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If you're remote, ramble

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Re: If you're remote, ramble

#81

Post by rubslopes »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #59
bsenftner wrote: post #55

I've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one…

At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social co…

It's http://gather.town

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#82

Post by ruszki »

siva7 wrote: post #10

> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.

I’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.

Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#83

Post by Stratoscope »

nottorp wrote: post #75
senko wrote: post #23

I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code). While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.

That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?

#random

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#84

Post by jobs_throwaway »

stingraycharles wrote: post #69
count wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team. It helps a LOT. We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.

We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work. As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in…

group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#85

Post by nasalgoat »

I worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break.

I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#86

Post by elric »

layer8 wrote: post #77

> Common topics include: > - ideas related to current projects > - musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback > - “what if” suggestions > - photos from recent trips or hobbies > - rubber ducking a problem Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO. Some might be interested in the former but not the latter, and also might be interested in them at different times (of the day/week). There’s also the…

> There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.

So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#87

Post by layer8 »

nottorp wrote: post #75
senko wrote: post #23

I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code). While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.

That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?

It depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#88

Post by [deleted] »

comrade1234 wrote: post #74

I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that would just ruin this. The entire channel would be just be walls of his text. It's hard enough just to understand his wall of text emails that have a big report embedded somewhere in it.

[deleted]

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#89

Post by delecti »

firesteelrain wrote: post #57
hk__2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement. The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.

In teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?

Mattermost can truly mute. Doing so disables the behavior that makes the channel name bold when there are unread messages.

Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#90

Post by jamesblonde »

This is so anglo-saxon to be individual channels for ramblings. We have group wide channel. It's supposed to be social - no pressure to post. Lurkers welcome. Just share. Naturally, some are more talkative than others. The idea is to foster a group/social culture - not have atomized diaries about individuals.
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