Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

#151

Post by gilbetron » Sat, Apr 09, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

tomtheelder wrote: post #140

gilbetron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counter rant: I get great joy at socialization by working with people. It is something I've come to discover about myself, and I am not alone. And "work" doesn't have to include a job, but "working" with people on a sports team, or doing renovation at home or any other thing where we are working together to do something. Many other social things people like to do just doesn't do it much for me, although I've gotten b…

Want to layer onto this as someone with a similar, but slightly different perspective. I have a very active social life, and most of my leisure activities are group ones. But I also get great joy out of socializing by working. It's completely different from the other sorts of socializing I get, and neither is in any way a substitute for another. I also am just happier and more productive in a social workplace. I get…

Pre-pandemic, I had a fairly active social life, and I want to get it back (life changes happened, too, where my wife and I used to play soccer and other sports, and had social outlets there, but we hit an age where that became too tough on us) - so I agree with what you are saying. The thing is, there are different types of people you end up socializing with. Outside of work, it tends to be more people like us, with the same interests, same kind of humor, etc. At work, I get to socialize with people that I don't normally get to socialize with - especially with remote work. On my team now are people from different religions, nationalities, backgrounds, etc. People I never would meet usually, or at best, rarely. They think differently than me, and that's really cool and interesting.

But on the weekend I play RPGs with my ancient group of friends and we have a huge history and common interest and that's a lot of fun too.

Re: Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

#152

Post by jh0486 » Mon, Apr 11, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #124

jh0486 wrote: post #87

The pandemic has made it more challenging. I've worked remotely for over eight years and managed teams for 4 of those years. Engagement feedback has dramatically shifted, with people feeling disconnected and needing more social interaction. Before the pandemic, people leveraged their local social networks and didn't need work to be their source of community. One of the rituals on my team that has stuck for years is a…

Interesting, we’ve found unstructured conversation pretty much impossible on Zoom. No one liked the open ended happy hours, so they stopped. Games actually got people talking.

If common interests aren't found during the unstructured conversation, the manager should be probing for commonalities during 1:1s and using them to spark the conversation. Once the conversations start happening, they will snowball from there. Like anything, sometimes it needs an icebreaker.

Re: Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

#153

Post by jonjon10002 » Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #146

jonjon10002 wrote: post #128

I'm a manager. (Sorry.) I do a weekly Friday "Ask me anything" on Zoom that's basically a free-form training session where people reporting to me (or other teams are fine, too) ask about how to do something or how we should be doing something, and we walk through it in video. One reason I started this is we had a mix of junior people, people who came in from acquisitions, and people who had changed tools and weren't…

How often would someone watch them later?

Seldom, except when we on-boarded new people. This was mostly to counter when the folks on one continent would feel left out when folks on another continent were given custom training, and the feeling that institutional knowledge was being hoarded by different teams.

(In reality, they were doing a lot more off-boarding than on-boarding in my last year there. And thanks to agile and daily releases, nobody had any free time to do less important things like training, days off, or sleeping.)