90% of the engineers I've worked with in bigger companies wouldn't know how to find someone in the company outside of their direct reporting structure.
Honestly it's pathetic. The rest of the organization can't work like that and these are table stakes social skills IMO.
I seriously think the "headphones on, get into flow" trope is the most damaging meme in our industry. Management also takes huge advantage of the low-information environment that engineers seem comfortable in. Most of them don't even (really) know what our product is or how it's sold and marketed.
For most people it's hard, especially for the stereotypical "IT nerds".
I think the best tip for people who have a hard time is: Watch who of your colleagues know "everyone" and spend as much time as possible with them. If they ask you to go for lunch together, always join. If you can work on a project with them, do it. They will casually introduce you to all the people over time, and might just tell you the newest company gossip.
Not to be overly harsh but the problem is with seeing those who don't share their interests as people equally worthy of attention. IT nerds typically have trouble meeting people where they're at instead of the other way around. And most of the time it's because they've never made any effort to do so.
That's why I say it's not super hard.
It's also becoming more of a societal problem in general as younger people spend more and more time isolated and socializing in bubbles. I think it's a serious and growing problem that people don't have friendships outside of their immediate peer group age-wise.
My brother's kid is in her early 20s and her and most of her friends don't see people at 30+ as people. They don't value their opinions and it has all sorts of negative effects on their lives like they struggle to obtain/keep jobs, etc. That's not a blanket generalization though -- we have some team members in that age-range and they're great.
Obviously this doesn't happen when the legal team is located three buildings away. At that point you might as well be remote from the perspective of collaboration.
I've found the benefit of lunches together is that you get familiar with everyone, and they with you. There's more of an assumption of good will and competence between people who know each other.
If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.
It's not like there are that many natural opportunities to meet and interact with people you don't directly work with when everyone is remote.
Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.
Of course if everyone is working remotely via email this isn't going to happen.
I've had the same problem in person too (silos, no one talking) so I think it's more about structure than remote/in-person.
Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.
They did retain the MS tradition of an incredibly confusing floor plan. We used to say the last interview question is "can you find your way back to the lobby?"
The best office layout I've had was Infinite Loop at Apple. Private offices with lots of little open discussion spaces -- exactly the opposite of today's open offices with lots of little private discussion spaces! Perhaps shows how the job of the people signing the checks for the office differs from the job of the people working in the office...
Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.
1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.
Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.
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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.
dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.
The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.
I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.
I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.
My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.
Any large scale engineering product where “who you’ve talked to” is how things “get done” is going to fail.
Really you are just outing yourself as a member of the political class: someone who believes feelings and opinions matter to the behavior of CPUs.
The argument that important knowledge is best acquired through incidental office interactions sounds more like nostalgia for office culture than an effective approach to knowledge sharing.