Ask HN: Do you have inspiring spontaneous conversations while remote working?

2. using video chat often helps. once I had a longer video conversation with somebody to get to know each other it is much easier to go ahead thinking about things only in a few chat lines. mostly it helps also to be informal with language and plain with concepts in chats

I obviously don't need as much human interaction as you or other people I work with, because we have a system which allows a small number of people into the office per day if they want to work in the office, and it's always the same people. I haven't availed of it once.

I think all this is just showing what a lot of people already knew: the one-size-fits-all 9-5 way of working really didn't work for everyone. The company I work for (Arm) have been really great about the whole situation in accommodating people's different circumstances and I'm hopeful for the future.

What I mean is that OP's question and your answer both have a context which isn't always explicit in these conversations.

The Linux kernel development, and I would argue most successful remote shops, have had a "remote first" culture from the beginning, or, if remote was something that came up later, have had a change in culture.

My client, for example, has a culture where people would just drop in and ask random questions. Or you would overhear people talking about something and you'd jump in. During lockdown, this wasn't possible anymore. So they would start having meetings among "stakeholders", which, in the above story would be the people initially in the conversation, and reach some sort of decision. The other people wouldn't be able to jump in during the conversation. They could of course argue with the decision, but sometimes they'd find out about it "too late".

Contrast this with a culture where everything is done in public, for everyone to see and with a possibility for everyone to intervene during the discussion, as is the case on the LKML or as I suppose is the case in a remote-first company. There would be discussions say on slack or some other communication tool where even people not directly invited could at least have a look and see what's emerging.

I think that those people "wringing their hands about how there’s no way to do spontaneous, creative, collaborative work remotely" are people used to working in in-person cultures. Not only that, but it's very likely that the companies where they work are very "in-person" companies and that those companies have a hard time adapting to the remote way of doing things. It's not enough that some people would try to make this work. For this to actually work, there has to be a serious change in how the company itself works.

We tried doing a bimonthly quiz across our wider team but attendance waned and it was a lot of work for people to pull together content and manage etc.

In our smaller team, you are right and not everyone is into the idea every week, but they are vocal about it and the reasons (deadline/family etc). They are not penalised in any way shape or form for being honest. We also had themed stand-ups for a while (it was good to cheer us up from time to time but a lot of work).

We also have to acknowledge that it's different for everyone, we all have different circumstances.

I have a daughter, two of my colleagues have two kids, one is single, one is in a relationship. Half the team are from different countries, and have had visits home cancelled, they have been upset on calls I've been depressed about things too at times, but you have to be honest with your team, now more than ever you need to be supportive of eachother.

The most simple thing I've found is to have a variety of MS Teams backgrounds that are not your standard ones. It's a simple thing but can get a smile every now and then, especially when someone's kid appears!