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Comment by mattacular | Hacker News Reader

With remote, everything has to be highly intentional. Schedule a meeting means having a pre-defined time, often there is a specific topic of conversation in mind, people diligently stick to that topic as much as possible to respect everyone's calendar etc. Collaboration tends to play out within these extremely narrow parameters that are unnatural to hundreds of years of human social development. It doesn't help that the best substitute - video conferencing - still strips a lot of crucial information that you're used to getting in person for modulating conversation (eg. ability to scan body language and facial expressions of people in the room as you talk) and find moments to interject.

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This is just because of culture and the tools that we use.

I rarely get this feeling when using Discord due to the culture if "just hanging out" in channels.

Some people in the channels I frequent will stream their screens by default, just in case anyone wants to see what they are playing at any given time.

All that behind said, I hope this model doesn't become an expectation for remote work, because constantly being forced to stream, or be present for long periods of time in voice channels sounds exhausting.

Actually with covid my department just switched to discord and much of the "intentional" part fell out - it felt really good.

It was just hanging out and working. I don't get why teams and competitors are not keen on making sound channels, it's so much better imo.

This is a very incorrect and overly prescriptive view based on your, to use your own term, narrow experience. I vastly prefer meetings and collaboration to be remote. People who dominate in person meetings due to their body language and personality are not nearly ad oppressive over zoom.

I would make the exact opposite claim. Since Covid and working from home the quality of my teams’ collaboration and decision making quality has gone through the roof. Quality of promotions has gone up significantly, you’re no longer rewarded for just being the loudest monkey in the room with an opinion. The only metric that has suffered in any measurable way is onboarding and mentoring young engineers who do not yet know how to learn. You have to be much more active and sensitive to their state. In general I look back at that era of my career as archaic. Everyone that wants to go back to that way of working seems dinosaurs who operate on their feelings rather than the data of how quality work is done.

Just noting I didn't prescribe anything or state my personal preference anywhere.

It was merely an observation after working remotely for about as long as I've worked in person and I don't really appreciate you adding words like "loudest monkey" and "dinosaurs" to my statement.

> With remote, everything has to be highly intentional.

As work should be. I want to have spontaneous moments with my family, friends, and neighbors, which are more common when working from home.

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