If you're remote, ramble
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I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else onboarded had similar questions. Some subjects were about pure onboarding friction, some were about workflows most folks didn't know existed, some were about theoretical concepts.
So I moved the questions to a public (within company) channel, and called it "Marek's Bitching" - because this is what it was. Pretty much me complaining and moaning and asking annoying questions. I invited more London folks (Zygis), and before I knew half of the company joined it.
It had tremendous value. It captured all the things that didn't have real place in the other places in the company, from technical novelties, through discussions that were escaping structure - we suspected intel firmware bugs, but that was outside of any specific team at the time.
Then the channel was renamed to something more palatable - "Marek's technical corner" and it had a clear place in the technical company culture for more than a decade.
So yes, it's important to have a place to ramble, and it's important to have "your own channel" where folks have less friction and stigma to ask stupid questions and complain. Personal channels might be overkill, but a per-team or per-location "rambling/bitching" channel is a good idea.
So while the Q&A format is good to have available, I’d discourage creating separate channels around a person. I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.
I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel. That’s the place where all of the relevant people will be relevant and watching and it’s the first place they’ll search in the future.
People just act differently in "official" topic channels.
It's like when you buy that super secure door lock and the lowest bid handyman bends it while installing because it's such a pain to align correctly and now it's just as vulnerable as any other lock.
Slack's search is … okay … but there are any number of times when I have issues finding a thread I was looking at prior.
For all the AI hype that is the current time, search still can't a.) rank the alert bot that is just spamming the alerts channel as "not relevant" when "sorting by relevance" or b.) … find the thread when I use a synonym of an exact word in the thread.
Or the other day I was struggling to find an external channel. I figured it should be easy. But again, I chose a synonym of the name, so miss there, but I though still — by management edict, all of our external channels start with #external-, I'll just pull up all external channels and linear search by eyeball … but management had named this one #ext-…
I find "Exclude automations" toggle to be good enough. But we might have very different workspaces, as I usually don't see the point of "sorting by relevance" at all: for my purposes, relevance is almost always better approximated by date than whatever Slack's ML team comes up with.
I'd rather avoid the manager's perspective.
OP's post was about a great experience 'tremendous value' they had and now you're pooping on it with 'manager' opinions. Read what you wrote from the employee perspective, you're sounding like the self-appointed fun police.
Update: Cue the downvotes from the managers.
One thing I suggested was that they should be muted by default so that they aren't a distraction and don't set the expectation that they should be read.
I thought it would be interesting to write about because it was an emergent practice that seems to be sticky and useful within our team.
I get the need to call a peg a peg, but it's also good to allow a little fun as well or you end up with these dementors sucking the life out of a company.
For a slack group, I think it's relatively harmless if the focus is around casual shoot the shit convos.
It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal.
You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."
I struggled to guess at the real motive. Is it some project manager's blatant control freakery? An org-level, cynical management attempt to commoditize their knowledge workers? Or some kind of emergent failure where culture morphs through openness -> radical transparency -> enforced conformism a la 1984?
That is, don't put the burden on the initiating party, but also don't continue the dark-channel discussion.
In my case - indeed the name is a historical baggage, I'm not arguing for or against it.
Indeed we had regularly situations that we had to pull in experts from other rooms, to discuss specific topics (like TCP), so we should have forwarded the conversation at the start.
But I don't think this should be categorical. There is value in non-experts responding faster (the channel had good reach) by your non-expert colleagues than waiting longer for the experts on the other continent to wake up.
Maybe there should be an option to... move conversation threads across channels?
I think there is place for both - unstructured conversations, and structured ones. What I don't like about managerial approach, is that many managers want to shape, constrain, control communication. This is not how I work. I value personal connections, I value personal expertise and curiosity. I dislike non-human touch.
"You should ask in the channel XYZ" is a dry and discouraging answer.
"Hey, Mat worked on it a while ago, let's summon him here, but he's in east coast so he's not at work yet, give him 2h" is a way better one.
I know that concentrating knowledge / ownership at a person is not always good, but perhaps a better way to manage this is to... hire someone else who is competent or make other people more vocal.
And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.
> And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.
I'm a manager who shaped communication patterns (e.g. default conversations to a public channel) because we're solving different problems. By moving conversations to a public channel away from an individual, we're improving redundancy and reducing single points of failure. Our primary responsibility, which understandably garners discontent, is to prioritize the system over the needs of individuals, within reason.
There are many issues resulting from defaulting conversations in private channels or DMs that you've probably seen first-hand.
Your uniqueness is not tolerated, assimilate to the collective, follow the processes given to you, don't think individually.
Except when solving these problems, they require creativity, be creative. BUT ONLY HERE
All middle managers (in my experience) talk a big game about reducing/preventing key person dependencies, but on 100% of my teams, there were always multiple key person dependencies. The real issue: If you are not the key person for anything, you are the easiest to layoff (fire).
Agreed, you never want to be the one holding no secrets when the music stops.
The redundancy also helps the key person be able to disconnect when on vacation. If you are the sole knowledge base for some critical part of the company, might as well drag the work laptop with you every where you go.
I believe Zulip can do this, but Zulip is not really favored in these parts
What if it is a specific technical question but does not clearly belong to a specific project?
Focus on eliminating tribal knowledge, implementing a learning culture.
These just become apologetics channels. Not productive.
If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together. Trying to push that burden down the chain often results in that institutional knowledge being shared verbally or via private emails/DMs in order to avoid the burden of documentation, which is a net negative.
Such information is a force multiplier for teams as well as a great asset for onboarding new hires. Both of those are direct benefits for the manager and the company, so take the advantage of that kind of spontaneous documentation rather than insisting on passing on the cognitive burden.
Isn’t the GP describing exactly that?
I've often gotten this down to a single directory and a primary script you need to run 3-4 times... mostly because of required reboots, such as after WSL setup, also, a few options to set in Docker Desktop. I've done similar with mac/homebrew.
From there, you have docker-compose and shell scripts to run against the projects... these scripts and the compose file(s) are the entry points into a project, actually documenting where things are, and how they connect (to an extent).
Effectively, getting a working solution running sooner than later. This is just my own opinion, but automating a dev environment for onboarding, especially if you're a larger org, is a great tactical decision.
"First Warning, this is an unauthorized topic in an incorrect location. You are permitted to discuss this topic but only in the predesignated area."
"Did you complete your TPS reports this morning?"
"Yeah... I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. We have a go live in 3 weeks for our mini waterfall agile release and you currently have 2 bug tickets assigned."
This murders the last spark of connectivity for remote workers who are already left out of the daily in person banter and bonding that in office work provides.
Comments like these really make me appreciate that we are simply numbers in a spreadsheet and no longer real people to companies and leadership.
Channels aren’t searchable. Messages are.
> risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.
Sorry to break it to you, but that’s not just an impression. It’s a fact.
If people have found an effective way to communicate information, leave them the hell alone. I have too often seen people like Auronis decide to come in and manage something to be proper, and then destroy the communication.
The appropriate thing to do is to find a way to augment, without interfering, the channel to shore up any weaknesses.
Formal channels are often too formal - people don't want to look dumb, or get chastised for asking something incorrectly. Formal channels are intimidating, not welcoming.
The point is knowledge sharing, not "appropriate" knowledge sharing.
I love how the OP was like, "hey, we created this informal channel and communicated valuable info to the whole company", and then Auronis is like, "yeah, don't do that!"
that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.
If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road within the organization; to think otherwise would be pure fantasy.
Similarly : if you go drinking with the boss, you do still have to remember that the drunk puking slob who you're carrying to their hotel room is going to wake up and be your boss tomorrow.
very few humans actually disconnect this stuff from their internalized judgements of people.
I tell new hires that they shouldn't be scared of asking questions, and that if they're not asking questions they're probably not pushing themselves enough. But also caution to make sure that they check available resources first, and then ask the right audience.
You got to be really careful.
If there's a lot of jobs and a lot of market opportunity and a lot of demand for talent, then workplaces can be like this.
I'm afraid that with AI, one of these types of things are simply gone.
The first type don't ask questions. They know they're imposters and don't want to be called out.
The second type do ask questions. They also know they're imposters but they're trying to learn so they're not.
Judge people on their actions else you'll only spot the second group, and often with a bit of support those ones can go on to do great things, especially if they're experienced at one thing but they're not learning a new thing. When they get enough knowledge to connect the two things they can be absolutely brilliant.
People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.
The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.
A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.
The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.
Yeah, the incentive structure for something like this is totally misaligned for this to work effectively in many cases outside of a very small, tight-knit team. (In which case... why the formality in the first place?)
For the "juniors": Why waste time digging through documentation, searching, or thinking--I can just post and get an answer with less effort.
For the "seniors": I'm already busy. Why waste time answering these same questions over and over when there's no personal benefit to doing so?
Sure, there are some juniors that will try and use it as a last resort and some seniors that will try their best to be helpful because they're just helpful people... but I usually see the juniors drowned out by those described above and the experts turn into those described above.
I think we _could_ come up with something that better aligned incentives though. Spitballing--
Juniors can ask a question. Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again--improving the documentation based on that answer. Whether that's creating new documentation, adding links or improving keywords to help with search, etc. That change then gets posted for a quick edit/approval by the senior mainly to ensure accuracy.
Now we're looking at something more like:
For the "juniors": If I ask a question, I will get an answer but it will create additional work on my end. If I ask something already answered in the documentation that I could have easily found, I basically have to publicly out myself as not having looked when I can't propose an improvement to the documentation. And that, fairly, is going to involve some judgement.
For the "seniors": Once I answer a question, someone is going to take responsibility for getting this from my head into documentation so I never need to answer this again.
This has an added benefit of shifting some of the documentation time off of the higher paid, generally more productive employees onto the lower paid, less productive employees and requiring them to build out some understanding in order to put it into words. It may also help produce some better documentation because stuff that a senior writes is more often going to assume knowledge that stuff a junior writing may think to explain because _they_ didn't know it. It also means that searching in the Slack/other channel, any question you find should end up with a link to the documentation where it's been answered which should help you discover more adjacent documentation all of which should be the most up-to-date and canonical answer we have.
> Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again.
That might make sense for simple questions. But for anything more complex, especially when the issue stems from something you have control over, having senior folks take ownership might make more sense. If they can tie the fix to visible impact, there’s a strong incentive for them to actually solve the root problem. Otherwise, there’s always the risk that experienced team members simply ignore the question 100% of the time (which also solves the problem of "i've already answered this question").
One way seniors might approach these types of groups is by treating them as a source of ideas. Repeated questions like “how do I use X?” might indicate that X needs a redesign or better onboarding. An experienced corporate climber could treat those questions as justification for "X 2.0 which is way easier to onboard to" and get backing to work on it.
Anyone who’s spent time at a large tech company has likely seen this dynamic play out, because it’s a common pathway to promotion. Definitely taken to problematic extremes, no doubt, but a slightly-healthier version of that playbook still beats the alternative of relying on the arcane knowledge of a select few as gatekeepers of information.
I am surprised that I had to scroll this far to find this observation. If I see a person's posts in multiple channels, I don't switch ON and OFF my mental image of them based on channel like a SQL where clause where channel <> personal. Based on the same premise, the person posting also probably knows this fact and isn't going to be totally free and relaxed asking whatever comes to their mind due to fear of judgement - the same eyeballs are going to be looking at the posts, irrespective of the type of channel.
As someone posted elsewhere, it is all going to be cultural and if that is right, it pretty much doesn't matter how you structure channels.
Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations.
I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings. I think people learnt a lot from following all the internal blogs.
> internal blogs
In my personal experience the problem is the total lack of writing culture at non-premiere companies.
Put differently: unless you’re working on a great team at a great organization roughly 90% of people cannot be expected to write/read well as a component of technical collaboration. Any thoughts on that? I may just be too cynical
Reading comprehension is declining. Emphasis on individual "impact" and deadline pressure, common at both premiere companies and "non-premiere" companies mindlessly copying the former, both consume time that could have been spent thinking, writing, and engaging with optional things others wrote. People who avoid documents because they might get outdated create systems with no documentation at all. And now, LLMs promise a world where documents don't need to exist a priori -- a model will look at your code and generate a plausible description of possible intent and system architecture on demand, if someone implausibly happens to ask for documentation. If nobody happens to ask, that's even more time saved - a win-win!
Leadership can either support or inhibit the culture of writing and reading. However, modern managers are not immune from the rising pressure. Their response is to shift from thinking and deliberate information processing to rapid-fire pattern matching. Some of them don't see documents as "real output" to begin with, and operate solely in meetings without any written record or documentation whatsoever. Of coures their staff will pick up on the pattern. I have a vivid memory of engaging with a full team working on a substantial project in the absence of their senior leader, getting the tactical picture and then asking the team about the project's goal. You could have heard a pin drop. None of the people working on the project could speak about anything but their immediate assigned tasks.
I've many friends that worked most of their carreers in small to medium companies where this wasn't a thing and stuff mostly worked. We can't expect to replicate the high end tech experience everywhere, I doubt it is a good investment of resources.
This is, of course, without explicit management directives to update documentation as a task/chore. Much like in many (most?) orgs, churning through technical debt is rarely a priority.
That said, no place is perfect and it takes only a handful of people to improve a culture, but without at least management support and/or fostering such a culture, it doesn't tend to happen.
These were usually quite short notes. Like I did this and that. Or here are instructions I've run. Pretty much a "lab notebook".
Again, this was often useful to people. Folks new what I was working on at that time. Over time more people adapted this style of public note taking (within company), but I have the impression I was more consistent than others.
I did it for many reasons. I genuinely forget things. It was always nice to see comments (like James complaining that I shouldn't do `dpkg -i x.deb`, and instead finally install the package repo in apt-sources!). So again - searchability (a form of documentation), reach (getting feedback), and work log (for planning).
The format was also nice - short, without specific audience in mind. Zero drama, zero effort. Plentiful and low quality. Because it was "blog" and not "pages", this meant it was obvious when the note was written and nobody expected old blogs to be up to date. The lower the friction in note taking - the better.
Finally, I was working with an SRE team, which was tightly knit and communicated very often over daily checkins (which I wasn't invited to) and other informal channels. And I worked from home a bit. This meant I had to find an asynchronous way to communicate with the team. My personal blogs worked nicely. I highly recommend this style to anyone working remotely.
Although I must admit the personal "lab notebook" wiki thing is not scaleable. It's impossible to "follow" more than a handful of people.
I kept statistics. It's fairly obvious when I was most productive. Here it is, my internal blogs on the wiki per quarter:
2013-Q4 | 0 |
2014-Q1 | 0 |
2014-Q2 | 2 | ##
2014-Q3 | 3 | ###
2014-Q4 | 2 | ##
2015-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2015-Q2 | 15 | ###############
2015-Q3 | 57 | ###################################################
2015-Q4 | 60 | ######################################################
2016-Q1 | 70 | ######################################################################
2016-Q2 | 71 | #######################################################################
2016-Q3 | 17 | #################
2016-Q4 | 23 | #######################
2017-Q1 | 13 | #############
2017-Q2 | 22 | ######################
2017-Q3 | 16 | ################
2017-Q4 | 25 | #########################
2018-Q1 | 12 | ############
2018-Q2 | 9 | #########
2018-Q3 | 23 | #######################
2018-Q4 | 14 | ##############
2019-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2019-Q2 | 20 | ####################
2019-Q3 | 18 | ##################
2019-Q4 | 36 | ######################################
2020-Q1 | 19 | ###################
2020-Q2 | 13 | #############
2020-Q3 | 4 | ####
2020-Q4 | 3 | ###
2021-Q1 | 4 | ####
2021-Q2 | 8 | ########
2021-Q3 | 3 | ###
2021-Q4 | 21 | #####################
2022-Q1 | 4 | ####
2022-Q2 | 12 | ############
2022-Q3 | 4 | ####
2022-Q4 | 28 | ############################
2023-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2023-Q2 | 16 | ################
2023-Q3 | 10 | ##########
2023-Q4 | 6 | ######
2024-Q1 | 12 | ############
2024-Q2 | 22 | ######################
2024-Q3 | 0 |
2024-Q4 | 2 | ##
2025-Q1 | 20 | ####################
2025-Q2 | 3 | ###
An amazingly large number of questions are generally applicable, but it is really hard to maintain a culture that actively encourages that.
Then I realized you meant colleague.
;)
As in, take time in your day to wander and roam. (I would go for a ~1hr hike in the mornings as my “commute”)
It gives you a sense of distinction from being home or “at work”. The routine cardio, and musings you have while walking make it well worth it.
When my schedule allows, I walk my dog with my daughter and pause at her bus stop and meet her friends. Years ago it was a 45 minute walk, round trip, to daycare.
* pick up Becky from school
* feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today)
* sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am)
* sorry "train canceled"
* will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment
While all these can be completely valid reasons, it's just funny hearing one of these daily. On a side note, I also kinda like my job and am not interested in slacking.
However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+
Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.
That's one reason people feel like they have to keep hiding it and it builds up to burnout.
I could pretend to be available that day, maybe, but it’s mutually beneficial for me to just take a day off.
The next day I’m usually just fine, and I don’t always give more explanation than “taking a sick day”.
And that's entirely justified; your health is a private matter. If your employer is suspicious, there's ways and means that don't involve sharing your medical history with either your colleagues or employer.
SOmetimes it can knock me out for a day, but sometimes after half an hour or so I'm good to go (especially if there is no pain accompanying it).
I've never had to give more explanation than "Sorry, migraine, I need to take rest of day off, see you tomorrow".
One of my worst examples was that I made it to work on the bus, and immediately had to take off. I was pretty nauseous by the time I made it home, and should I have been found throwing up in a bush, nobody would have believed “I have a migraine”. To the drunk tank with me, at 930am.
It is that kind of mentality that unfortunately then gets promoted in corporations and creates a feedback loop to create every less trust, because how could you trust anything or anyone on a system that is like that? You can’t. Only the naive trust anyone at their job. All corporate employment structures are inherently hostile trust environments, you’re always swimming with beasts with toxic control issues above you and random features thrown together around you.
The very core nature of a corporation is inherently a structure of narcissistic control and exploration of people to one degree or another, that is its whole purpose.
The other day I had a killer headache. Just couldn’t shake it. I did everything I needed to that was time sensitive, then went AFK. I don’t see any reason to be suspicious of others if they do similarly—we all have days when we’re just not at our best for some reason.
And I am, too, when I hear this weekly from the same person (and when I ask back next day, if she recovered, she asks me "from what"?)
I'm all in for more times off for parents, more PTOs, sabbaticala, etc. But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious.
I'd say you're missing the hint that it is none of your business.
The suspicion etc may not be, but the question is obviously fine.
People like you are always more transparent than you realise.
Suspicious in that it's only twice a month? When my kid first started preschool, we got exposed to all sorts of wonderful novel viruses, and I had respiratory infections of various sorts for probably 50% of the days for the entire autumn and winter. Most of them not rising to the level of high fever and not being able to work, but definitely noticeably cutting my productivity.
"A cold" doesn't usually totally incapacitate someone working from the comfort of their home, down a paracetamol, drink hot liquids, take a nap, don't need to be 110% productive but still can manage to get some job done. But "a massive hangover" is something that surely can knock someone out.
Sure, this never happens. Literally, noone in the history of mankind has gotten wasted in the middle of the week.
A cold can absolutely do that. Expecting people to work while they're sick is an unhealthy work culture, don't inflict that on other people.
(Child spent 16 % of the year sick. Across two parents, that is nearly a month of absence in a year.)
But yeah, some of them... Definitely.
Someone said in another thread, it's none of my business. Indeed. Especially as an external. I also would never report any of my suspicion. Sometimes,however, I'm blocked by this (waiting on others, etc.) so not entirely unaffected, tho
Some people may "abuse" such things, but I'd say most people legit have days when they're under the weather and feel fine the next day.
Also, if you have kids in daycare or something? A cold twice a month is pretty much the norm as I understand it. I love my nieces, but there's a 50/50 chance each time I see them I'm going to wind up with a minor cold. Toddlers are awfully efficient at spreading disease...
I'd bet a fair few "under the weather" days are because people have mental health issues but aren't going to announce that publicly (due to the ongoing stigma.)
I bill by days worked, and I'll still take a day off if I'm feeling terrible in the morning. Even taking the hit on pay is worth it, because I'll probably recover in one day instead dragging it out for 3 days.
But then, maybe I'm too honest. On occasions when I've felt ill later in the day, I've also just signed off early before the team meetings and just left a message like "I worked 6 hours today, but felt really unproductive, so I'm finishing early and I'll only bill a half/quarter day" (depending on how little I got done). Not had any complaints yet.
I similarly don't bat an eye when a coworker takes off for whatever reason. We're allotted PTO. Why jump through hoops to convince ourselves that it's ok to use it?
I don’t think I’ve taken a “sick day” once since going remote over 5 years ago. But for the last 10 years I’ve been leading initiatives first at startups and then at consulting companies and I mostly have autonomy and the trust to get things done.
Unless you are the one paying for that person and they are not performing as by contract, even if someone needs an extra day off to chill, you should be happy they do take it as it creates an environment where you also could take it off if you so wished.
Everybody says having kids is really rewarding, so the folks who don’t should also get some time to find their own rewards. And, if we’re making extra space for people who have kids, that puts those people at a competitive disadvantage.
I mean, like, we should have maternity leave as a special thing. But everybody should get enough days off to deal with a 10 year old’s baseball games, school plays, doctor appointments, or whatever. And even for maternity leave—maybe just give everybody a sabbatical at some point!
I have zero desire to be a parent but I think people having kids is a pretty important part of keeping humanity/society going, so I'm happy to accommodate (or even reward) it.
We definitely don’t want to create a situation where parents are less desirable to employ, right?
And, most people have kids (even in places countries with highly developed economies and lower fertility rates). So, we shouldn’t think of this as an extra perk (some special case benefit). The treatment of folks who have had kids is the average case. The special case is whatever we for people who don’t have them (we shouldn’t make a special negative case, right?)
Regarding your second point, I guess you're right. :) I'm just looking at it from my "you couldn't even pay me to have a child" perspective.
Your question about making it a negative case is an interesting can of worms I'll elect not to open.
Which is fine. And better than the people who show up no matter what and drag others down by being miserable and making mistakes.
If you don't normalize one-day "under the weather" events, you are trading them for multi-day "off sick" events.
Personal anecdata: I recall once at a job with a particularly easygoing boss I simply didn't feel up to my morning commute, for no easily definable reason. I rang in sick anyway and went back to sleep. I then proceeded to more or less sleep through the entire following 24 hours, until it was time to go to work again. Lo and behold I magically had the energy this time, and bounced into work. I then realized that I had been suffering from fatigue from the early stages of an infection which I had successfully fended off through rest - had I dragged myself into work, I most assuredly would not have been there the following day, and probably not the day after that either.
Its my time, I'll take it. I have 5 weeks of vacation. I use every one of them.
No one ever asks why I worked 60 hours the prior week and the one before that, that's never noticed. So I'll just do what I want and if that bothers some people, then so be it. I do feel bad though as the other dozens of devs on my team are offshore and they work non stop and its just expected.
Before they got rid of the onshore people though, I never batted an eye when my co-workers took off 2 or 3 days with no warning, its their time.
"as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok." I'm sure your team very much appreciates this.
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
Anyway, over-announcing is good; take away the stigma of calling in sick or taking time for yourself/your family.
Before you say it'll be exploited; the largest economy in Europe does this and it works wonderfully, and so do many others.
It sounds like those people have their priorities and you have yours. Personally, theirs sound much more sustainable than yours.
In my experience, "rambling" channels build up organically... as you have a thought, you share it with someone relevant, not just drop it into a channel and see who reads it. Over time, small group chats evolve naturally, and assuming everyone has communications skills, topics that become relevant to the whole team are then shared with the whole team.
I agree that such discussions are healthy, maybe even required, for a functional remote team. But let people organize themselves - don't prescribe specific methods that teams must follow. The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
Just make a "random" channel, where most people keep notifications off, and use it for everything random, from lunch invitations to "i'm selling olive oil", etc.
This seems to happen a lot: Someone writes some highly exaggerated career advice that has good intent at the core but turns into overly weird suggestions by the end. They might be trying to be memorable or to make an impact by exaggerating the advice.
Then some people, often juniors, take it literally and start practicing it. They think they’re doing some secret that will make them the best employee. Their coworkers and managers are more confused than impressed and think it’s just a personality quirk.
As a manager I found it helpful to skim Reddit and other sites for semi-viral advice blogs like this. With enough juniors in a company there’s a chance one of them will suddenly start doing the thing written in a shared post like this. Knowing why they’re doing it is a good way to help defuse the behavior (assuming they don’t really benefit but rather do it because they perceive it will look good)
Most people doing "agile" do literally the opposite of what is on the manifesto.
So… what’s the point of a “sprint”? We don’t even do monthly releases. It’s hilarious.
I suspect we do “agile” in name only so they can pretend to the board that there is a system at all.
“Isn’t 15 the minimum?”
“Well, yeah, if you just want to do the bare minimum. But look at Todd over there - he has 37 rambles”
“Well if you wanted people to have 37 rambles why wouldn’t you make that the minimum”
Someone please save my soul..
If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.
Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Most of my middle management experiences has been between Office Space and Better off Ted.
One with "Don't care" as an answer and the other says "Care more" as its.
Those are the two extremes of the genre.
Ted Crisp: We do everything: industrial products, biomedical, cryogenics, defense technology.
Veronica Palmer: We want to weaponize a pumpkin.
Ted Crisp: Then so do I. Because?
Veronica Palmer: There's a country with whom we do business that grows a great deal of pumpkins and would welcome additional uses for them. As well as cheaper ways to kill their enemies.
Ted Crisp: Well, finally, the pumpkin gets to do something besides Halloween.
I believe this showcases, succinctly, corporate “ethics” in our society.
Absolutely anything to make a buck and strengthen trade.
there is white people rapping and Michael Bolton is ashamed of his name. Tread carefully folks!
I couldn't buy rated M games or R rated movies, but I could certainly download them... which led me to my first graphics card and RAM upgrade, installing a TV tuner card, and eventually to PC building. Doing all this while in grade school was the best tech education I could get, especially back in the 90s.
If you're in a startup of <10 people and someone isn't communicating with the rest of the team, it's not going to work.
I can see how this feels dystopian in a giant corporation, but that's because everyone is there for the paycheck.
In a startup, people are making sacrifices to make the thing work. They could get a higher paying, less stressful job.
Picking a startup and not being engaged is disruptive.
When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.
But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.
I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.
These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.
Getting more eyeballs on that idea also helps. Both in the different knowledge and expectations / assumptions they have and in proofing how clearly the idea's communicated. Really helps reveal areas where there's ambiguity you hadn't even realized because it's not even a confusion spot you'd consider with your knowledge.
Now, I've consulted at places that use Microsoft Teams file shares for their "documentation", and I feel like I'm back in 2005. Confluence would be a dream.
The last 10 years I've seen jira and confluence groaned about, what has replaced what they do?
My personal preference is to have some kind of "Off-Topic" or "Open Discussion" channel that is communal. I'll then make a point of consistently posting half-developed ideas to that channel. Especially the ideas that I know are going to morph as the team discusses them. I find that helps do two things:
- Helps create a culture of collaboration rather than one of "whatever the lead dev says goes".
- Provides Cover For/Reduces Pressure On anyone that is less comfortable putting their thoughts out there for discussion.
As the parent comment said, the fundamental idea in the post isn't bad, but the mechanism may need tweaking for a given team.
I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article states "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."
this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working
computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)
The problem that this post is trying to address, is that these kinds of informal rambling channels -- which have enormous value -- almost never happen organically.
some folks -- i guess like you? -- read this and think, "oh, great. a mandate that fixes a problem i don't have, and now might be something i'm forced to participate in against my will"
and other folks -- definitely me, and i believe the OP as well -- read this and think, "oh, great! an idea that might help me with a problem that i have, and might be something i can point-to as one possible solution to that problem"
> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. We want as much deep focus time as possible, so ramblings help us stay connected while minimizing interruptions.
Emphasis in the quote is mine, to call attention specifically to the fact that this is what Obsidian is doing instead of standups.
Taken in that vein, it sounds positively miraculous to me.
The fully remote org I work at does async standup threads, they're great, they work just like they're described here except they're vastly easier to track and search, and nobody has any allusions of them being anything more than just remote asynchronous standups.
I feel like it’s a common pattern that organically forms. People want to express themselves, they don’t want to distract group chats, so they make a space to do it.
It all comes down to company culture.
This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.
I'd also argue that "scheduled meetings" doesn’t translate to "water cooler talk" automatically. So even if you'd have regular scheduled meetings, you might still crave for some socializing.
There is a bar downstairs where I live in a tourist area where I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there, maybe get a drink or sip on diet soda and just talk to whoever comes down and with the bartender.
We had a regional in person get together a day before I went on vacation and the get together was supposed to be an overnight trip. I flew in the morning and flew out back home late that night just so I could attend the social events the day before the meeting.
All that and I hate remote “social” events and don’t attend. I loved our team’s quarterly get togethers where we would fly out out to one of our company’s headquarters once a quarter someone in the US. All of us are older (35+) and have lives outside of work. We come to work to make money, not to socialize.
As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.
It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room
And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.
She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?
I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).
I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.
I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?
(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).
EDIT: Even MS Teams implemented it!
The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.
Same experience on full time remote gig. Didn't help that my colleagues were mostly speaking about topics that I had zero interest in. So I just muted myself and practiced some guitar. You pay me for this time, you organized this meeting, so be it.
If you did this at my company, I would turn up with a smile every time, and then get hours less practical work done that day, because I would be drained and also because I know I would be shut down if I tried to say that these social meetings don’t work well for me, so you wouldn’t even know.
Just remember, just because nobody has complained doesn’t mean something doesn’t impact people.
Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.
.. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".
Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment. So these leaders have an especially hard time in a remote environment. But they do soon learn that even Slack DMs can be searched and they love this tool to root out "troublemakers".
Of course, if you can, leave such a place. But not everyone has this luxury.
I got tired of the abject fear that some of those idiots were stoking so I took it upon myself to set the example for the more junior people and started rambling and asking questions and doing the things that the "leaders" obviously didn't like. You can imagine how that went as I got a bit more bold week after week... I've never been more relieved, and proud, to be canned.
Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.
It seems impossible to escape the feeling that something written down is somehow firmer or more significant than something said in person. Have you ever been more comfortable saying something painful or awkward in person than via text or email? Spoken words exist for a short time and then disappear, but even a text message sits there and stares at you for long after you send or receive it. It's not just the controlling CEOs; I think they're just a specific case of this much, much wider phenomenon.
Also crawling exhaustion and burnout, later coming frustration and unrealisticly high standards for oneself and others. Hmm, why am I starting to describe myself...
I appreciate any effort to increase social cohesion in remote teams, but intermingling it with one of the main stressors of my work environment—keeping up with team communication—isn’t the right way IMHO.
The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".
I know that also for me these rambling channels would add to my stress.
So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.
Every time a company has said “you should mute and ignore this channel” but also encourages relevant project discussion in that channel, it becomes something people realize they need to unmute and monitor.
The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring channels are managers and leads, because they can dictate how people need to bring information to them.
Have never been like this with email though (but email is much higher volume/more individual things to click on... and less interesting :D)
At best it can be temporary or short term messaging and there's probably something missing between slack and email that needs to exist in the world.
I'm not a notification or interruption driven individual, and it shows in my productivity. Having a place to put things or share things, can be helpful.
(Of course, in an organisation that contains many politically inconvenient truths, you can easily end up doing that too much and people will catch on to it and dislike what you're doing. Another drawback is you have to be willing to look stupid and trust that the stupid first impression goes away with time.)
Pick a channel grouping that makes sense (by-team/by-project/by-manager) and Just Start Typing. Busy channels are alive and will create their own culture organically. Freely mix in work talk with pictures of cool stuff you found while walking the dog. "threads" makes this extremely manageable.
Strongly agree. This is what threads in the project channel are for.
Creating excessive channels for everything gets out of hand quickly. It’s a habit you see from people who worked at small companies before threads were available on discussion platforms.
While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.
As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.
We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.
That's a good point.
I think threads would help here (always reply to a thread), but enforcing this consistently can be a chore (on all parties).
Obviously you can still get in trouble if you say something very inappropriate, but anything middle of the road will be forgotten.
When doing deep work in some problem domain, often I find the brain starts to drop these highly ephemeral fragments of ideas (that are sometimes downright ingenious). Caveat is they often only come once, and then they're gone if you don't grab them.
I often keep an envelope or scrap paper next to my desk where I write down any idea I have, whether it's "I should fix this" or "what if I did that", really no matter how small I try to put it to paper.
What usually ends up happening is I somehow end up with a fairly concrete todo list of easy improvements.
I think that's precisely why the ramblings should be a separate channel apart from all the emails and more serious communication, but I have some thoughts why this still might not work.
I used to be guilty of leaving walls of text in our "random" channel, and we weren't even remote back then. My reasons weren't entirely irrational. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't taken seriously because of the way the business was run and it was the only chance I had to speak "out of turn". These workplaces that encourage a lack of boundaries are usually small startups that hire inexperienced people. Ultimately whatever anyone said was used to manipulate them or for the rotten parts of middle management to "steal" ideas.
I'm not a fan of this concept either and I think it's easily abused by all.
I guess, maybe unprofessional might mean short essays but I'd like to work somewhere that supports such behaviours if I am being honest.
I just really feel like its so hard convincing a single person anything or let alone the world. What are your thoughts?
This is the fundamental difference between what a healthy remote-first company starts to look like versus the soulless version historically in-person companies try to sell.
To the author, thank you for sharing your version of the dynamics.
I'm trying hard to understand why it has to be a personal channel. Water coolers aren't personal, that's the whole point.
In particular you're still adjusting what you write to be OK for anyone in your team read, so the distinction with the other "casual" channels sounds thin.
OTOH if your team doesn't have a casual place to say random stuff, it would be a nice improvement to get one.
It might not help in all situations, but I see some people threading their posts to avoid that effect and somewhat keep a context to their thoughts if someone wants to jump in.
A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.
http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...
Like anyone else, when I joined the company, I had various questions: how to access certain systems, how to handle permissions, how to debug specific services, etc.
I compiled all these questions and answers as notes in a Git repository that my teammates could access. I wrote the notes using QOwnNotes, utilizing its Git integration. So, when someone had a question for which I already had the answer, I could simply share my notes, or create/update a node and share it.
The names of the notes were straightforward and easy to follow, such as:
- aws.md
- azure.md
- kubernetes.md
- staging.md
- production.md
- useful-commands.md (jq, sed, base64, etc)
My teammates used this resource frequently. As I was preparing to leave the company, I suggested them to fork my notes repository. I later heard that they continued to use it for many months afterward.
Is isn't 2018 any more. Don't ramble about off topic casual stuff somewhere where it's all kept on record and easily viewable by your boss (and if your boss isn't invited to the channels, what do you think they'll think when they find out all their employees have lots of 'rambling' channels?). What if HR gets wind of this during the next planned RIF? Your job is to add value to the company
Take your project ideas etc directly to your boss. Don't let other people steal them
Join a non-work Slack group for this kind of socialising
> - ideas related to current projects
> - musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback
> - “what if” suggestions
> - photos from recent trips or hobbies
> - rubber ducking a problem
Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO. Some might be interested in the former but not the latter, and also might be interested in them at different times (of the day/week). There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.
All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?
My point is that channels should be set up such that it’s well-defined whether they are work-related or not.
In fact it is just the opposite, salaried employees are paid the same no matter how many hours worked.
So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?
Besides, multi-tasking exists: sometimes I need to let my brain idle on another topic for 15 minutes, because I'm working through something complex, or just wrapped up a project and have a meeting.
Certainly, nowhere I've ever worked has tried enforcing anything like this. I've had plenty of co-workers who made a point of wandering over to socialize for 5-10 minutes every day, which must have easily added up to an hour a day - but they were also the expert that knew exactly where everyone was and who needed to coordinate with who.
bottom line: YMMV. check your local laws and/or collective agreements.
Why does it feel like people take this (reasonable) idea too far so often these days (and always on the Internet - I've never seen anyone in real life act like that).
Like, yes, don't treat your job like a family or spend your whole day talking about your personal drama. Be careful or avoid dating coworkers. Etc. But this stuff is, as the author said, the equivalent of water cooler talk.
If I had a salaried job that tracked the fact that I spent 15 minutes (when not on a time crunch, of course) talking about some random interesting blog post or a coworker's trip, I would... probably look into leaving that job. I have never had a job that met that description. (On the contrary, many jobs I had, especially back as an intern/student, let us get away with way too much time spent fooling around or talking, in retrospect.)
Even the stereotypical overworked fast food employee is allowed to chat with their coworkers when there's downtime, it's perfectly normal. I can't imagine pursuing the "work/life balance" ideal to the point one avoids regular old casual conversation with their coworkers.
Please engage in the mandatory socialization experience
Having a way to share what's on your mind that might not get shared is usually what can happen in person during the early days of a startup.
It can also allow the initial startup group to have a better connected sense of what's going on in each person's world compared to what they take the time to type.
It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.
Effective sharing is amazing and a superpower. Doesn't have to be chat either.
Years ago (between 2006-2012) I worked for a company that implemented Salesforce. We were all in the office but spread across floors, US offices, and some offices elsewhere in the world.
Someone structured Salesforce in such a way that every client question/answer was clearly documented and properly linked. So, over time, I found and learned so much searching through that knowledgebase. Had some garbage questions/answers just like anything (including chats).
What's key though is MOST client-facing folks bought into sharing/linking/documenting to Salesforce. Rather than sitting in individual inboxes.
So, if you're able to create that same sort of magic through a chat channel, do it. If you don't see an org that understands that sort of behavior, might not be worth your time. It takes effort!
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
Yet here goes my rant. Nothing can replace a good in-person interaction. Perhaps I'm the old guy in the room. When teams are trying to build something there is nothing like water-cooler talk and banter about the work that helps relate shared challenges. Granted this is going to very specific to organizational needs.
I don't work in software development so perhaps my needs are different than most on Hackernews. I've managed teams in person and remotely. I've found that managing in person is a much more productive way to work.
I can do it in person. But I find diagramming with collaborative tools, shared Google docs, etc to be much better than in person drawing on a whiteboard. There are remote collaborative tools for everything.
With the tools available now, you can record all of the meetings and don’t have to take notes, have transcripts automatically generated and summarized with AI. I can then take all of the transcripts and other artifacts, throw them in Google’s NotebookLM and ask questions and get answers about the project (with citations).
I do the same for transcripts of meetings I am not in - mostly pre-sales.
Yes these are all approved tools.
I've now seen this across two companies, and it's great to have #rd-martinjaniczek where I can just talk about what I'm doing as I'm doing it, post error messages and later how I solved them (or let somebody else jump in and tell me how they solved it etc.), it helps Slack searchability and combats the remote loneliness, it's pretty great.
And reading other folks' RD channels, you realize how frickin' funny some people are.
As a result 1:1s tend to work much better technically for socializing, but it of course doesn't bring the group vibe.
The idea in the article sounds really nice! Unfortunately does not really scale to larger companies than maybe 5-10 people.
We also tried scheduled casual talks with the whole team, but didn't have more success than you.
I think the closest we get was the small talk before meetings start, but as we're starting to get auto-transcript for all our meetings that also became very bland.
PS. between the two Mastodon will be better, you can fully disable all federation and even have SSO! + setting up a private Bluesky is quite a bit harder
Besides fixing my customer's stuff, I learn and improve their systems. There's a small corral of offsite indy IT talent; I'm the onsite, everything else guy.
I could use a simple space to quickly post v1 thoughts in an unpolished format. They'd be available for our other IT to review and comment on.
Since I want this, all the client will pay for is for me to implement it. Nothing else. Also, the owner likes data to stay in house. Together it rules out subscription and cloud products. I'll see what my FOSS options are.
Also, I'm very glad that I don't work in a place with Slack/chat culture. I really like the idea of making your ramblings available, but the thought of forcing everything into chat is repulsive. Just use a wiki page or files in a Git repo (as long as they're sufficiently easy to access) and that's good enough.
The best companies I’ve worked for freely encouraged workers to leverage chat or forums for non-work stuff. Rooms for AV enthusiasts, for sharing music, for discussing photography, corporate gripes, new ideas, personal projects, meeting colleagues on holiday, you name it.
You can absolutely have the spontaneity of physical collaboration through solely online and remote means. The internet itself is proof positive of this, companies just need to encourage that behavior more (and only minimally police it to avoid HR incidents or lawsuits).
It worked really well for about half the people, the other half ignored it completely.
I wouldn't mind if today's office chats like Teams or Slack added a microblogging feature where you could subscribe to interesting colleagues.
I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.
This stuff needs to happen organically to be meaningful. Templates don't work.
It's like starting a chess club that everyone has to join.
Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool
We are all busy, when we want to talk about something or get sanity checks, we schedule time on each others calendar. I go to work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. I’m not anti social and I can carry on small talk with the best of them. But there is a strict separation between church (home) and state (work). Well I did meet my now wife at work in 2009…
It was not used routine, it was for times when the entire team is looking at an SDK for the first time, we all have a group item to discuss, and times like that. It's like a non-meeting, ambient party call. Not for continual use, by any means.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
isnky -> is my Inam -> I am In -> I?
Funnily, the first two autocorrected when I typed then in and I genuinely didn't know what isnky was supposed to mean.
On topic though, if no one else can read it it's like writing in your own local notes files.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
There's a choice there, and the choice to wrap meetings into "I spent all day in meetings" is to communicate that meetings are as much of a timewaste as driving is, and not as respectable as real work. Which is a tired geek trope. Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about? What was decided? What couldn't be decided? How it influenced the team? How you spread what the team were doing to the other meeting participants? How you shielded the team from bullshit during the meetings? How the projects are looking after the meetings? because you're performing weaponised incompetence "I hate meetings so I'm going to be a stroppy teenager and if you're going to force me into meetings, I'm going to make it painful for you to get information from me about them. Harumph". and hoping HN will upvote it because "Does Anyone Else think meetings are bad? right guys??"
You know what "spent all day in meetings" communicates on HN or in tech circles, that's why you chose to say that, and why you chose to phrase it that curtly.
In a scrum update? Usually because the meetings in question have no bearing on tasks in the sprint, and daily scrum isn't a generic rambling all-topics team chat session it is a very short timeboxed focused update on sprint tasks and the only reason to mention meetings not directly related to sprint tasks is to provide context for the absence of progress on sprint tasks.
If they were genuinely in meetings, and respect that as real work, and that's the right thing to say in the scrum update, then ... why is it noteworthy enough to comment here, and what do they "really mean it"?
ideas related to current projects musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback “what if” suggestions photos from recent trips or hobbies rubber ducking a problem
it seems like the goal is to split #random into #work-random and #not-work-random. but #ramblings seems like a weird naming convention. Why is an idea related to a current project a "rambling"?
Two times a week, the weekly standup is extended by an hour, from 15min to 1h15.
People are welcome to jump in and out of that open zoom that acts as a water cooler corner: any topic goes, from work to personal hobbies, etc
We’re fully remote (US / EMEA / APAC)
I suppose you could do something similar with local sub-org/2-pizza team, but bit of a different vibe, and then if there is a #topic channel would your thought on topic go in #topic or #ramble-name?
This is a great place to use threads.
If someone wants to ramble, you say “Starting a thread to think through <topic>” in the project channel and then you put your follow-up chats in the thread. This way it only occupies a single line and notification (for those who have it enabled) but keeps it in the right place.
Creating excessive numbers of channels is a common small company mistake that they’ll come to regret later. Every growing company I’ve worked for has gone through a “let’s create channels for everything” phase followed later by a “we’re all so burnt out from being in 80 different channels” phase. Creating a separate channel for every person of a project will scatter the discussions and add excessive cognitive load for juggling channels.
Why do people pray?
Why do people do rubber-duck debugging?
I've worked on 3 different projects / workplaces in the last year where I've been the only talker on a Slack with 10s of people on it. Sometimes I'll write 5-6 detailed messages in a day, talking about particular problems or updates on things I'm working on, and almost nothing from anyone else.
These are in subject-specific channels (#network-engineering or #programmers or the like) where colleagues are subscribed.
But the real business of each company seemed to happen in private group chats or video meetings, with no long-term records.
I'm like to state a problem before I've solved it, for the rubber ducking. Very occasionally someone would reply to help, and occasionally I reply with a :facepalm: if I realise I've just been hasty or sloppy. But even if nobody replies, I am very happy to have a public log of my work, the problems I've solved (or not), and the people I might tag for particular input.
If someone DMs me for help with something that is possibly of interest to >1 person, I tend to re-state the issue (without identifying who asked me), then answer in public, and thank them for asking.
If I have a question for a colleague, I will tend to ask it in a channel, as it becomes something searchable.
I ask work questions on Stack Overflow for the same reason, and often self-answer because the place is dead as a community, but the search works well. After a few years I find my own answers as a complete surprise.
But I have colleagues who've not said a line in public basically forever. I've not been a manager for years, always an IC lately. I've not had any objections, but it seems like nobody wants to join me to make "work in public" the default.
Apparently I'm happy to be the exhibitionist little freak?
jwz wrote about how well that worked out on his blog.
I'd be interested in trying this if I was remote, but I still just prefer in-person work.
I worked an in-person job recently at an oil company where we had no regular meetings (I was doing absolute grunt drafting work), and it was the most depressing experience of my life. This would be better than in-person w/o water cooler chats.
Wake up at 6, start working, finish at 2 pm. In the middle do all the house chores that I could squeeze in (cleaning, shopping, eating, even chopped few cubic meters of wood in span of weeks) while keeping my output the same as other teammates (it wasn't particularly hard, either). Each day I was out at 2 pm, ready to decide on MY terms, who to meet, what to do, what to attend.
I'd be so curious about the demographics on these comments. For context, I am a single person in my 20's, living alone. If I had a family, I can easily see WFH being a whole lot better.
Or at least that's my point of view.
In office was fine while I didn't have kids. Now I have kids and my life would be in shambles if I had to commute. I also live in BFE and would make probably 70% less if I worked locally.
I grew up on the internet in the early 2000s. So I'm well used to getting lots of my social interaction from text chats, and I prefer it. I can text chat all day. I can in person chat for about 45 mins before I want to be alone with my thoughts.
Plus, I get off work and get to socialize with my family, who I like roughly 100x more than my favorite coworker.
It's just different people, different communication styles, different lives.
But fair enough, everyone’s different. Having a family would certainly make wfh easier.
I actually do this, but into a personal google doc.
High performers usually have their own thing going on outside of work and don't need the workplace for socializing. This boosted a lot of careers, and otherwise made life way less toxic. Unless you're fresh out of college I can't see anyone wanting this again.
Like, if the ceo said something very stupid in the last All Hands, well, you use the ramble channel to talk about it. Sometimes this works (you feel like you’re not the only one that thinks X), but it could easily go south.
I’ve seen this dynamic too: once people start venting, the channel can spiral. I sometimes wonder how to steer that energy into something constructive. Maybe it helps to let people express uncertainty or frustration before decisions are final, and to respond with context before things snowball.
It’s tricky, because most coworkers only overlap on the job itself, they might not share much else in common. so their “bonding” can easily turn into shared complaining.
Curious if anyone has found ways to keep that from going south without shutting people down completely.
It can be intimidating to join in when you’re new though. You got to lurk for a while to read the room a bit and learn the culture.
I hate that Slack and other apps have nothing in between "mute" and "tell me immediately if I have anything unread". Many channels I want to know if there are new messages and read, just not by the second. If it could batch them up and only show them as unread after lunch, perhaps.
Team chat is for the project.
It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.
I'd imagine this is highly team dependent. I'd personally love if my company adopted this. I think only one other team member would actually participate though. We're far too busy.
Once I was convinced that I had enough buy in, I would then officially propose it in a team setting. It’s called “pre-wiring a meeting”.
Now it’s more of getting peer reviews and sanity checks than anything else before I go down a road. We also have Slack channel where we ask for peer reviews now of architectural decisions (working in cloud consulting).
[1] My title has been “Senior Developer” for decades at various companies. But in reality, based on “scope”, “impact”, etc not “I codez real good” I was really what would be considered a mid level developer until a decade ago.
These micro‑interactions gave valuable context: which teams were under pressure, where things might be stuck, and sometimes where a quick helping hand was needed.
When we went remote, we tried to recreate this with a single global “coffee chat” channel. It worked for a while, but quickly became noisy.
I really like your idea of having one ramblings channel per person instead. It feels like a cleaner way to keep that background awareness and human connection alive without overwhelming everyone. We’re going to try this next.
Anything else usually just feels awkward and pathetic. But since online game shows or "breakaway rooms" cost the company a whole lot less money, that's what we're stuck with.
Edit: I may be falsely blaming the contrast, but something about the design is causing me eye strain. Im not sure what. Here is a screenshot how the site looks to me: https://imgur.com/a/LNVCMRc Maybe someone else can figure it out.
Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.
The page has a (JS-dependent) light-mode/dark-mode switch. It defaults to "light". Meanwhile a browser configured to default to dark theming will only partly apply the themed parts (the pages own function being stuck in light), resulting in an objectively unreadable black-on-dark-gray.
Even enabling JS, the button in the upper right corner still has to be clicked to make it readable.
At first not everyone will catch on to this. Those will be the first to be called into HR or get remarks on their anual review.