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Comment by RankingMember | Hacker News Reader

"Enjoy lunch with your spouse instead of in the break room with Connie from accounts payable!"

I'm fully in favor of the freedom for everyone to work from home, but I think there are unique upsides to being in the office, too. Incidental contact with people from other departments (e.g. "Connie from accounts payable") is one of them, as this can give you a unique perspective on your organization and can spur new ideas/reveal new avenues for improvement you would've never encountered had you been sequestered away in "deliberate contact only" mode at home.

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I make sure not to talk about work when I'm at lunch.

I step away from my desk to eat lunch when I'm in the office to explicitly take a breather from work.

Why this forced line between work and non-work?

Haven't you ever had a moment that your work was so interesting that you wanted to share it with someone else in your 'non-work' time?

I would say: talk about what interests you. Don't focus too much on 'appropriate' timing.

As someone who does the same, it's not a forced line. In fact, not talking about work feels far less forced to me. Sure, there could be moments where something is so interesting you want to share it—but that requires talking to someone who won't just stare blankly at you because they lack the requisite knowledge and background to have the conversation.

More often than not, there's nothing so interesting happening with work that I want to talk about it. Before I was self-employed, I frequently hated how going to lunch with work mates meant having to spend time talking about work. It felt like lunch was just another meeting, instead of a break from work. I'd much rather have more meaningful and personal conversation—like, about books, art, traveling, relationships, whatever. Something that elevates us out of our role as workers and focused on our non-working selves. Conversation that helps increase our knowledge and understanding of each other. To be sure, that could mean work-related topics come up. But it gets seriously boring to talk with people who only want to talk shop.

> Haven't you ever had a moment that your work was so interesting that you wanted to share it with someone else in your 'non-work' time?

No.

> talk about what interests you.

I have far more interests than work. Work is what I do to pursue those interests.

Lunch and the end of the day are hard lines between work and non-work specifically to keep my head clear and to not suddenly become the job.

Lunch is my break from work. I leave the office and go somewhere, whether it's to take a walk in the park, go to the gym, or just grab a bite out and read a couple chapters.

Also, trying to get three or more people to agree on a time and place for lunch is less fun than herding cats.

> Also, trying to get three or more people to agree on a time and place for lunch is less fun than herding cats.

I built a lunch voting website for our Friday company lunch for this very reason. We would spend up to an hour hashing it out on Slack each week, now everyone puts in their votes and it either picks a random one, or if there's a majority it picks that. No more arguments, although there's significantly more horse trading!

Creating opportunities for serendipitous meetings between people or teams is one of the challenges of remote work. Several ways to create similar opportunities without needing to rely on chance.

The idea of relying on chance encounters to drive innovation within an organization is insane.

Do I think that an organization should rely on chance encounters to drive innovation? Certainly not, but that doesn't mean there's not value in such serendipitous encounters.

Sometimes the value of such encounters is simply that you understand the daily trials and tribulations of another department better and can use that information to better communicate with them.

I (like others in the comments have said) agree that there is value in this, but as an employee it's not worth it to me to give up so much for just this.

Say one day you figure out that the format of a report Connie gets isn't optimal, but you could do a quick change (1/2 day of work), that means she'll save an hour a month. That's easy to work out the economic benefits of the off chance meeting. But what you can't easily work out is how much time your employees have to waste to get there.

Plus then you have to support Connie with that report for the rest of your days

I have those kinds of meetings all the time on slack.

But that tends to fall more into 'search' instead of 'browse', unless you both happen to be having unrelated conversations in public channels.

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