The Remote Pop-In (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Remote Pop-In (2021)

twos.dev

95 pointsmcqueenjordan92 comments

My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.

Sorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.

Interesting, do you think you have a chance at competing against Microsoft's own tools, like Teams?

Regardless how crappy Teams is at certain things, the people that decide "we're using Teams" often barely use it themselves.

Yeah we decided to integrate with Teams because I had that exact experience in the past. I was at a company that decided "we're using Teams". We weren't allowed to install alternatives like Discord or Slack.

Teams itself has some limitations that are easy to improve upon. They have no way of doing a huddle/pop-in-style room. They screw up the presence signaling in a way that discourages pop-ins: if you join a call with someone your and the other participants' status is set to busy/unavailable. From other peoples' perspective this isn't very inviting, and doesn't indicate that the conversation is public. Teams also limits who can share screens to only 1 person at a time.

Look at Microsoft buying sunrise, even though the server based calendar outlook feature was arguably fully fledged. There’s always space:

One related technique that I think works well is to hold "Office Hours" at least once a week.

Just schedule a regular meeting, and attend it - then advertise widely that you are available at that time and that anyone is welcome.

It's a great way to foster skip-level interactions, give help to someone who needs it, and just chat. It's really fun when a few people come in at once. Sometimes nobody shows up, and that's fine, too.

Give it a try!

I’ve had lackluster results with hosting weekly office hours. A grand total of 2 engineers showed up, both on my direct team, out of 100+ ICs in my org over the course of 2 months. But your mileage will vary depending on workplace culture I suppose.

Honestly I think it works best inter-functionally. Many engineers won't volunteer for a meeting, even (maybe especially) if it's just for chit-chat.

Maker's schedule and all that. http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

maybe the scope of your direct team is too small, try a combined office hours with several related teams cohosting? at least you have each other to chat to if noone shows up.

I don't want to be the downer here because this is a common view and my company does this as well.

I personally do not have fun in these kinds of meetings. Even if they were held in person. My goal at the end of the day is to finish my work quickly and efficiently and try to get out a little early while meeting my obligations. Typically these chats eat up an hour or more and I end up working longer to make up for it.

They are extremely useful for helping newer engineers and answering questions but the "fun" chats tend to be just time consuming noise. It's entirely possible I have a different/maligned view of my relationship with my job but I just don't like giving any more than I have to for something that consumes 40-60 hours a week of my life.

Agree 100%. We used to do this and even if I had fun it was still taking an hour out of my day. Like you, my goal is "get in, get the job done, go home."

in weeks with more spontaneous requests I use https://calendly.com/ and put a link in my profile to announce daily meeting slots

> If you're going to the restroom and will be AFK, you can join the restroom channel. You're in, but away. No one is actually wearing a headset on the toilet, it's just a fun way to feel like a real office.

Interesting, I would never have expected anyone to feel the need of recreating this particular piece of office life in a remote setting.

Likewise, this is quite possibly the worst suggestion or best troll I’ve seen in months.

As an employer I’d like to know how much time my employees spend in the restroom each day, so I can only applaud this suggestion.

Worst employer ever

I don't think it's that terrible. The little jokes lighten the mood, and make it feel more real and in-person. Online meetings have a tendency towards formalism in my experience

I don't understand how this is better than simply sending the person a message.

I've realized that extroverts are really, really damaged by the remote work setting. The word "fun" gets thrown around a lot but to me the reason remote is so great is because I don't have to play make-believe with my coworkers.

That being said this suggestion is hilarious. I would imagine people are auto-muted in the restroom channel so it seems like the ideal place to sit yourself if you're required in zoom all day. It's totally valid. I often get my best thinking done in the bathroom.

Video conferencing forces me to look at a person’s face. I never really do that in real life. My best chats usually happen while walking in the nearby park, where we are both facing forward almost the entire time.

There’s also a physical warmth you get when being near someone. Being physically close to a fellow primate who is part of your clan and who you trust not to kill you must trigger something that video calls do not.

I have no training at all in any of this and this could be complete pseudish nonsense. I would be interested to read more informed opinions about this sort of thing.

The article doesn't say video is the main purpose (or even necessary).

I agree with you, having a common 'thing' to focus on together is great. I absolutely HATE video calls as well, but I can sit in a discord call for hours if there is something to focus on. Playing a game with someone, or people watching a video together, etc.

We started using Discord the same way at my last company when the pandemic hit and everyone had to go remote-only overnight. It was immensely valuable for fostering a sense of presence and we were pretty proud to call it our "virtual office". Slack Huddles and Zoom can't hold a candle to it. Zoom doesn't foster a sense of "who's online now?" discovery (since it's used a lot as a tool for intercompany communication, and it's none of your vendors' business whether you're online now or not) and Slack Huddles doesn't default to having your speakers on, you need to decide to join the huddle, which is too much friction. $75/month (for a level 2 upgraded Discord chatroom, for upgraded audio), for a 50-100 person startup, was an incredibly good value. It wasn't quite the same as an in-person pop-in, you can't grab your coworker's keyboard to show them something when you share screens, but it's 80+% of the same thing.

Which is why it's really sad that Discord doesn't scale for enterprise usage. No enterprise SSO, no way to search through or organize an ever-growing list of voice channels with an ever-growing number of people in them, no way to force the employees you invite to use their real names as their usernames so user management becomes difficult. We would have easily made the decision to throw Discord $10+/user/month if they would have decided to address the enterprise market. Shame.

I don't get it. Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection? In my opinion everyone who's advocating "meetings" - formal or not - is just unable to express thoughts in writing. You have to learn to communicate asynchronously and become a better writer rather than trying to recreate the dysfunctional environment that you are familiar with.

I am a very big introvert. I've recently realized (and adopted) the convenience of short 5-10 min zoom calls to sort out something rather than typing. Often times there is context that is either hard to explain or something that inflection will convey better than well written prose.

I personally don't like all the "fun" calls extroverts seem to want to have all the time. But for short huddles I've often gotten unblocked 10x quicker by simply seeing if someone had 5 minutes to talk through something 1-on-1. Then I have their undivided attention and I don't have to wait for them to get around to me on Slack or email which understandably take a back seat.

There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously. For everything else, synchronous meetings will continue to be essential (and even those projects like Linux which seem to be fully asynchronous usually have one contributor who dominates the project and thus the communication overhead/latency problem isn't as taxing)

>There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously.

Both this assumption and the gp's assumption are just that: assumptions. It's fascinating how a few years of half-hearted attempts with status quo management all too eager to revert to at-location is used as a way to support this.

It's still way too early to make such a bold statement.

That's because people suck at communication - especially programmers. I lead remote teams and it is totally possible. The only essential "meetings" we have are retrospectives in which we discuss how to work/communicate with each other better. Good communication requires a lot of energy, bad communication requires meetings. We only have meetings unless absolutely necessary, not some laughable "pop ins"

>That's because people suck at communication - especially programmers

It's everyone. Not 'especially' programmers. Everyone. Flip the tables and expect the other side to adapt to the context instead, and we'd be calling management terrible at communication. Software development seems fairly unique in expecting developers to bridge the gap instead of management, when such expectations are not put on several other fields. Regardless of the mental strain put on those professions.

Heck, it's stunning we have so many customer-facing type jobs in software development only to expect developers to adapt. The heck you getting paid for if you're not actually a mediator between two different contexts like, you know, almost every other field?

I disagree with the modern blanket assumption that meetings are bad. Meetings do not have to be bad.

Now most meetings are bad, I’ll give you that. But a well-run meeting, with purpose, which doesn’t faff on and respects the participants’ time, is still a very effective way to get something done.

It is a fallacy that every meeting can be replaced with email. I hate email more than I hate even a mediocre meeting.

Yeah, especially random-pop-ins-by-anyone-with-no-agenda as a culture

Introverts view them as horrors. Extroverts love this stuff.

I view meetings as next to worthless as nothing is retained as nobody writes anything down (and I am not willing to pay attention enough to do it as a rank and file dev who won't be blamed for it).

I agree. Meetings are exclusive, usually poorly documented time wasters.

> Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection?

Because a lot of people have a pathological need for social interaction. In my opinion this is extremely unhealthy, a person should not be dependent on other humans to be comfortable and happy, but society sees it as normal and even desirable.

I strongly disagree, and I would suggest if you feel that way you have an abnormality such as autism.

Human interaction is fundamental to being a human, and people should be expected to desire it regularly.

I do, however, agree people shouldn't be dependent on their office for that. I have no desire to make friends with coworkers, unless it just happens to occur organically because we like each other.

> Human interaction is fundamental to being a human, and people should be expected to desire it regularly.

It's a weakness that needs to be fixed, not something that should be encouraged.

I am always pretty concerned about a "hot mic" situation. Not because I might say something outrageous, but because perhaps I want to sing the lyric stuck in my head, or problem solve by taking to myself out loud. Managing to disconnect is already somewhat hard when you jump in and out of meetings on multiple platforms. All it takes is forgetting a button and you're broadcasting yourself by accident. As a user, that's my initial pause when seeing these kinds of things.

Discord supports push-to-talk, which I highly recommend. I wish all voice/video chat technologies would prioritize that support. It avoids all accidental mic problems.

I once had a fight with my partner on a hot mic zoom call because everyone else was late by a half hour (let’s schedule a meeting after lunch, ope lunch is late) and zoom had a terrible UI. I checked many times to see if i was muted and always was… but not really.

Only use a mic/camera you control, tape over the rest. I use a wireless headset with a obvious red mute light to prevent mistakes like this. Don't trust the software to do it for you.

The famous zoom fart that highlights you.

That’s interesting but I’d have to wonder how effective it is for traditionally more introverted teams like engineering. Do they enforce a certain amount of time someone must be in their “office” and thus primed to be interrupted, maybe even only doing lite work? Or is this a case that works really well for only largely extroverted teams, sales, product, marketing etc.

My suspicion is a non trivial amount of introverted staff will just never have an “open door” so to speak, but then you miss out on valuable interactions for the broader organization or team even if locally for the person they’re uncomfortable or annoying.

Author here. We had no requirements to use this system so people frequently left their “office” to get some concentration time in. Some folks were rarely or never “in”, which was completely fine. (The company even had a standing “all meetings are optional” rule.)

In practice it has felt more collaborative and inclusive. I’m not / don’t work with OP (early stage startup also, < 5 engineers), but our team has been using only Discord for the last few weeks (using only 1 eng room, not 1 room per person like OP).

This is definitely a killer feature on Discord for remote working. Being able to see who is in a room, join ad hoc, and work along side them has greatly reduced communication friction, and I’ve grown to love using (basically only) Discord over Slack + Calendar + Zoom/Meet to manage team communications.

It is simple. Just start a video call. With the following etiquette:

Anyone can call anyone during office hours for any reason they would classically pop in.

Anyone receiving such a call is entitled to ignore it.

This has an additional advantage over the physical office: by declining the call you don’t get cognitively interrupted. With the popin the person starts talking about accounts API and the context switch has been forced on you.

Unless you dispense with politeness in the physical office, but that is a lot harder to do. Maybe impossible without some team building role play training.

In my workplace we use zoom breakout rooms as an alternative. When we have a meeting we move to the main room and have it there. Otherwise each member is in a breakout room.

oh, that's kind of clever. So when not otherwise in a zoom, each of you hang out in your own breakout room so others can "drop in"?

Exactly. If I want to drop in all I need to do is to check the breakout rooms list then move to the room where my colleague is. And once done I can go back to my breakout room. We also use it when pair programming remotely. It's quite effective and it eliminates communication barrier.

Very cool. Thanks for the reply.

Best pop-in culture to my mind comes through simple old fashioned IRC with a few utility bots.

The pop-in paradigm seems principally a matter of synchronisation/rendezvous.

Someone is "available" because they are "holding you in mind" but still receptive to engage or not engage without consequence. Fancy high-bandwidth tools, including smartphones and web-video don't solve it because they create a commitment of presence. In response/defence people erect barriers, away messages, out-of-office notes etc, working hours get out of sync and asynchronous exchanges fall apart.

IRC seems to find the best balance that approximates between a digital water-cooler where you can turn up and see who is up for a chat, and a notice board where you can leave a message "I called in, chat with me when you have time".

IRC may do this better than some other platforms depending on how you use it but I don’t think it’s ideal. In particular, most times when I’ve used IRC the social norm is to use a bouncer to stay connected persistently. Even in the absence of that, the fact that you can be joined to multiple channels simultaneously means you have some of the same issues as Slack of having to keep up with the goings-on in several channels.

I think the Discord setup mentioned in the OP feels like a “place” because when you’re joined to one room, you’re crucially not in any of the others. You can do this with IRC but it’s not very natural. Honestly, I think the place where that interaction style would feel most natural is in a MUD.

We just use Slack DMs to propose a huddle when appropriate. If I cant talk immediately, I can propose a time frame ("give me 5 or so"). This article seems super over-engineered to me.

I totally disagree with the premise of this blog post.

At my last 3 jobs - it was common to slack or IRC "Got time for a zoom?" and on yes, type '/slack meeting talk.'

remote pop-ins happen all the time.

I think to solve this properly you first need to fix Bluetooth audio.

I would have no problem having an open channel on discord for example for the team to pop in and out but doing so forces my Bluetooth headphones into 'microphone' profile and dramatically lowers the audio quality.

Give me an option that allows me to have my music playing on full quality or an audiobook etc, then id happily leave a call open and muted.

Configure a separate microphone device system wide or in app, then your headphones should stay in audio output mode.

I’m hoping that Bluetooth 5.2 and BLE audio fix this issue. It’s hard to find info on how the updated headset profile works in terms of bandwidth and latency of input and output.

By far the closest online equivalent to pop-ins I've had has been... inside video games. The first 10 hours of playing DayZ, a survival FPS with in-game spatial audio, was a revelation to me. Mostly relating to how, why and when people to talk to each other. I'm convinced you can't separate the work (talking or doing) from the workspace (real or virtual).

I've been building a 3D visual collaboration platform that has some fairly obvious value in how you externalise/connect/recollect thoughts, but I'm really keen to explore if it can become a workplace where pop-ins and serendipitous social collisions come easily. For that to happen it needs to become something you can spend large chunk of your workday inside of, which is no easy task.

The thing that remote “pop in” doesn’t do is let me assess how interruptible someone is. When I pop in on someone in an office, I do it when I’m not interrupting their deep work — it’s extremely easy to tell when this is. Remotely, it’s much harder.

Looks like in this setup, people only join their office room when they're open to being interrupted:

"When you are online and able to be disturbed, you join your office, alone."

Yes but this places a task on someone, to decide when they're open to be interrupted or not. This places that work on them, and makes them do this work whether or not someone wants to interrupt them.

In the office scenario, I as the interruptor take on the burden of finding out when someone is open to being interrupted (and it's not that hard). For example I can just say "I'll ask him the next time I see him" and wait until I see him go to the coffee machine or the bathroom. Or, if it's more urgent, I can take a peek in his office and see if he seems to be engrossed in thought or more relaxed.

Author here. As a companion to this, we had informal optional daily water cooler esque meetings that we used to fill the “I’ll ask them next time I see them” use case.

I worked somewhere that used this software that had this exact feature. This was pre pandemic and they had two offices and a few remote employees. You could barge in and open up a video chat instantly if you really wanted but that was considered poor form. The more common thing was the "knock" button that would play a tone and ask if you were available for the pop in, which would start instantly when you accepted. It worked surprisingly well, although I did some consulting for them years later and they had moved to slack/google meets.

https://www.sococo.com/

My former tram used to have a Google Meet URL which we tried to reuse in our meetings. We announced the URL in our Slack channel as a bookmark and in the description.

Particularly, we had our morning standup using the URL and when we stayed around working together on something. Other people in the company would just be able to pop in and talk to use. It was super nice!

I did see two issues with this, though:

- Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on.

- I felt it used some cognitive overhead being in a video call.

> Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on.

I was shocked when I found out this was the case in 2020. Surely this would be a solved thing! So annoying especially for this exact use case.

Yeah, I think it's a security feature not get run over by a car when talking - but I agree it would be nice to be able to turn off.

Is this possible to achieve with Slack (the voice channel as "office" that others can join), or does it only work with Discord?

I just phone (or teams call) people (not scheduled meetings) to collaborate. This only really worked with people that I worked quite well with but it comes pretty close to just going over to their office and interrupting them. I'd ping them on slack/teams to see if they are free if I didn't know.

>the effort of physically going somewhere is high

Ok, I realize there's a context for it. Still can't help, but laugh at how low is a "high" mark for physical effort when in office.

Slack Huddles directly address this issue pretty effectively.

Too bad screen sharing quality is somehow way worse with huddles.

> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in.

There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me.

Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll listen to it and call you back.

This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee. It gives us back control of whether we are interrupted (put your phone on silent if you really need to), it is universal and ubiquitous.

Obviously, because of phone spam, this doesn't work with normal telephones (unless you add all your coworkers to your contacts). But Slack/MS Teams/Discord/VoIP/etc can solve that for us. Just tell everyone in your office to call you, and leave a message if you're not there and you will get back to them as soon as you can. Put "Call Me" as your away message. Voice calls worked well enough for nearly a century as a remote working method; I think we can learn to do it again.

The problem with this is it doesn’t scale unless you have voice mail transcription.

If you get one call a day, it’s fine.

Getting one slack message a day is also fine.

Getting 50 a day makes it impossible, because unless the messages are transcribed, you have to listen to each one to decide if you want to return the call.

…and if they are transcribed, well… now you’re using slack.

There’s definitely something to be said for a call that you can’t do over chat (for whatever reason; some people just don’t “text” they only talk).

…but, calling arbitrarily when you want something flat out doesn’t work.

Personal experience: people call for trivial reasons, you don’t answer and they don’t leave a message.

3 missed calls from your boss, no message left.

Just leave it because they didn’t leave a message? Probably not.

…but, the reality is, most people cbf leaving a message saying what they wanted. They want to talk now, or not at all. …and, I don’t think it’s ok to just ignore your missed calls.

So then the pressure is on you to track down each of those people and see what they wanted.

It’s a nightmare. (My solution: choose a different place to work. /shrug. Can’t change the culture in some places)

> This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee

I don't see how either of those are true for phone calls.

1. It's ideal for the interrupter: they get to decide when they want your time. They want it now.

2. It's annoying for the interruptee, because you only have two options. Either you can pick up the phone now and force a hard context switch away what you were doing, or you can reject the call and spend more time later listening through voicemails. And unless you have voicemail transcriptions, you're at the complete mercy of the interrupter again.

Compare that to asynchronous text-based communication, where the interrupter can't forcefully take your time from you. They can only message you, and you can decide when to read it. Reading the message doesn't cede control of your time to them, and you can adjust the actual time of the call to accommodate whatever you're working on.

I found it helps to set boundaries and in one instance make it clear that I do not appreciate being called out of the blue. I feel almost everyone understands that a texting before a call is polite these days. Clarification was only required once for a colleague who tried dialling me into a meeting I wasn’t party to, just to ask me some questions that could have been an IM. They were actually a little younger, and so I think it was more a case of realising your impact on other people (who may be in or trying to achieve flow) if you interrupt them because it seems urgent to you. Like the article notes, the open plan office engendered interruptions too easily because it was convenient rather than urgent.

As a millennial I suppose I fall in between the two camps. When I was younger, social anxiety about taking up people’s valuable time with my silly questions made a phone call seem like a terrible burden to subject someone to, but with age and (remote work) experience, I’ve realised that conversations are indeed much higher bandwidth and often appreciated more than a letter or thread of back-and-forth clarifications. If I _had_ to stereotype by generation (sorry GP) I could say voice and video seem easier than reading and writing for boomers and Gen-Zs, but even that doesn’t sound right. It’s probably just a communication style thing. There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead. As humans we communicate with our voice, face, and body. The main benefit of text is asynchronicity. The challenge is how to thread the needle of asynchronicity in an increasingly post-literate world.

>There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead.

Most people don't watch TV to obtain information, yet at the same time, videos can convey information better than a book would thanks to audio and video. Quality audio and video material far surpass books when they augment the original text-only format. Shoddy video material is still preferred over shoddy writing for reasons beyond conveying information.

And that's the real issue. People are using bad writing and asynchronous communication skills as a cop-out to push more, not realizing their other communication skills are just as poor. Sure, the guy waving his warms during a presentation feels more humane, but how much does it really add one week after? You're stuck only with the notes he left, the notes you made (probably none) and your own memory probably muddied along the way. It's the same for meetings or any kind of call. Taking notes takes far longer if you ask the one conveying information to slow down so you can keep up. Most people are awful at communication in any form, and half of the problem comes from them trying to blame the medium or believing they are better using a different medium or it's flat-out the medium's fault. Newsflash: it's probably you, not the medium.

It's most astounding this has to be told to developers of all people. The field moves fast, new information is thrown out at rapid pace, the work is mostly mentally straining and you're expected to know a lot. Surely, that alone would make enough people question whether fast-paced, transient communication is a great fit. Writing is easier to point at people and say "this doesn't make sense" without the answer being another call.

Voicemail is the worst possible form of communication.

Consider a plot of fidelity vs latency. You want to talk to somebody - high-fidelity back-and-forth communications instantly. It's up in one corner of our plot.

Now consider voicemail. One-way, lots of "um, uh" wasted time, tedious menus to fetch and wade thru it, maybe tomorrow. It's down in the other corner of our plot.

Literally any other form of communication beats that. Text. Email. Hell, send a letter. But you try to leave me a voicemail, you're saying "Here, you type this email".

I never even set up my voicemail.

Agreed. Transcribe-to-SMS is the only way.

In my work circle a protocol has naturally established itself. If you call me, I assume you want something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered calling me. So you don’t need to leave a message: I will see your missed call, and I will call you back.

Those quick replies you can send from your phone help. Customise them. I use two:

“Can’t pick up, call you back in 5.”

“I’m in a meeting, call you back as soon as it’s over.”

I don’t get this at all. The UI on voicemail is easy on every phone I’ve used for a decade. Room for one fact “I called about X, it is this important” or “This is the simple piece of information I wanted to cover”

How is this different or more convenient than a chat message?

Hey! I’m working on X and I was wondering if you’d have time today to help me out.

Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message?

I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.

I was hoping people would use it to explain what they wanted to talk about, since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want, and speaking is easier than typing. But I guess I forgot that people on voicemail just say "hey it's X, call me back when you get this".

It would be nice if Slack had an away message that was sent back to the user when they message you, rather than a status that nobody ever reads.

> since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want,

So you reply to that with a link to https://no-hello.com/ every time, and they eventually catch on.

Because I can convey more complex information with less effort with my voice than a phone keyboard.

Assuming the other person hears you clearly and assuming the other person listens to it at all.

Phone tag really doesn't sound much better than email. The culture of a quick callback is not inherent.

Voice mail is terrible, but I do think Google Chat/Meet is missing a "call" button. All you can do is send a regular chat message with a link to an impromptu meet. Sometimes I would like a button that politely asks for more immediate attention.

Given the described situation (company already using Discord), your suggestion is obviously silly. The solution proposed is simple and uses an existing tool that they are already using.

Author here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments.

1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discord was an easy and incremental jump to take. Take whatever path makes sense for your culture.

2. “Why not make this asynchronous?” Asynchrony should indeed be the default mode of communication, but synchrony has its uses; between nonverbal communication and round-trip-time it is simply obnoxiously higher bandwidth. It trades away efficiency (person-hours) for speed (hours). The fewer people involved the better the exchange rate, which is why this article focuses on 1:1 interactions. I wrote about this later in my article “Why Be Synchronous?” [1] but tldr; synchrony should be deployed similarly to tech debt.

[1]: https://twos.dev/async.html

Spaceballs…

“Hey, I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall!”

Does discord not just have away messages?

Is it just me or are purple using a lot of goofy-ass fonts these days? What the fuck is the lowercase “f” in this post?

Looks like a programming font, where having the word “function” stand out is good.

A phone call works great for a remote “pop-in”. Has worked for 100 years.

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