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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life

This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.

Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.

These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.

It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.

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Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...

(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)

But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!

oh for sure.

this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.

executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.

Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.

Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.

"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.

building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.

demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.

I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.

One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.

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