Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

pragli.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 168 posts

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#101

Post by lukethomas »

tommoor wrote: post #21

I have worked remotely for 10 years and raised VC funding for an idea very similar to this in the past – we failed to build a sustainable business, although the product did have a couple of hundred teams that swore by the product. In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is re…

I used Sqwiggle back in 2013 and while I appreciated the idea in theory, as an employee, it felt like an employee oversight tool.

Essentially, it gave the impression that my boss didn't trust that I was doing my work. This tool made it so someone could see if I was actually at the computer doing work.

It also drained my battery, so I always needed to have my computer plugged-in.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#102

Post by jon-wood »

goatinaboat wrote: post #73
ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

This is very common in some industries to have always-on two-way screens connected to workers in another office. A company called Tandberg was the main maker of them. It’s owned by Cisco now but everyone still calls them Tandbergs. Typically you would have one at the end of a row of desks to “extend” that row to another row physically located in another office and vice versa

I love Atlassian's implementation of this[1] where they installed "portals" around their offices, connected to a counterpart in another office - if you want to chat to someone you can walk over to the relevant portal and do so, but because they're always on and in public places they also facilitate the sort of spontaneous conversations you get when you bump into someone in the kitchen while making a cup of coffee.

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/developer-lives-save...

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#103

Post by dewey »

reificator wrote: post #15
whalesalad wrote: post #3

This is an even more egregious violation of someone’s attention than IM. We tried to use mumble on one team with push-to-talk and it only lasted a few hours.

I grew up with IM and distributed teams online, and am very comfortable with it. It's my platonic ideal for remote/distributed communication... until expectations around response times are put into place. If I can receive a message, respond to it four hours or a day later, and receive a phone call for anything more urgent than that, I'm happy to use IM platforms for collaboration.

> If I can receive a message, respond to it four hours or a day later, and receive a phone call for anything more urgent than that, I'm happy to use IM platforms for collaboration.

Isn't that exactly Slack with the "Do not disturb" mode on does or email?

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#104

Post by nnq »

> quick, synchronous audio/video communication between teammates

..."kill it with fire" or other equivalent meme is the proper response to this, no matter how wonderfully it is executed.

Really, what everyone needs is more asynchronous communication and less attention draining and less interruptions! This can only help very small teams of extroverts with very-very-similar personalities work, it brings HELL for everyone else! And creates a homogenous bubble by locking people with different personalities out of the loop because they can't stand being in it.

We should put more time into bringing to the future ASYNCHRONOUS communication tools that WORK FINE, like email, comments in project-management-systems (eg. in Trello, Asana etc.)... we need more and better of these! (And without compromising them by adding push-notification and crap that makes them synchronous and attention grabbing.)

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#105

Post by jiofih »

p_l wrote: post #96
tom_mellior wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no mention of special do not disturb handling There's a section on setting manual statuses, including one specific example of "focussing - do not disturb". The animated screengrab below suggests that if someone wants to contact you with such a status set they will get a window informing them and the option to bother you anyway. Not sure how special you would want your handling, but something is definitely there. Th…

The resigned me would accept that DND mode because somehow it would be made hard to work without this software, possibly with HR involved. The naive me would think there's going to be something better or that people would actually respect that. The cynical experienced me wants a progressively higher level of pain delivered before you can call someone in DND mode.

They also mention that what finally made it feel nice is automatically setting DND mode when there is a calendar event (including any “focus time” blocks you create).

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#106

Post by cbzbc »

goatinaboat wrote: post #73
ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

This is very common in some industries to have always-on two-way screens connected to workers in another office. A company called Tandberg was the main maker of them. It’s owned by Cisco now but everyone still calls them Tandbergs. Typically you would have one at the end of a row of desks to “extend” that row to another row physically located in another office and vice versa

At one point I worked at what had been Tandberg; and there were a couple of teams there with remote workers who were represented by a desk with Tandberg terminal on it with a always on session running all day.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#107

Post by tomgp »

ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

We used a similar setup to co-ordinate a project team split between New York and London. At both locations, at the end of the row of desks, we had a monitor at about head height on a stand running a google hangout. You could immediately see who was about and what kind of activity they were doing and then gather round the monitor for conversations etc.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#108

Post by dorkley »

andyfleming wrote: post #90
steve1977 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They can say "no" or "can you come back in 10?" By then, the damage to concentration has already been made. Yes, you can set your status to "do not disturb". But you have to remember to do that.

Sure, it's still an interruption, but I don't think it's completely derailing. That's why I compared it to stopping by someone's desk. It still requires both parties to be responsible and aware.

You've clearly not got a clue how a software engineer works if you think its not derailing.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#109

Post by divisonby0 »

cyrusmg wrote: post #100

Is it just me or is the pragli.com website doing some heavy computations to everyone ? I connected via Firefox on Linux and my CPU temperature skyrocketed to 81C almost immediately. Note: Not this blog page, the main landing page itself.

Can confirm, eats up all 8 cores. Seems to be a script from firebasestorage.googleapis.com

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#110

Post by p_l »

jiofih wrote: post #105
p_l wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resigned me would accept that DND mode because somehow it would be made hard to work without this software, possibly with HR involved. The naive me would think there's going to be something better or that people would actually respect that. The cynical experienced me wants a progressively higher level of pain delivered before you can call someone in DND mode.

They also mention that what finally made it feel nice is automatically setting DND mode when there is a calendar event (including any “focus time” blocks you create).

A big problem is that many people will ultimately ignore DND anyway.
Post reply on HN