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The Remote Pop-In (2021)

twos.dev

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Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like in this setup, people only join their office room when they're open to being interrupted: "When you are online and able to be disturbed, you join your office, alone."

Yes but this places a task on someone, to decide when they're open to be interrupted or not. This places that work on them, and makes them do this work whether or not someone wants to interrupt them. In the office scenario, I as the interruptor take on the burden of finding out when someone is open to being interrupted (and it's not that hard). For example I can just say "I'll ask him the next time I see him" and wai…

Author here. As a companion to this, we had informal optional daily water cooler esque meetings that we used to fill the “I’ll ask them next time I see them” use case.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#84
post #25

I don't get it. Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection? In my opinion everyone who's advocating "meetings" - formal or not - is just unable to express thoughts in writing. You have to learn to communicate asynchronously and become a better writer rather than trying to recreate the dysfunctional environment that you are familiar with.

> Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection?

Because a lot of people have a pathological need for social interaction. In my opinion this is extremely unhealthy, a person should not be dependent on other humans to be comfortable and happy, but society sees it as normal and even desirable.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#87

My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation…

[deleted]

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#88
Author here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments.

1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discord was an easy and incremental jump to take. Take whatever path makes sense for your culture.

2. “Why not make this asynchronous?” Asynchrony should indeed be the default mode of communication, but synchrony has its uses; between nonverbal communication and round-trip-time it is simply obnoxiously higher bandwidth. It trades away efficiency (person-hours) for speed (hours). The fewer people involved the better the exchange rate, which is why this article focuses on 1:1 interactions. I wrote about this later in my article “Why Be Synchronous?” [1] but tldr; synchrony should be deployed similarly to tech debt.

[1]: https://twos.dev/async.html

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#89
I totally disagree with the premise of this blog post.

At my last 3 jobs - it was common to slack or IRC "Got time for a zoom?" and on yes, type '/slack meeting talk.'

remote pop-ins happen all the time.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#90
post #15

> If you're going to the restroom and will be AFK, you can join the restroom channel. You're in, but away. No one is actually wearing a headset on the toilet, it's just a fun way to feel like a real office. Interesting, I would never have expected anyone to feel the need of recreating this particular piece of office life in a remote setting.

Likewise, this is quite possibly the worst suggestion or best troll I’ve seen in months.

I don't understand how this is better than simply sending the person a message.
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