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Comment by alexwilde | Hacker News Reader

Having read Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock, It does not seem that strange to me...

The Google culture and leadership, right or wrong, hold on to the belief that the spaces they cultivate, do more than just enhance productivity. For example, they believe that (regardless of how rare it may be) their spaces create opportunities for teams to bump into each other and build solutions/products out of that.

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I think there is something to that - a lot of stuff used to come up from random encounter with other peopl in the company and yet that almost totally absent now. A lot of stuff seems like it is still coasting based on that momentum (eq. people you met at a conference or at lunch) yet new connections are not being made.

That could be a problem over time unless people can met at the office again in some form and go to conferences. Or some remote form of that would be needed.

Random encounters that lead to interesting things can happen when working from home. For example, I work on Jupyter and last week there was a "Jupyter realtime collaboration workshop" and at one point participants were randomly divided up into breakout groups. I ended up sharing and learning all kinds of interesting new things with a small group of random people I've never met before, and making important connections. It felt very much like the sort of random things that could happen in person, with the main difference being that it was even more efficient than it would be in an office or conference center.

Yeah, but that's the thing - you need to consciously organize such events. I'm sure remote only companies have always done such informal "mixer" events but companies that were not heavily into WFH might no be aware it's needed untill all the social inteaction based stuff thats currently coasting with inertia comes to a halt.

I personally believe that the "serendipitous random hallway conversations" thing is totally overrated. I don't deny that it probably once in a while leads to a great product, but how often? Quantify it! Moreover, if your business depends on this element of randomness to provide value, I'd argue the opposite: you have a process problem that needs to be addressed. Brainstorming and ideation should not be dependent on the roll of dice.

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