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The Remote Pop-In (2021)

twos.dev

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Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#41

Post by dwrtz »

raymondgh wrote: post #11

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…

Sorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#42

Post by morsch »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #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 li…

Voice mail is terrible, but I do think Google Chat/Meet is missing a "call" button. All you can do is send a regular chat message with a link to an impromptu meet. Sometimes I would like a button that politely asks for more immediate attention.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#43

Post by solatic »

We started using Discord the same way at my last company when the pandemic hit and everyone had to go remote-only overnight. It was immensely valuable for fostering a sense of presence and we were pretty proud to call it our "virtual office". Slack Huddles and Zoom can't hold a candle to it. Zoom doesn't foster a sense of "who's online now?" discovery (since it's used a lot as a tool for intercompany communication, and it's none of your vendors' business whether you're online now or not) and Slack Huddles doesn't default to having your speakers on, you need to decide to join the huddle, which is too much friction. $75/month (for a level 2 upgraded Discord chatroom, for upgraded audio), for a 50-100 person startup, was an incredibly good value. It wasn't quite the same as an in-person pop-in, you can't grab your coworker's keyboard to show them something when you share screens, but it's 80+% of the same thing.

Which is why it's really sad that Discord doesn't scale for enterprise usage. No enterprise SSO, no way to search through or organize an ever-growing list of voice channels with an ever-growing number of people in them, no way to force the employees you invite to use their real names as their usernames so user management becomes difficult. We would have easily made the decision to throw Discord $10+/user/month if they would have decided to address the enterprise market. Shame.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#44

Post by mh- »

ahmetnoid wrote: post #37
mh- wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh, that's kind of clever. So when not otherwise in a zoom, each of you hang out in your own breakout room so others can "drop in"?

Exactly. If I want to drop in all I need to do is to check the breakout rooms list then move to the room where my colleague is. And once done I can go back to my breakout room. We also use it when pair programming remotely. It's quite effective and it eliminates communication barrier.

Very cool. Thanks for the reply.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

phailhaus wrote: post #34
throwaway787544 wrote: post #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 li…

> This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee I don't see how either of those are true for phone calls. 1. It's ideal for the interrupter: they get to decide when they want your time. They want it now. 2. It's annoying for the interruptee, because you only have two options. Either you can pick up the phone now and force a hard context switch away what you were doing, or you ca…

[deleted]

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#46

Post by quickthrower2 »

It is simple. Just start a video call. With the following etiquette:

Anyone can call anyone during office hours for any reason they would classically pop in.

Anyone receiving such a call is entitled to ignore it.

This has an additional advantage over the physical office: by declining the call you don’t get cognitively interrupted. With the popin the person starts talking about accounts API and the context switch has been forced on you.

Unless you dispense with politeness in the physical office, but that is a lot harder to do. Maybe impossible without some team building role play training.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#48

Post by gorgoiler »

Video conferencing forces me to look at a person’s face. I never really do that in real life. My best chats usually happen while walking in the nearby park, where we are both facing forward almost the entire time.

There’s also a physical warmth you get when being near someone. Being physically close to a fellow primate who is part of your clan and who you trust not to kill you must trigger something that video calls do not.

I have no training at all in any of this and this could be complete pseudish nonsense. I would be interested to read more informed opinions about this sort of thing.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#49

Post by jeffbr13 »

phailhaus wrote: post #34
throwaway787544 wrote: post #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 li…

> This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee I don't see how either of those are true for phone calls. 1. It's ideal for the interrupter: they get to decide when they want your time. They want it now. 2. It's annoying for the interruptee, because you only have two options. Either you can pick up the phone now and force a hard context switch away what you were doing, or you ca…

I found it helps to set boundaries and in one instance make it clear that I do not appreciate being called out of the blue. I feel almost everyone understands that a texting before a call is polite these days. Clarification was only required once for a colleague who tried dialling me into a meeting I wasn’t party to, just to ask me some questions that could have been an IM. They were actually a little younger, and so I think it was more a case of realising your impact on other people (who may be in or trying to achieve flow) if you interrupt them because it seems urgent to you. Like the article notes, the open plan office engendered interruptions too easily because it was convenient rather than urgent.

As a millennial I suppose I fall in between the two camps. When I was younger, social anxiety about taking up people’s valuable time with my silly questions made a phone call seem like a terrible burden to subject someone to, but with age and (remote work) experience, I’ve realised that conversations are indeed much higher bandwidth and often appreciated more than a letter or thread of back-and-forth clarifications. If I _had_ to stereotype by generation (sorry GP) I could say voice and video seem easier than reading and writing for boomers and Gen-Zs, but even that doesn’t sound right. It’s probably just a communication style thing. There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead. As humans we communicate with our voice, face, and body. The main benefit of text is asynchronicity. The challenge is how to thread the needle of asynchronicity in an increasingly post-literate world.

Re: The Remote Pop-In (2021)

#50

Post by qq66 »

2easy wrote: 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.

There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously. For everything else, synchronous meetings will continue to be essential (and even those projects like Linux which seem to be fully asynchronous usually have one contributor who dominates the project and thus the communication overhead/latency problem isn't as taxing)
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