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Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Ditto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps, as well as helped new people onboard with many to many learning, but we will cope.

What I would like, as a manager who had to do quarterly planning would be a week a month or a week per quarter for cross functional in office planning. It would help with a lot and probably be enough time in office to fill many of the real gaps being remote has left without being required full time.

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> Ditto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps (...)

I'm sure mileages vary, but between wasting a significant portion of my life commutting to be able to experience water cooler talks, and hugging my wife and children once I step out of my home office, you can keep all the water coolers in the world to yourself.

Work/life balance shouldn't fall all the way to the work side of the scale just because some managers struggle with remote work.

Totally agree. I've been getting up to speed just fine at my new and (at least for now) fully remote job.

If you're struggling to fill the gaps or onboard people at a certain point you have to admit to either managerial or organizational failure to adapt. It's called taking responsibility

Just out of curiosity, how large of a company/companies have you been working for?

I’m asking because my experience is largely with <200 people companies (more so with <50) and onboarding and such is always very scant at startup stage and only starts to happen in my experience at stages of intense growth and post series C/D, but I may be in a weird niche.

These things also tend to happen organically at different stages depending on the team but don’t become mandated/invested in until later.

I agree. I’m speaking personally. I cut out a three hour commute and I’m never going back, but I lead a team of twelve people and it’s important to me that I also care about their lives and careers, helping them advance and grow is important to me beyond my current company because I hope to work with them again no matter where. To that end, trying to think of ways to improve their professional growth on the remote world is important. The week in the office is something I think leadership should do, I see almost no reason for ICs, except for onboarding/cross team socializing which can be done other ways too, just more work these days :)

That required office time means everyone still needs to live within a short distance of the office though. For a lot of people that defeats some of the main benefits of remote.

For a quarterly 1 week meeting the company can just fly everyone in who needs to be there. They already do this for board meetings so why not important plannings?

Hell, put it in a fun location and call it a retreat.

I still think that’s a big ask. I’d bet that the group of people that want full remote also includes a large number of people who hate the idea of company retreats. I’d rather finish work at 5pm and have fun on my own terms than a week of proscribed company “fun”.

Sure it’s a big ask but if the planning is important and you are important to the planning and it is deemed a sufficient quality of planning can only happen in person … business travel seems far too common to be worthless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nobody said anything about work activities after 5. You can go do whatever.

But hanging out with coworkers when you’re all seeing each other for a rare or even first time seems like a pretty common whatever.

I mentioned in another thread, my company is planning to do this twice a year but the actual company mandate is to make any in person meeting or gathering accessible to remote people.

This is exactly what my company plans when it’s safe though only twice a year, and we will easily pay for leadership to do the same more frequently if needed.

I planned to fly in where ever for that week, not commute every day.

Use the money saved on maintaining an office for peak capacity and pay for travel/temporary space.

To be clear: I do not advocate required office time for anyone. For me I’d like to spend a week in the office with my peers in leadership and we all have a lot of ability to do that without much chaos. We also can include folks actively who don’t want to come in, this is actually our company mandate, also. If there is any in person meeting it needs to be accessible and visible to remote folks.

Hired in the middle of the pandemic, worked for one year before stepping into the office.

It's now impossible to get 3 people in a 15 minute meetings to clear requirements.

Before: email -> problems -> let's do a zoom call -> done.

Now: email -> problems -> nobody has time in the office for a meeting.

It might be the culture but still...

Ugh that sucks. Speaking for myself there have been hiccups but for the most part slack contacts move things along where I am now and you can unironically ping a leader if you are ignored. We all know we are all busy and sometimes a reminder of priorities is helpful :)

> the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps

I hear that because informal stuff can solve a lot of problems, or prevent it even arising, but at the same time, it papers over a lot of cracks that should probably be exposed.

I've taken to virtual coffees during the week with people on a semi-regular basis to try and keep that sort of stuff going.

100% agree that water cooler talk being effective in the first place should raise some eyebrows about how things get done. I think there is a strong social component that doesn’t want that to change, but not much choice these days.

Filling in at water coolers and difficulty onboarding is mostly because companies still don’t really think about communication and information and have no strategy for either beyond “they will figure it out”

100% agree depending on company size. For startups training and enablement is wildly chaotic. That said I have tried a lot of strategies in the past year and none yet match insitu learning but again this is likely a startup problem, we started with almost nothing in terms of onboarding so it’s hard to stand up that program remotely too. I’ve had plenty of folks who are successful onboarding remotely but as a manager who has run this team for seven years I can tell it’s not as fast as before. Obviously change and innovation is needed but there not a lot of source material out there for such a change yet :) working on doing my part for my team though.

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