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The Remote Pop-In (2021)

twos.dev

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Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#2
That’s interesting but I’d have to wonder how effective it is for traditionally more introverted teams like engineering. Do they enforce a certain amount of time someone must be in their “office” and thus primed to be interrupted, maybe even only doing lite work? Or is this a case that works really well for only largely extroverted teams, sales, product, marketing etc.

My suspicion is a non trivial amount of introverted staff will just never have an “open door” so to speak, but then you miss out on valuable interactions for the broader organization or team even if locally for the person they’re uncomfortable or annoying.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#3
I just phone (or teams call) people (not scheduled meetings) to collaborate. This only really worked with people that I worked quite well with but it comes pretty close to just going over to their office and interrupting them. I'd ping them on slack/teams to see if they are free if I didn't know.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#5
> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in.

There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me.

Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll listen to it and call you back.

This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee. It gives us back control of whether we are interrupted (put your phone on silent if you really need to), it is universal and ubiquitous.

Obviously, because of phone spam, this doesn't work with normal telephones (unless you add all your coworkers to your contacts). But Slack/MS Teams/Discord/VoIP/etc can solve that for us. Just tell everyone in your office to call you, and leave a message if you're not there and you will get back to them as soon as you can. Put "Call Me" as your away message. Voice calls worked well enough for nearly a century as a remote working method; I think we can learn to do it again.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#7

> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll li…

Given the described situation (company already using Discord), your suggestion is obviously silly. The solution proposed is simple and uses an existing tool that they are already using.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#8
This is definitely a killer feature on Discord for remote working. Being able to see who is in a room, join ad hoc, and work along side them has greatly reduced communication friction, and I’ve grown to love using (basically only) Discord over Slack + Calendar + Zoom/Meet to manage team communications.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#9

That’s interesting but I’d have to wonder how effective it is for traditionally more introverted teams like engineering. Do they enforce a certain amount of time someone must be in their “office” and thus primed to be interrupted, maybe even only doing lite work? Or is this a case that works really well for only largely extroverted teams, sales, product, marketing etc. My suspicion is a non trivial amount of introver…

In practice it has felt more collaborative and inclusive. I’m not / don’t work with OP (early stage startup also, < 5 engineers), but our team has been using only Discord for the last few weeks (using only 1 eng room, not 1 room per person like OP).
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