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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

Kinda off-topic, but am I the only one who's experience brain rot from not being able to go poke a colleague on the shoulder and head off to a separate room and have a loose semi-relevant conversation about some work topic (with umpteen digressions) for half an hour?

Seriously, I think 90% of every good idea I've ever had has come to me in situations like the above. I don't wanna force people to come back to the office with me, but I'm just surprised that more people aren't feeling like they've lost something important without it. Yes, I can informally start off a chat with a colleague over Slack, but it just doesn't work for me. People think too much before they write something. All the good ideas die if people weigh their words too much :-(

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Assumes everyone was in same office to start. No one said home means slack/written comms. Hours per day of ad-hocs & meetings in-person or zoom are similarly verbal. If your company is globally / nationally distributed, you were on zooms anyway pre-pandemic, not a huge difference.

Extrovert vs introvert bias here as well. If you are introverted & trying to get focussed work done, open floor plans full of extroverts and shoulder tapping is the reason most of your commits happen after 7pm when the office is empty or you are coding at home after-work.

Wife & I went into our offices for a partial week recently and had same experience - I got nothing done, spent hours on zoom anyway, am completely exhausted, and everyone just seemed to be there to socialize (hey lets get lunch! / hanging out by the coffee machine).

Ideas vs implementation thing here too. Spitballing ideas is great, but actually having the time to implement them (not chopped up into 30min blocks between meetings & interruption) is another.

We had layoffs a year ago and got moved into an existing team that none of us knew. Then they reassigned more people on and off the project.

After 2 months our team lead realized that we were having problems so he organized 2 meetings a week but there is no status taking. It is all "What problems are you having and let us try to collectively debug it." Share your screen, other people draw on it, give control of your screen to a coworker and let them try a command.

It has actually been great. I have gotten to know 4 of the remote people really well now. I hope to meet them in person some day and have a beer with them.

I'm doing semiconductor design, not software in case anybody is wondering.

The social isolation of this whole period has definitely had an effect on me personally.

I'm assuming most people already have a strong social circle that they've been able to rely on during this, but as someone who moved to a new city to work as a young professional in his late 20's and no friends in the area, it's been rough.

Ask them if they have time for a 30 minute phone call later?

Right. This feels like classic open floor plan extrovert "I could just grab & interrupt people whenever I needed them" lol.

Of course not. I hate open floor plans. The same would apply if we were all in individual offices. What matters is physical proximity allowing for impromptu informal conversations.

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