photos from recent trips or hobbies
- rubber ducking a problem

Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO. Some might be interested in the former but not the latter, and also might be interested in them at different times (of the day/week). There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.

jobs_throwaway3• 12 months ago

work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t

All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?

layer86• 12 months ago

What do you mean? Your employment contract says you need to work n hours per week. Private activities obviously don’t count as work.

elric• 12 months ago

There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.

So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?

layer86• 12 months ago

This is formally/legally a work break that you’re not allowed to count as work time. If I have a half-hour conversation about a non-work topic, which I sometimes do, it means I’ll need to work half an hour more. At the office it’s effectively at everyone’s discretion how exactly they count it, but on a chat platform it can in principle be tracked if someone spends substantial time on #offtopic.

ipdashc• 12 months ago

Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO.

Why does it feel like people take this (reasonable) idea too far so often these days (and always on the Internet - I've never seen anyone in real life act like that).

Like, yes, don't treat your job like a family or spend your whole day talking about your personal drama. Be careful or avoid dating coworkers. Etc. But this stuff is, as the author said, the equivalent of water cooler talk.

If I had a salaried job that tracked the fact that I spent 15 minutes (when not on a time crunch, of course) talking about some random interesting blog post or a coworker's trip, I would... probably look into leaving that job. I have never had a job that met that description. (On the contrary, many jobs I had, especially back as an intern/student, let us get away with way too much time spent fooling around or talking, in retrospect.)

Even the stereotypical overworked fast food employee is allowed to chat with their coworkers when there's downtime, it's perfectly normal. I can't imagine pursuing the "work/life balance" ideal to the point one avoids regular old casual conversation with their coworkers.

paradox4603• 12 months ago

Agreed. Some of the solutions I've seen and even experienced seem like something right out of severance

Please engage in the mandatory socialization experience

bitwize• 12 months ago

"Well, Mike, let's talk performance: your code is good, you get along well with your teammates, but you just haven't been rambling enough in the rambling channel. So unfortunately I'm going to have to put you on a PIP. If we don't see an improvement to at least 3 ramblings per week, further action may be taken, up to and including termination. Sorry it has to be this way, but we've got KPIs to hit."

nasalgoat3• 12 months ago

I worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break.

I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.

larrydag• 12 months ago

I agree. Group channels on relevant topics is very helpful. Especially on technical details relevant to getting work done.

Yet here goes my rant. Nothing can replace a good in-person interaction. Perhaps I'm the old guy in the room. When teams are trying to build something there is nothing like water-cooler talk and banter about the work that helps relate shared challenges. Granted this is going to very specific to organizational needs.

I don't work in software development so perhaps my needs are different than most on Hackernews. I've managed teams in person and remotely. I've found that managing in person is a much more productive way to work.

nasalgoat3• 12 months ago

The channels I'm talking about weren't about work, they were about hobbies - biking, cars, cats. I found that interaction quite fun and actually much better than in-person chats because I could choose to interact at my pace and comfort level.

JustExAWS2• 12 months ago

I’m also an old guy at 51. I have been in cloud consulting for the last five+ years and I’m perfectly capable of leading large projects remotely.

I can do it in person. But I find diagramming with collaborative tools, shared Google docs, etc to be much better than in person drawing on a whiteboard. There are remote collaborative tools for everything.

With the tools available now, you can record all of the meetings and don’t have to take notes, have transcripts automatically generated and summarized with AI. I can then take all of the transcripts and other artifacts, throw them in Google’s NotebookLM and ask questions and get answers about the project (with citations).

I do the same for transcripts of meetings I am not in - mostly pre-sales.

Yes these are all approved tools.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 12 months ago

Can you not just create those channels? I did at my 10 person company and at my 100k company, no body seems to mind

nasalgoat3• 12 months ago

Yes but they get very lonely all by yourself.

jamesblonde• 12 months ago

This is so anglo-saxon to be individual channels for ramblings. We have group wide channel. It's supposed to be social - no pressure to post. Lurkers welcome. Just share. Naturally, some are more talkative than others. The idea is to foster a group/social culture - not have atomized diaries about individuals.

parpfish4• 12 months ago

Every place I’ve been to has a dedicated “random” or “off topic” channel and it’s where all the good team building happens. There are usually a few more narrow channels for specific topics (video games, music, pets, food, etc) which can help if there are big personalities that dominate a channel.

It can be intimidating to join in when you’re new though. You got to lurk for a while to read the room a bit and learn the culture.

mhh__• 12 months ago

Internal Twitter should be more of a thing.

liveoneggs• 12 months ago

I strongly agree with the title but the prescribed details are not to my taste.

Pick a channel grouping that makes sense (by-team/by-project/by-manager) and Just Start Typing. Busy channels are alive and will create their own culture organically. Freely mix in work talk with pictures of cool stuff you found while walking the dog. "threads" makes this extremely manageable.

byryan• 12 months ago

Yea I agree it seems like (for my own team anyways), one group channel would work a lot better than a per person channel for everyone. I think some people may feel more likely to post, especially work related topics, in a group channel rather than starting solo threads in their own "ramblings" channel. One channel is also easier and "less work" to look through than n number of channels. This is very subjective though I guess, so I could be wrong.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

"threads" makes this extremely manageable.

Strongly agree. This is what threads in the project channel are for.

Creating excessive channels for everything gets out of hand quickly. It’s a habit you see from people who worked at small companies before threads were available on discussion platforms.

danparsonson• 12 months ago

This sounds like Twitter for Enterprises - how about setting up a local instance of Bluesky or Mastodon or one of those? People can then follow whomever they want to and the rest of us can continue not being interested in that sort of thing.

aprilnya• 12 months ago

Or if you use M365 then Viva Engage/Yammer can be great!

PS. between the two Mastodon will be better, you can fully disable all federation and even have SSO! + setting up a private Bluesky is quite a bit harder

hkon• 12 months ago

So, if you're remote, why not just talk to your real friends on discord or whatever?

I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.

lttlrck• 12 months ago

Right. Not everybody wants, needs or has these interactions even in-person.

This stuff needs to happen organically to be meaningful. Templates don't work.

It's like starting a chess club that everyone has to join.

robertclaus• 12 months ago

Why not a shared "Ramblings" channel? And at that point, why not re-use something like "Random" that many companies already have?

gavmor• 12 months ago

OP is proposing something more like internal blogging.

sublinear3• 12 months ago

No thanks. One of the best parts of going remote is letting your work truly speak for itself to a much broader audience. This would have been impossible in person.

High performers usually have their own thing going on outside of work and don't need the workplace for socializing. This boosted a lot of careers, and otherwise made life way less toxic. Unless you're fresh out of college I can't see anyone wanting this again.

nip• 12 months ago

We do something similar that we call « Office a la Zoom »:

Two times a week, the weekly standup is extended by an hour, from 15min to 1h15.

People are welcome to jump in and out of that open zoom that acts as a water cooler corner: any topic goes, from work to personal hobbies, etc

We’re fully remote (US / EMEA / APAC)

spike021• 12 months ago

my team just has a couple off-topic channels we use from time to time to chat about random things. i'd say that's pretty sufficient. ymmv of course.

srcoder• 12 months ago

We do the same, just topic specificaties channels like kids, random or pets... Works very well and you only need to join if you want to...

fHr• 12 months ago

Nah not another useless channel to maintain, I'm good.

ManlyBread• 12 months ago

This article is about nothing, how does this kind of stuff hit the front page? Is it because of bots?

majke3• 12 months ago

Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".

I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else onboarded had similar questions. Some subjects were about pure onboarding friction, some were about workflows most folks didn't know existed, some were about theoretical concepts.

So I moved the questions to a public (within company) channel, and called it "Marek's Bitching" - because this is what it was. Pretty much me complaining and moaning and asking annoying questions. I invited more London folks (Zygis), and before I knew half of the company joined it.

It had tremendous value. It captured all the things that didn't have real place in the other places in the company, from technical novelties, through discussions that were escaping structure - we suspected intel firmware bugs, but that was outside of any specific team at the time.

Then the channel was renamed to something more palatable - "Marek's technical corner" and it had a clear place in the technical company culture for more than a decade.

So yes, it's important to have a place to ramble, and it's important to have "your own channel" where folks have less friction and stigma to ask stupid questions and complain. Personal channels might be overkill, but a per-team or per-location "rambling/bitching" channel is a good idea.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.

So while the Q&A format is good to have available, I’d discourage creating separate channels around a person. I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.

I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel. That’s the place where all of the relevant people will be relevant and watching and it’s the first place they’ll search in the future.

Xeoncross• 12 months ago

This is the difference between a good idea and the implementation.

People just act differently in "official" topic channels.

It's like when you buy that super secure door lock and the lowest bid handyman bends it while installing because it's such a pain to align correctly and now it's just as vulnerable as any other lock.

latchkey2• 12 months ago

from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid

I'd rather avoid the manager's perspective.

TimTheTinker2• 12 months ago

That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting".

It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal.

You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."

seadan83• 12 months ago

I've found the best way to kill a conversation is to point out the appropriate place the conversation should have started.

majke3• 12 months ago

This is a great comment. Thanks.

In my case - indeed the name is a historical baggage, I'm not arguing for or against it.

Indeed we had regularly situations that we had to pull in experts from other rooms, to discuss specific topics (like TCP), so we should have forwarded the conversation at the start.

But I don't think this should be categorical. There is value in non-experts responding faster (the channel had good reach) by your non-expert colleagues than waiting longer for the experts on the other continent to wake up.

Maybe there should be an option to... move conversation threads across channels?

I think there is place for both - unstructured conversations, and structured ones. What I don't like about managerial approach, is that many managers want to shape, constrain, control communication. This is not how I work. I value personal connections, I value personal expertise and curiosity. I dislike non-human touch.

"You should ask in the channel XYZ" is a dry and discouraging answer.

"Hey, Mat worked on it a while ago, let's summon him here, but he's in east coast so he's not at work yet, give him 2h" is a way better one.

I know that concentrating knowledge / ownership at a person is not always good, but perhaps a better way to manage this is to... hire someone else who is competent or make other people more vocal.

And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.

xg15• 12 months ago

I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel.

What if it is a specific technical question but does not clearly belong to a specific project?

IOT_Apprentice• 12 months ago

Oof. From a manager’s perspective why don’t you focus on getting this information being in place for your team so that they are productive? You could feed that content into a platform the is searchable, categorized and part of onboarding. Utilize utilities that will automate collecting information, rather than discouraging learning.

Focus on eliminating tribal knowledge, implementing a learning culture.

whoknowsidont• 12 months ago

I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.

These just become apologetics channels. Not productive.

fallous• 12 months ago

A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.

If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together. Trying to push that burden down the chain often results in that institutional knowledge being shared verbally or via private emails/DMs in order to avoid the burden of documentation, which is a net negative.

Such information is a force multiplier for teams as well as a great asset for onboarding new hires. Both of those are direct benefits for the manager and the company, so take the advantage of that kind of spontaneous documentation rather than insisting on passing on the cognitive burden.

wonderwonder4• 12 months ago

This is why so few people have loyalty to a job. Managements role appears to be simply killing all individuality and fun in the workplace.

"First Warning, this is an unauthorized topic in an incorrect location. You are permitted to discuss this topic but only in the predesignated area."

"Did you complete your TPS reports this morning?"

"Yeah... I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. We have a go live in 3 weeks for our mini waterfall agile release and you currently have 2 bug tickets assigned."

This murders the last spark of connectivity for remote workers who are already left out of the daily in person banter and bonding that in office work provides.

Comments like these really make me appreciate that we are simply numbers in a spreadsheet and no longer real people to companies and leadership.

jelder3• 12 months ago

doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability

Channels aren’t searchable. Messages are.

risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.

Sorry to break it to you, but that’s not just an impression. It’s a fact.

gilbetron• 12 months ago

This is a terrible suggestion, please ignore it.

If people have found an effective way to communicate information, leave them the hell alone. I have too often seen people like Auronis decide to come in and manage something to be proper, and then destroy the communication.

The appropriate thing to do is to find a way to augment, without interfering, the channel to shore up any weaknesses.

Formal channels are often too formal - people don't want to look dumb, or get chastised for asking something incorrectly. Formal channels are intimidating, not welcoming.

The point is knowledge sharing, not "appropriate" knowledge sharing.

I love how the OP was like, "hey, we created this informal channel and communicated valuable info to the whole company", and then Auronis is like, "yeah, don't do that!"

ZeroCool2u• 12 months ago

We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.

serf• 12 months ago

and they know it's a judgement free zone.

that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.

If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road within the organization; to think otherwise would be pure fantasy.

Similarly : if you go drinking with the boss, you do still have to remember that the drunk puking slob who you're carrying to their hotel room is going to wake up and be your boss tomorrow.

very few humans actually disconnect this stuff from their internalized judgements of people.

rr808• 12 months ago

As a senior judgement is a real problem as others have suggested. I suspect its a reason why AI is popular. I can ask those dumb questions I should know without embarrassing myself by asking someone, or even worse put it in writing with my name on it.

gr3ml1n• 12 months ago

Fwiw, Marek's technical corner still exists and still gets some activity.

dknecht• 12 months ago

And it still lives on today where we reposted this post!

jamesog• 12 months ago

I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".

Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations.

I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings. I think people learnt a lot from following all the internal blogs.

DiggyJohnson4• 12 months ago

Always funny to see these sort of missed connections on HN.

internal blogs

In my personal experience the problem is the total lack of writing culture at non-premiere companies.

Put differently: unless you’re working on a great team at a great organization roughly 90% of people cannot be expected to write/read well as a component of technical collaboration. Any thoughts on that? I may just be too cynical

majke3• 12 months ago

Internal blog is another thing, but indeed related to chat. Once we figured some techical thing out, I often put it under "personal blog" on wiki under something like ~marek/date-slug. (I'm actually quite upset about jira removing slug from the url and replacing it with random number, this makes url completion much worse. I often titled the wikis funny/witty to make it easier to remember and find)

These were usually quite short notes. Like I did this and that. Or here are instructions I've run. Pretty much a "lab notebook".

Again, this was often useful to people. Folks new what I was working on at that time. Over time more people adapted this style of public note taking (within company), but I have the impression I was more consistent than others.

I did it for many reasons. I genuinely forget things. It was always nice to see comments (like James complaining that I shouldn't do `dpkg -i x.deb`, and instead finally install the package repo in apt-sources!). So again - searchability (a form of documentation), reach (getting feedback), and work log (for planning).

The format was also nice - short, without specific audience in mind. Zero drama, zero effort. Plentiful and low quality. Because it was "blog" and not "pages", this meant it was obvious when the note was written and nobody expected old blogs to be up to date. The lower the friction in note taking - the better.

Finally, I was working with an SRE team, which was tightly knit and communicated very often over daily checkins (which I wasn't invited to) and other informal channels. And I worked from home a bit. This meant I had to find an asynchronous way to communicate with the team. My personal blogs worked nicely. I highly recommend this style to anyone working remotely.

Although I must admit the personal "lab notebook" wiki thing is not scaleable. It's impossible to "follow" more than a handful of people.

I kept statistics. It's fairly obvious when I was most productive. Here it is, my internal blogs on the wiki per quarter:

  2013-Q4 |  0 | 
  2014-Q1 |  0 | 
  2014-Q2 |  2 | ##
  2014-Q3 |  3 | ###
  2014-Q4 |  2 | ##
  2015-Q1 | 14 | ##############
  2015-Q2 | 15 | ###############
  2015-Q3 | 57 | ###################################################
  2015-Q4 | 60 | ######################################################
  2016-Q1 | 70 | ######################################################################
  2016-Q2 | 71 | #######################################################################
  2016-Q3 | 17 | #################
  2016-Q4 | 23 | #######################
  2017-Q1 | 13 | #############
  2017-Q2 | 22 | ######################
  2017-Q3 | 16 | ################
  2017-Q4 | 25 | #########################
  2018-Q1 | 12 | ############
  2018-Q2 |  9 | #########
  2018-Q3 | 23 | #######################
  2018-Q4 | 14 | ##############
  2019-Q1 | 14 | ##############
  2019-Q2 | 20 | ####################
  2019-Q3 | 18 | ##################
  2019-Q4 | 36 | ######################################
  2020-Q1 | 19 | ###################
  2020-Q2 | 13 | #############
  2020-Q3 |  4 | ####
  2020-Q4 |  3 | ###
  2021-Q1 |  4 | ####
  2021-Q2 |  8 | ########
  2021-Q3 |  3 | ###
  2021-Q4 | 21 | #####################
  2022-Q1 |  4 | ####
  2022-Q2 | 12 | ############
  2022-Q3 |  4 | ####
  2022-Q4 | 28 | ############################
  2023-Q1 | 14 | ##############
  2023-Q2 | 16 | ################
  2023-Q3 | 10 | ##########
  2023-Q4 |  6 | ######
  2024-Q1 | 12 | ############
  2024-Q2 | 22 | ######################
  2024-Q3 |  0 | 
  2024-Q4 |  2 | ##
  2025-Q1 | 20 | ####################
  2025-Q2 |  3 | ###

Total 784 over 11 years.

kirso• 12 months ago

Not to mention, its how people bond...

_ea1k• 12 months ago

I've noticed a trend in the last few years toward more and more DMs within our teams, and I really don't think it is a good thing.

An amazingly large number of questions are generally applicable, but it is really hard to maintain a culture that actively encourages that.

throwaway-blaze• 12 months ago

Not to be pedantic but I spent at least a solid minute trying to understand how you collaborated with a piece of artwork.

Then I realized you meant colleague.

;)

ryankrage77• 12 months ago

Huh, just realised my team did this organically without realising it. People were often hesitant to ask questions they perceived as 'dumb' in the group chat, and definitely unwilling to post anything seen as complaining/moaning about problems. We created a second chat without any managers in it, with a description clarifying it was a dumping ground for questions and comments that didn't fit in other chats. It sees a small but steady flow of use, mostly questions that people probably should know, but can't remember the answer/process of the top of their head, and the occasional slightly less-than-professional complaint or criticism about a service/tool/process. My favourite part is that I can actually discuss things in there - in the main chat, once the question is answered/problem is solved, if we keep chatting about it it's seen as clutter/distraction. I think it's beneficial to have an outlet for these things.

chaz6• 12 months ago

I always ask the "dumb" questions, even when I already know the answer, because there are always people too intimidated to speak up, and it sometimes facilitates a deeper discussion.

kqr2• 12 months ago

It also gives you cover to ask questions that reveal politically inconvenient truths: you can pretend you had no idea that answer would pop out of it.

(Of course, in an organisation that contains many politically inconvenient truths, you can easily end up doing that too much and people will catch on to it and dislike what you're doing. Another drawback is you have to be willing to look stupid and trust that the stupid first impression goes away with time.)

fantasizr• 12 months ago

I always respected leaders who did this, preprogramming the dumb questions in a presentation for the benefit of the timid ones

hoherd• 12 months ago

It took me too long in my career to feel comfortable asking the dumb questions. I would have had a much easier time if I had just asked them. I eventually learned to ask dumb questions when I made a friend who was never afraid to ask then, and it was amazing how quickly he learned.

codingdave• 12 months ago

I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post. Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.

In my experience, "rambling" channels build up organically... as you have a thought, you share it with someone relevant, not just drop it into a channel and see who reads it. Over time, small group chats evolve naturally, and assuming everyone has communications skills, topics that become relevant to the whole team are then shared with the whole team.

I agree that such discussions are healthy, maybe even required, for a functional remote team. But let people organize themselves - don't prescribe specific methods that teams must follow. The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.

ajsnigrutin2• 12 months ago

Yep this.

Just make a "random" channel, where most people keep notifications off, and use it for everything random, from lunch invitations to "i'm selling olive oil", etc.

zaphirplane• 12 months ago

Do you grow the olives as well

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post

This seems to happen a lot: Someone writes some highly exaggerated career advice that has good intent at the core but turns into overly weird suggestions by the end. They might be trying to be memorable or to make an impact by exaggerating the advice.

Then some people, often juniors, take it literally and start practicing it. They think they’re doing some secret that will make them the best employee. Their coworkers and managers are more confused than impressed and think it’s just a personality quirk.

As a manager I found it helpful to skim Reddit and other sites for semi-viral advice blogs like this. With enough juniors in a company there’s a chance one of them will suddenly start doing the thing written in a shared post like this. Knowing why they’re doing it is a good way to help defuse the behavior (assuming they don’t really benefit but rather do it because they perceive it will look good)

bee_rider4• 12 months ago

Maybe Agile was one of these things, but then a bunch of people started doing it literally.

quietbritishjim• 12 months ago

Or maybe they know that saying something wrong gets more comments / "engagement" than something more reasonable.

daxfohl• 12 months ago

"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric"

ronbenton• 12 months ago

“I see you’ve only had 15 rambles this week”

“Isn’t 15 the minimum?”

“Well, yeah, if you just want to do the bare minimum. But look at Todd over there - he has 37 rambles”

“Well if you wanted people to have 37 rambles why wouldn’t you make that the minimum”

e3bc54b22• 12 months ago

Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.

ducktective• 12 months ago

Hey Veo, guess what? New plot for another Black Mirror episode just dropped

mjevans3• 12 months ago

Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)

If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.

Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.

echelon2• 12 months ago

Yeah, but Obsidian is a startup. A remote startup.

If you're in a startup of <10 people and someone isn't communicating with the rest of the team, it's not going to work.

I can see how this feels dystopian in a giant corporation, but that's because everyone is there for the paycheck.

In a startup, people are making sacrifices to make the thing work. They could get a higher paying, less stressful job.

Picking a startup and not being engaged is disruptive.

tossandthrow• 12 months ago

If this is your attitude, then you are not part of a team of 2 to 10

agnishom• 12 months ago

Reminds me of the novel "The Circle"

sota_pop• 12 months ago

The work of Mike Judge is just eerily prescient on all accounts. Spooky and amazing.

michaelrpeskin• 12 months ago

Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".

When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.

But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.

I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.

These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.

mjevans3• 12 months ago

Same idea as rubber-duck debugging or just explaining things to someone else. The work of translating the idea forces your mind to marshal and walk the structures from a fresh angle and you can gain insights that were lacking.

Getting more eyeballs on that idea also helps. Both in the different knowledge and expectations / assumptions they have and in proofing how clearly the idea's communicated. Really helps reveal areas where there's ambiguity you hadn't even realized because it's not even a confusion spot you'd consider with your knowledge.

unethical_ban• 12 months ago

Off topic, 10 years ago, I hated confluence and wanted my team to be able to continue using DokuWiki.

Now, I've consulted at places that use Microsoft Teams file shares for their "documentation", and I feel like I'm back in 2005. Confluence would be a dream.

AtlasBarfed2• 12 months ago

So once upon a Time, jireh and confluence were far better solutions than things like bugzilla and other "solutions".

The last 10 years I've seen jira and confluence groaned about, what has replaced what they do?

Tohsig• 12 months ago

I'll add on to this that per-user channels could work well in teams where everyone is comfortable sharing, but could be absolutely paralyzing in other situations.

My personal preference is to have some kind of "Off-Topic" or "Open Discussion" channel that is communal. I'll then make a point of consistently posting half-developed ideas to that channel. Especially the ideas that I know are going to morph as the team discusses them. I find that helps do two things:

- Helps create a culture of collaboration rather than one of "whatever the lead dev says goes".

- Provides Cover For/Reduces Pressure On anyone that is less comfortable putting their thoughts out there for discussion.

As the parent comment said, the fundamental idea in the post isn't bad, but the mechanism may need tweaking for a given team.

kepano4• 12 months ago

Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.

I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article states "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."

oulipo• 12 months ago

I don't think he mentioned anywhere "expected"? it's more a kind of log, of stuff you'd like to share in a fuzzy way, but don't know where

OmarShehata• 12 months ago

The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.

this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working

computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)

kiitos2• 12 months ago

Nothing in this post suggests any kind of expectation, mandate, or obligation to post anything in any kind of channel.

The problem that this post is trying to address, is that these kinds of informal rambling channels -- which have enormous value -- almost never happen organically.

jama21111• 12 months ago

They say something about posting 3 times a week. Even if it’s not a formal obligation, it’ll certainly feel like one if they notice you never post whilst other people do.

throwanem3• 12 months ago

Overlooked in this recap is a telling line from later in the article:

We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. We want as much deep focus time as possible, so ramblings help us stay connected while minimizing interruptions.

Emphasis in the quote is mine, to call attention specifically to the fact that this is what Obsidian is doing instead of standups.

Taken in that vein, it sounds positively miraculous to me.

starkparker2• 12 months ago

Or they're just async standups, except less accessible since OP uses separate, exclusive channels instead of threads within a single shared channel.

The fully remote org I work at does async standup threads, they're great, they work just like they're described here except they're vastly easier to track and search, and nobody has any allusions of them being anything more than just remote asynchronous standups.

conradev• 12 months ago

Hack Club, the largest Slack instance I’ve ever been a part of, has a culture of personal channels and it is incredibly organic and fun. It’s largely restricted to students under 18, though!

I feel like it’s a common pattern that organically forms. People want to express themselves, they don’t want to distract group chats, so they make a space to do it.

pavel_lishin2• 12 months ago

Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.

It all comes down to company culture.

Aurelius108• 12 months ago

Agreed, it’s one of those things that works well if it happens organically but not as a policy. I’ve got a personal wiki at work where I dump a bunch of useful stuff, it has helped people and attracted attention which is nice. I think the easiest solution is to have longer-form team meetings once a week.

pimlottc• 12 months ago

I think the pos tog having a designated spot is to remove friction. Otherwise you can gummed up trying to decide where to post: “is this worth bothering the team? Maybe I should just message my friend? Or should I just bring it up in the next standup? Or maybe the retro…”

scarface_747• 12 months ago

I hate this idea. If I have an idea I think we should implement when I was a mod level developer [1] and had to get buy in for it, I would think it through and ask for a coworkers opinion, take their suggestions, and then keep reaching out to who I thought would be my toughest critics until I got their buy in.

Once I was convinced that I had enough buy in, I would then officially propose it in a team setting. It’s called “pre-wiring a meeting”.

Now it’s more of getting peer reviews and sanity checks than anything else before I go down a road. We also have Slack channel where we ask for peer reviews now of architectural decisions (working in cloud consulting).

[1] My title has been “Senior Developer” for decades at various companies. But in reality, based on “scope”, “impact”, etc not “I codez real good” I was really what would be considered a mid level developer until a decade ago.

Brajeshwar• 12 months ago

Long back, I used to set up P2 for teams, inspired by WordPress’s theme-based personal/team updates. The current theme seem to have changed over time but the early versions where tweet-ish kinda flow of events which people/team wrote.

https://wordpress.com/p2/

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels.

This is a great place to use threads.

If someone wants to ramble, you say “Starting a thread to think through <topic>” in the project channel and then you put your follow-up chats in the thread. This way it only occupies a single line and notification (for those who have it enabled) but keeps it in the right place.

Creating excessive numbers of channels is a common small company mistake that they’ll come to regret later. Every growing company I’ve worked for has gone through a “let’s create channels for everything” phase followed later by a “we’re all so burnt out from being in 80 different channels” phase. Creating a separate channel for every person of a project will scatter the discussions and add excessive cognitive load for juggling channels.

softwaredoug• 12 months ago

There is a kind of leader that's threatened when they don't control communication. In these cases, random thought bombs on slack feel like chaos. Like people are going in random directions not rowing together. I don't think this is true of course -- people are just sharing inspiration and ideas. But in some places / cultures just rambling on slack can be dangerous and put a target on your back. You can be labeled as "distracting" by these leaders that feel threatened / worried about the perception the team is not executing on their marching orders.

Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment. So these leaders have an especially hard time in a remote environment. But they do soon learn that even Slack DMs can be searched and they love this tool to root out "troublemakers".

Of course, if you can, leave such a place. But not everyone has this luxury.

theideaofcoffee• 12 months ago

This is true because it has happened to me. I was at a place where there was a very ingrained hierarchy in the culture where people were afraid to ask questions in public (slack), to discuss problems and solutions, because the "leaders" were so thin-skinned, doing anything outside of being ticket-solving machines was seen as wholly objectionable.

I got tired of the abject fear that some of those idiots were stoking so I took it upon myself to set the example for the more junior people and started rambling and asking questions and doing the things that the "leaders" obviously didn't like. You can imagine how that went as I got a bit more bold week after week... I've never been more relieved, and proud, to be canned.

Seattle35032• 12 months ago

Most people, myself included, cannot thrive in a culture of fear and control. I think what you did is the best way to handle it. Do the right thing and surrender to the outcome. Like you, I was happier that way.

throwaway7432• 12 months ago

Happened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats.

Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.

andrewflnr• 12 months ago

Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment.

It seems impossible to escape the feeling that something written down is somehow firmer or more significant than something said in person. Have you ever been more comfortable saying something painful or awkward in person than via text or email? Spoken words exist for a short time and then disappear, but even a text message sits there and stares at you for long after you send or receive it. It's not just the controlling CEOs; I think they're just a specific case of this much, much wider phenomenon.

p0w3n3d• 12 months ago

Ah, yes. The control freak. However control freaking has more problems than this. I'm thinking bus factor = 1 unless team tries to solve problems for themselves but hiding it from the control freak

Also crawling exhaustion and burnout, later coming frustration and unrealisticly high standards for oneself and others. Hmm, why am I starting to describe myself...

quantile122• 12 months ago

And these leaders are fairly common. And more so during tough times when it's every man for himself

ogou4• 12 months ago

After watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better. Even now there are people I will screenshot any DMs that have even a hint of conflict. I doubt I will ever participate in any work chats in a social way again.

mjevans3• 12 months ago

There's a distinction between random (probably not for work, 'water cooler chat') and 'obviously divisive' topics like politics. Particularly in the US, those are the sort of things you avoid.

ogou4• 12 months ago

Those distinctions evaporated in 2020 and never returned.

Gigachad• 12 months ago

Never do casual conversation on the record. It's always going to result in this kind of stuff. If you want to get to know your coworkers, go out to lunch with them or chat face to face. That way you can limit exactly who is listening, gauge the response. And anything you say will be lost to time.

Obviously you can still get in trouble if you say something very inappropriate, but anything middle of the road will be forgotten.

esco27• 12 months ago

There are certain things in life that are meant to be unstructured and spontaneous. The moment you try to sandbox them they tend to devolve into noise which then calls for more structure or "rules", it's a slippery slope. If you're remote, you can always start a huddle and talk while you work, or if talking is not your thing, a good old DM can work. If you're worried about noise or things getting lost, you can always move the work related things into their own channel as they come up. Just 2 cents.

respondo2134• 12 months ago

struggling to create the organic interactions you had in-person? Here's a reomte process you can mandate and measure to ensure everyone is casually interacting in the correct, company-approved way!

Separo• 12 months ago

Channels should also include a #roast-the-product channel which encourages harsh, direct but valid criticism of the product (NOT people / feature authors etc).

It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.

t5teveryweek• 12 months ago

Hey at least it's not T5T (top 5 thing)that you're forced to do every other week because your founder read one nvidia blog post

nicoritschel• 12 months ago

You should do this in normal channels relevant to the discussion topic to facilitate discussion, not a separate channel per person. What.

RedNifre• 12 months ago

We did something like that on a private Minecraft server 15 years ago, where everybody was required to have an identi.ca account for this server (status.net, like mastodon today). All messages appeared posted to the walls of a large library building in the middle of the world and people could post to their accounts from the ingame chat.

It worked really well for about half the people, the other half ignored it completely.

I wouldn't mind if today's office chats like Teams or Slack added a microblogging feature where you could subscribe to interesting colleagues.

andrewrn4• 12 months ago

I really cannot imagine working remote full-time, it sounds so depressing. We already don't go to church or bars or movies or clubs anymore. Work is one of the few remaining places to interact with other humans.

I'd be interested in trying this if I was remote, but I still just prefer in-person work.

I worked an in-person job recently at an oil company where we had no regular meetings (I was doing absolute grunt drafting work), and it was the most depressing experience of my life. This would be better than in-person w/o water cooler chats.

Etheryte• 12 months ago

I mean, no one is stopping you from going to church or bars or movies or clubs. All of those things are still there if that's what you fancy.

ryandrake4• 12 months ago

Yea, different strokes for different folks. Since going remote, I now have the choice about if, where, and when to interact with other people, and who those people should be. If I want to go two weeks without seeing another person (IRL, not counting video conference), I can do it. If I want to go out and socialize, I have 4 formerly-commuting hours back every day that I can use to do so.

andrewrn4• 12 months ago

Did I claim that someone was stopping me from doing those things? My point was that traditional gathering formats that are conducive to community-forming are diminishing. It's not a matter of an individual choosing not to participate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

mystifyingpoi3• 12 months ago

People are different. I worked around 1.5 years on fully remote gig and it was the best time of my life ever.

Wake up at 6, start working, finish at 2 pm. In the middle do all the house chores that I could squeeze in (cleaning, shopping, eating, even chopped few cubic meters of wood in span of weeks) while keeping my output the same as other teammates (it wasn't particularly hard, either). Each day I was out at 2 pm, ready to decide on MY terms, who to meet, what to do, what to attend.

andrewrn4• 12 months ago

Glad it works for you.

I'd be so curious about the demographics on these comments. For context, I am a single person in my 20's, living alone. If I had a family, I can easily see WFH being a whole lot better.

atomicnumber3• 12 months ago

People are different. I have been fully remote for 5 years after 5 in-office, so I've seen both.

In office was fine while I didn't have kids. Now I have kids and my life would be in shambles if I had to commute. I also live in BFE and would make probably 70% less if I worked locally.

I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s. So I'm well used to getting lots of my social interaction from text chats, and I prefer it. I can text chat all day. I can in person chat for about 45 mins before I want to be alone with my thoughts.

Plus, I get off work and get to socialize with my family, who I like roughly 100x more than my favorite coworker.

It's just different people, different communication styles, different lives.

andrewrn4• 12 months ago

I can’t relate to text chat sufficing for face-to-face interaction. All the micro nonverbal communication seems important to me.

But fair enough, everyone’s different. Having a family would certainly make wfh easier.

standardUser• 12 months ago

If you want your remote teams to have increased cohesion you need to fly them all to the same location (at company expense, only during weekdays) multiple times per year and give them the opportunity to actually get to know each other.

Anything else usually just feels awkward and pathetic. But since online game shows or "breakaway rooms" cost the company a whole lot less money, that's what we're stuck with.

twinkjock• 12 months ago

This whole post is unnecessary if you have threaded replies and threaded conversations.

throw109202• 12 months ago

I put my work ramblings in daily journal notes in Markdown files in a git repository. Unfortunately, I don't spend the time to then ensure that they're accessible to my co-workers - and given the amount of value that I would get if they did that, I should do it myself.

Also, I'm very glad that I don't work in a place with Slack/chat culture. I really like the idea of making your ramblings available, but the thought of forcing everything into chat is repulsive. Just use a wiki page or files in a Git repo (as long as they're sufficiently easy to access) and that's good enough.

ethan_smith• 12 months ago

Try using a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo with GitHub Pages to automatically publish your Markdown ramblings - minimal setup, preserves your workflow, and gives teammates a simple URL to bookmark.

throw109202• 12 months ago

Oh, that's a great idea - thank you.

rayrey• 12 months ago

Machine Stops comes to mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

jedberg• 12 months ago

We use #random for this.

gardnr• 12 months ago

They had these at BigCorp I worked at. Anyone can make a channel like #x-gardner and then people can join that channel if they choose. The way that you find them organically is by searching the chat app for some random thing that you are interested in and then finding a few people discussing it in an X channel.

It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.

j452• 12 months ago

Where rambling might not have a positive connotation, imagining them as "musing" channels seemed to resonate.

Having a way to share what's on your mind that might not get shared is usually what can happen in person during the early days of a startup.

It can also allow the initial startup group to have a better connected sense of what's going on in each person's world compared to what they take the time to type.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 12 months ago

We had this, but they were called journal channels. It worked great cause I always have something to say but it's not worth putting in a shared channel.

surge• 12 months ago

This is just rubberducking into a private channel. It's really not that new.

I actually do this, but into a personal google doc.

nunez• 12 months ago

This used to be the #random channel on Slack iirc

nixpulvis• 12 months ago

I like having an #offtopic and #thoughts channel for not worrying about burying important info in. If something meaningful happens it'll get captured, otherwise it serves to connect and relate.

babyshake• 12 months ago

One of these is not like the others:

ideas related to current projects musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback “what if” suggestions photos from recent trips or hobbies rubber ducking a problem

it seems like the goal is to split #random into #work-random and #not-work-random. but #ramblings seems like a weird naming convention. Why is an idea related to a current project a "rambling"?

kepano4• 12 months ago

Simply, it is an unpolished thought. It gives coworkers a lens into what you're thinking and gives space for ideas that are not fully baked.

WarOnPrivacy• 12 months ago

For one of my small-biz clients, I could use what the author outlines - restrictions and all (if I'm an outlier, is fine).

Besides fixing my customer's stuff, I learn and improve their systems. There's a small corral of offsite indy IT talent; I'm the onsite, everything else guy.

I could use a simple space to quickly post v1 thoughts in an unpolished format. They'd be available for our other IT to review and comment on.

Since I want this, all the client will pay for is for me to implement it. Nothing else. Also, the owner likes data to stay in house. Together it rules out subscription and cloud products. I'll see what my FOSS options are.

your_friend• 12 months ago

Why not one common channel?

steele• 12 months ago

Reads like pro-tips for middle management avoiding losing knowledge captured in DMs from layoffs

jama21111• 12 months ago

I would prefer this so much to enforced daily meetings. This is much more natural and interesting.

stego-tech• 12 months ago

Seconding OP with my own experiences:

The best companies I’ve worked for freely encouraged workers to leverage chat or forums for non-work stuff. Rooms for AV enthusiasts, for sharing music, for discussing photography, corporate gripes, new ideas, personal projects, meeting colleagues on holiday, you name it.

You can absolutely have the spontaneity of physical collaboration through solely online and remote means. The internet itself is proof positive of this, companies just need to encourage that behavior more (and only minimally police it to avoid HR incidents or lawsuits).

projexorcism2• 12 months ago

There's no such thing as a dumb question. Only dumb people.

projexorcism2• 12 months ago

There's no such thing as a dumb question. There are only dumb people.

matsemann• 12 months ago

All the ramblings channels should be in a Ramblings section at the bottom of the channel list. They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them.

I hate that Slack and other apps have nothing in between "mute" and "tell me immediately if I have anything unread". Many channels I want to know if there are new messages and read, just not by the second. If it could batch them up and only show them as unread after lunch, perhaps.

fennec-posix• 12 months ago

yeah my coworkers deal with this in our "banter" channel, my raw thoughts.

mattbee• 12 months ago

This speaks to me!

I've worked on 3 different projects / workplaces in the last year where I've been the only talker on a Slack with 10s of people on it. Sometimes I'll write 5-6 detailed messages in a day, talking about particular problems or updates on things I'm working on, and almost nothing from anyone else.

These are in subject-specific channels (#network-engineering or #programmers or the like) where colleagues are subscribed.

But the real business of each company seemed to happen in private group chats or video meetings, with no long-term records.

I'm like to state a problem before I've solved it, for the rubber ducking. Very occasionally someone would reply to help, and occasionally I reply with a :facepalm: if I realise I've just been hasty or sloppy. But even if nobody replies, I am very happy to have a public log of my work, the problems I've solved (or not), and the people I might tag for particular input.

If someone DMs me for help with something that is possibly of interest to >1 person, I tend to re-state the issue (without identifying who asked me), then answer in public, and thank them for asking.

If I have a question for a colleague, I will tend to ask it in a channel, as it becomes something searchable.

I ask work questions on Stack Overflow for the same reason, and often self-answer because the place is dead as a community, but the search works well. After a few years I find my own answers as a complete surprise.

But I have colleagues who've not said a line in public basically forever. I've not been a manager for years, always an IC lately. I've not had any objections, but it seems like nobody wants to join me to make "work in public" the default.

Apparently I'm happy to be the exhibitionist little freak?

dherikb• 12 months ago

This reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked.

Like anyone else, when I joined the company, I had various questions: how to access certain systems, how to handle permissions, how to debug specific services, etc.

I compiled all these questions and answers as notes in a Git repository that my teammates could access. I wrote the notes using QOwnNotes, utilizing its Git integration. So, when someone had a question for which I already had the answer, I could simply share my notes, or create/update a node and share it.

The names of the notes were straightforward and easy to follow, such as:

- aws.md

- azure.md

- kubernetes.md

- staging.md

- production.md

- useful-commands.md (jq, sed, base64, etc)

My teammates used this resource frequently. As I was preparing to leave the company, I suggested them to fork my notes repository. I later heard that they continued to use it for many months afterward.

spauldo• 12 months ago

The first thing this puts me in mind of is mcom.bad-attitude, the internal Netscape newsgroup for this sort of thing.

jwz wrote about how well that worked out on his blog.

PeterStuer• 12 months ago

In my experience, every business social/communication channel will be gamed for (stealth or blatant) personal promotion.

At first not everyone will catch on to this. Those will be the first to be called into HR or get remarks on their anual review.

gregoriol2• 12 months ago

"with no expectation that anyone else will read them" => this is depressing, why would anyone ramble (or do anything actually) with this in mind?

gimboland• 12 months ago

Why do people write in a journal?

Why do people pray?

Why do people do rubber-duck debugging?

gregoriol2• 12 months ago

In each of these activities you listed, you know it's for yourself only. The case described in the post is very different: it suggests rambling in a place where others are, but just don't care about what you say.

quantile122• 12 months ago

No - focus on communication that adds value to your company and your career. Don't get sucked into distractions. Spend your time aligning yourself with projects, ideas, people etc that will boost your career

Is isn't 2018 any more. Don't ramble about off topic casual stuff somewhere where it's all kept on record and easily viewable by your boss (and if your boss isn't invited to the channels, what do you think they'll think when they find out all their employees have lots of 'rambling' channels?). What if HR gets wind of this during the next planned RIF? Your job is to add value to the company

Take your project ideas etc directly to your boss. Don't let other people steal them

Join a non-work Slack group for this kind of socialising

djmips• 12 months ago

Rambling also makes you visible which is not a bad thing when you're remote.

mnafees• 12 months ago

I’ve been working remotely for YC startups for the past 3.5+ years, and I completely agree. I went from being the quietest person in the room to someone who often ends up rambling on most calls. Remote work has not only given me the space to speak my mind - and sometimes even find answers to my own questions - but also the opportunity to learn so much from my colleagues.

abc123abc123• 12 months ago

Why would I? It is boring and adds no value. Much better to work instead. If I need something, I ask. If people need something from me, they ask. I think the biggest increas in productivity for me was when we banned chatting and moved all communication to email. The amount of distractions was reduced significantly!

thedudeabides5• 12 months ago

yup

grvdrm• 12 months ago

This post talks about remote but I will generalize beyond remote.

Effective sharing is amazing and a superpower. Doesn't have to be chat either.

Years ago (between 2006-2012) I worked for a company that implemented Salesforce. We were all in the office but spread across floors, US offices, and some offices elsewhere in the world.

Someone structured Salesforce in such a way that every client question/answer was clearly documented and properly linked. So, over time, I found and learned so much searching through that knowledgebase. Had some garbage questions/answers just like anything (including chats).

What's key though is MOST client-facing folks bought into sharing/linking/documenting to Salesforce. Rather than sitting in individual inboxes.

So, if you're able to create that same sort of magic through a chat channel, do it. If you don't see an org that understands that sort of behavior, might not be worth your time. It takes effort!

mjaniczek• 12 months ago

Related: Rubber duck channels. https://wolfgangschuster.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ducks/

I've now seen this across two companies, and it's great to have #rd-martinjaniczek where I can just talk about what I'm doing as I'm doing it, post error messages and later how I solved them (or let somebody else jump in and tell me how they solved it etc.), it helps Slack searchability and combats the remote loneliness, it's pretty great.

And reading other folks' RD channels, you realize how frickin' funny some people are.

If you're remote, ramble

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