Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbxbx | Hacker News Reader

Screen was mentioned as a viable alternative in the blog post :).

Also IRC would work, but if you're already using skype it also has a textual chat interface...

Yes, it was. As for skype, I find IRC to be a bit more friendly than skype, especially with people joining/leaving the conversation, reconnecting etc. Obviously we don't use voice/video and I'm fine with that, it would probably get in the way of work being done. IRC is a nice and simple way to get textual information across (links and so on) and it's nicely asynchronous.

Our 'virtual office' has between two and five people in at at any time of the day and it really does feel quite immersive.

Considering how infrequently I actually interact with other people in my own physical office (especially since we are all very conscious of not breaking each other out of the 'zone') this sounds fantastic.

I have tried to motivate usage of a engineering-team internal IRC channel and spread the use of screen-sharing software, but when people are physically so close the standard response is "why don't you just go talk to him?". Makes sense until you mix in the element of "I don't want to talk to him when he is obviously concentrating." Sprinkle a touch of e-mail overload making that medium useless and you have a strange atmosphere of working in proximity with one another, but not necessarily together.

Here it's the opposite, we're not in proximity but we are definitely working together.

I'm actually very surprised by how well this works, I can't imagine it working as well in a situation where we'd both have to leave our homes to travel to some building somewhere to work together.

The atmosphere is pretty relaxed, there is a time for hard work and one for status updates (the virtual water cooler), we get an awful lot of stuff done in a day with 0 commute time to boot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com