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Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

I miss being able to tell if I'm interrupting a coworker's state of flow or not with a quick message.

When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them.

As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months.

Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."

Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.

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ping "Hey, Bob, can I share my desktop and show you something?" Five minutes later, Bob is fixing his mistake. Or, Bob has notifications turned off, and he lets me know as soon as he's available again.

My point is that the tools are there to address this concern. I don't go a day without sharing my desktop or looking at someone else's. And in some ways it's even more efficient and less disruptive than getting up, walking over to someone's desk.

I can't describe how distracting it is for me personally to have to overhear every screen share in a physical office, and how great and easy it is to do it remotely and even pull in another couple people if something they're knowledgeable about comes up

I have found that the introduction of using remote tools (Teams etc) regardless of in/out of office location has dramatically improved collaboration.

People seem to be a lot more open to sharing ideas. We tend to chat back and forward all day. If you really need to, kill notifications and mark yourself as busy or focusing and review the chat when you are available.

The only down side I've found is that workgroup chats, being somewhat private, can tend to become a bit of an echo chamber if there is any dispute or controversy in the workplace. Dealing with this tend has required everybody to step back and examine their behaviour. I would assume that if you had a team in a different location you could have a similar problem.

On interruptions, I turned the notification indicator off for general messages in Slack, so I only get system notifications for DMs or mentions. Slack obeys DND (on Mac OS at least), so I use that a lot to mute it when I am doing work. I check it a couple of times a day to catch up on messages.

It's amusing to see the occasional "hi" sent without any context, then an hour or two later, the real question the person wanted to ask. I think I'd get in trouble if I set https://www.nohello.com/ as my status though.

Unfortunately we also have to use Microsoft Teams which implements its own notification system and doesn't obey the system-wide DND, so I usually just quit Teams when I am not actively using it.

> You have to write multiple paragraphs

This I actually like. My short summary of my work in Slack usually becomes the first draft of the documentation I need to write later.

Same here, I also like having time to proof-read and refactor what I've written to remove redundancy, clear up any amiguities and look for assumed knowledge.

> Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."

Honestly, I've found screen sharing better on a video call for pair programming. I can switch to the branch and share on my screen to code through a solution, give or take control of their workstation without crowding around a tiny desk, and if I need to have an in-depth discussion that takes 45 minutes to work out what core concept is missing, then we can do that without annoying everybody else in the office or needing to find a meeting room.

Three days is an epic amount of time for an open pull request to be resolved, unless there's been some massive miscommunication. To me, that would indicate there's some other problem with the team.

So in synchronous communication, you have to spend time _watching_ for someone to be available for a question? I much prefer async communication where I can ignore notifications for a bit, and check them when I come up for air. In the open office, I'm _constantly_ interrupted/distracted, so you might as well interrupt me anyway <sigh>.

If people keep interrupting you, update your notification settings.

Why are you not doing screen-share code reviews? You can easily say "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_." via screen-share.

> Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review. I enjoy pair programming MUCH more when we both have our own computers (with dual monitors, etc). This works GREAT with screensharing

> Nothing like a little pair programming to work through a code review.

Screen sharing works better for me for that kind of thing.

I solved this by creating calendar events for just myself. I’ll book an hour of dedicated programming time and then after that I’ll respond to all of my messages. Or if I don’t need to be hyper focused on a task I’ll bounce around and respond to various messages and check the status of stuff.

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