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If you're remote, ramble

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Re: If you're remote, ramble

#451

Post by grvdrm »

This post talks about remote but I will generalize beyond remote.

Effective sharing is amazing and a superpower. Doesn't have to be chat either.

Years ago (between 2006-2012) I worked for a company that implemented Salesforce. We were all in the office but spread across floors, US offices, and some offices elsewhere in the world.

Someone structured Salesforce in such a way that every client question/answer was clearly documented and properly linked. So, over time, I found and learned so much searching through that knowledgebase. Had some garbage questions/answers just like anything (including chats).

What's key though is MOST client-facing folks bought into sharing/linking/documenting to Salesforce. Rather than sitting in individual inboxes.

So, if you're able to create that same sort of magic through a chat channel, do it. If you don't see an org that understands that sort of behavior, might not be worth your time. It takes effort!

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#452

Post by jobs_throwaway »

ghaff wrote: post #154
parpfish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings: The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations. But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio t…

And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video. The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls. It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly dif…

> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room

And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#453

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

anal_reactor wrote: post #176
sublinear wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic. I think that's precisely why the ramblings should be a separate channel apart from all the emails and more serious communication, but I have some thoughts why this still might not work. I used to be guilty of leaving walls of text in our "random" channel, and we weren't even remote back then. My reasons…

I used to work for a small company, and I'd sometimes write short essays about things in general. It was rarely even related to programming, but people seemed to love that. Then I switched to corporate and I quickly understood to shut up because whenever I say something, someone might get upset over it for whatever reason and then it's going to be a problem.

I am actually surprised that people weren't upset over it in the startup side since a cousin of mine worked in a startup and he said that they were pretty immature and frankly "unprofessional"

I guess, maybe unprofessional might mean short essays but I'd like to work somewhere that supports such behaviours if I am being honest.

I just really feel like its so hard convincing a single person anything or let alone the world. What are your thoughts?

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#454

Post by throwaway-blaze »

majke wrote: post #132

Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else…

Not to be pedantic but I spent at least a solid minute trying to understand how you collaborated with a piece of artwork.

Then I realized you meant colleague.

;)

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#455

Post by philsnow »

majke wrote: post #300
Aurornis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are…

This is a great comment. Thanks. In my case - indeed the name is a historical baggage, I'm not arguing for or against it. Indeed we had regularly situations that we had to pull in experts from other rooms, to discuss specific topics (like TCP), so we should have forwarded the conversation at the start. But I don't think this should be categorical. There is value in non-experts responding faster (the channel had good…

> Maybe there should be an option to... move conversation threads across channels?

I believe Zulip can do this, but Zulip is not really favored in these parts

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#456

Post by ryandrake »

ogou wrote: post #328
ryandrake wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must depend on the company/office. My team (200+ people) has a "offtopic/socialize" chat channel set up for this kind of rando chit chat, and it has never, not once in many years, even had a hint of divisiveness or politics. Yes, you do need to be working with grownups who can behave and leave that shit at home.

Basecamp is a well-known example. I saw it personally at 3 different companies, including one in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032627

Thanks for that link. Wow, what a wild story. I agree with the top commenter: It looks like the company was composed entirely of children or adults with child-like communication skills/habits!

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#457

Post by tracker1 »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #351
jamesog wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations. I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings.…

Always funny to see these sort of missed connections on HN. > internal blogs In my personal experience the problem is the total lack of writing culture at non-premiere companies. Put differently: unless you’re working on a great team at a great organization roughly 90% of people cannot be expected to write/read well as a component of technical collaboration. Any thoughts on that? I may just be too cynical

I'm not sure it's really cynical at all, in my experience, even with a LOT of wiki documentation, it is almost always severely out of date and many people don't know what is where... after a while, there's new, new, new versions of docs because people didn't want to refactor existing docs someone else created. And, in the end, almost nobody reads it and just ask other, more senior people within the team/org.

This is, of course, without explicit management directives to update documentation as a task/chore. Much like in many (most?) orgs, churning through technical debt is rarely a priority.

That said, no place is perfect and it takes only a handful of people to improve a culture, but without at least management support and/or fostering such a culture, it doesn't tend to happen.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#458

Post by tracker1 »

fallous wrote: post #395
Aurornis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are…

A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution. If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a…

IMO, the greatest force multiplier in onboarding is automation... How many user interactive steps does a dev need to walk through to get up and running?

I've often gotten this down to a single directory and a primary script you need to run 3-4 times... mostly because of required reboots, such as after WSL setup, also, a few options to set in Docker Desktop. I've done similar with mac/homebrew.

From there, you have docker-compose and shell scripts to run against the projects... these scripts and the compose file(s) are the entry points into a project, actually documenting where things are, and how they connect (to an extent).

Effectively, getting a working solution running sooner than later. This is just my own opinion, but automating a dev environment for onboarding, especially if you're a larger org, is a great tactical decision.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#460

Post by parpfish »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #452
ghaff wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video. The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls. It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly dif…

> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video. But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. Peopl…

the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it
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