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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the company and atmosphere it fosters. In our, watercooler/kitchenette is just empty chat, very rarely long term beneficial to company unless you meet just the person you need right now, but then they don't sit far in any case.

One thing that office is irreplaceable in (again, depending on company and atmosphere) is getting some stuff done from people not directly on projects but with crucial responsibilities/access.

If I am physically there, I just go to their desk, and either sit behind them till they have time or we agree to do it within 1 or 2 hours. Now I am few months fully at home due to breaking both legs while paragliding, and some of those folks take 2 weeks of chasing, meetings etc. to get their 5-minute max shit done. While 50-folks project is blocked by them. Maddening.

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That's not because of remote work. That's because either your managers aren't capable of doing their jobs or your co-workers refuse to speak up when someone isn't doing their part. I hold my co-workers to a high standard. If they're fucking up and it prevents me from doing my job, I'm not going to pretend like it isn't happening. They will know, and if it continues, so will their manager. The biggest problem with weak managers is that they don't know how to hold people accountable.

That thing you just described where you walk over to someone's desk? Doing it to other people seems like a feature, but when it happens to YOU it destroys your flow and interrupts your work. It quickly becomes impossible to get any deep work done, and you become far less productive. It's part of the reason ticketing systems were invented.

It's a flaw, not a feature.

Whether a flaw or feature is a meaningless academic discussion at the end, when entire IT of the company works like that. To get stuff done on time you need to do what is necessary, rest are details. I agree stuff is not set optimally, but when IT is a cost center to the business and looked down upon, this is what you get. Btw not everything is covered by some form of ticketing system, there are many grey areas.

And trust me, guy managing sFTP server (latest case in long line of cases) doesn't do any sophisticated deep stuff that requires 15 mins to get into the zone.

More often than not its the case of folks in various roles promising to do certain work by the end of the day or given date on the meeting, then happily ignoring all chats/emails/calls asking for it for another week or two past the deadline. Of course the excuse is in 100% of the cases how busy they are, when you know they happily spend 15 mins on coffee/smoke breaks multiple times a day. Absolutely 0 sympathies there, and this is one of general senior skills to get work done on time from such people too.

The solution to lazy or incompetent workers is not to watch them like children, or to make sure you're near enough to nag them like their mother. It's to replace them with people who do the work they're paid for. If nobody is being paid for it and it's worth doing, hire someone.

We have a "hybrid" office schedule, which I vaguely dislike and do not think is valuable, especially since my entire team is in a different time zone and I'm in a satellite office.

I was in the office the other week, and someone from the operations side of the project I work on started chatting me up about a recent company initiative to come up with projects to improve things, and asked my opinion about his suggestion. It was great info I didn't otherwise have and I got excited about solving his specific complaint in a productive way in the new system.

Except.... This was a companywide initiative. Why didn't the company have people present to all engineers instead of just submitting a powerpoint deck to leadership if they wanted collaboration on such an initiative? What if I was sick that day, would he have never talked to me about it and I never would have learned about this sticking point?

I'm available through email and Teams. Why didn't he message me? I message random coworkers all the time about feedback and ideas and brainstorming and questions, why didn't he?

Some people have no willingness or ability to communicate usefully digitally it seems, and they want to make my life worse to counteract that fact, but that's stupid! Just have a teams channel for water cooler talk! We used to have an extremely productive teams channel meant for devs to just bring up brainstorming and ask for feedback and wonder aloud and it resulted in all the supposed benefits that water cooler talk has, and it didn't waste my lunch hour!

Just talk to me! You don't need the excuse of physical presence! If the serendipity is utterly necessary (it really really really shouldn't be FFS), build a quick teams bot that just puts a few people in a chat room together occasionally!

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