Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".
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.
> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".
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.
Always funny to see these sort of missed connections on HN.
> 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
From my personal experience, internal Wikis are 90+% written by about 5% of the workforce. The vast majority of internal Wiki users are "read-only". That is fine. Really: Read that twice. It is OK that the vast majority of docs are written by the few who are highly motivated to do it. When I write for an internal Wiki, I am trying to reduce the number of future questions that people will ask me. If they do come with a question, my first answer is always: Did you search our Wiki? It only takes once or twice for them to change.
I'm not sure it's really cynical at all, in my experience, even with a LOT of wiki documentation, it is almost always severely out of date and many people don't know what is where... after a while, there's new, new, new versions of docs because people didn't want to refactor existing docs someone else created. And, in the end, almost nobody reads it and just ask other, more senior people within the team/org.
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.
But the non-premiere companies also do not hire the talent that is capable of doing this (and that might be fine, they might not really need that specific talent).
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.
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.
Internal blog is another thing, but indeed related to chat. Once we figured some techical thing out, I often put it under "personal blog" on wiki under something like ~marek/date-slug. (I'm actually quite upset about jira removing slug from the url and replacing it with random number, this makes url completion much worse. I often titled the wikis funny/witty to make it easier to remember and find)
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:
I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and 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.
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.
A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.
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.
IMO, the greatest force multiplier in onboarding is automation... How many user interactive steps does a dev need to walk through to get up and running?
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.
Heavily seconding the “setup script” method for anything that can be scripted in lieu of documentation and handholding. I’ve done this at multiple companies and it proved valuable. Even if it eventually breaks it’s easy to fix, and it’s usually pretty self-documenting, so anyone who’s even a little curious what’s going on, they have access to all the “secrets” of how it’s being done (and can also improve it).
> 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
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.
OTOH I hugely appreciate my manager who makes a conscious effort to direct people to ask questions in public channels and not just ping “hey” in my DMs all day. And it saves them time too, because my response is going to be “you should ask in channel xyz”. (And yes, in that public channel I am likely to be the one who answers it, but not always, and it’s now visible for other people who also need to know - the exact problem you were so proud of solving!)
The best Slack culture I ever saw also had a strict “No DMs” policy. All discussions had to take place in public or semi-public channels. DMs were reserved for “hey you’re missing standup” or similarly trivial stuff.
> 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.
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.
A slightly different viewpoint is that sharing in public or larger private channels allows for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Sometimes the key person is wrong because they aren't the only one working on something. I know that ego might get in people's way sometimes but other people in the team and in the organization also have valid perspectives. As a manager, its important to try and get to a best solution and that means collaboration, not a specific person's approach all the time.
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 like this post. It has the right balance between uncomfortable reality and some humour!
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).
That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting".
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."
Ouch, my wife has encountered almost exactly that in a recent brush with a biotech company that seems to have been infected by FAANG expats. She was advised that any kind of sidebar conversation is a faux pas.
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?
This is why so few people have loyalty to a job. Managements role appears to be simply killing all individuality and fun in the workplace.
"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.
This is the difference between a good idea and the implementation.
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.
yep, also doscoverability is not an issue with Slack. You can find most things with a search, people typically don't go scrolling through a channel to find something.
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-…
> search still can't a.) rank the alert bot that is just spamming the alerts channel as "not relevant"
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.
Yes - not only is Slack search underpowered, but also records management folks are likely to configure pruning of Slack content older than a couple years or so. This is IME less likely to be a problem with wiki pages.
Oof. From a manager’s perspective why don’t you focus on getting this information being in place for your team so that they are productive? You could feed that content into a platform the is searchable, categorized and part of onboarding. Utilize utilities that will automate collecting information, rather than discouraging learning.
Focus on eliminating tribal knowledge, implementing a learning culture.
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!"
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.
FWIW it's not something I asked anyone to do. The practice started organically and continues to exist because everyone created their own channel and kept going with it.
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.
As a CEO 'manager' myself, I try to let people just be. Getting too granular about person vs. topic and redirecting people to the right room sucks the fun out of everything. Let people mess up and post in the wrong place, who cares?
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.
We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, maybe I’m small-minded, but if someone I’m not familiar with, say a new hire asks a question way beneath their presumed experience level I’m absolutely gonna judge, judgement free be damned; and if they’re my report I’m gonna question the hiring (in my mind). There’s no shortage of imposters in the industry, most of them who’re capable of landing jobs above them are probably also smart enough to scoff at pure fantasy like “judgement free zone”.
Having spent a long time in tech and worked with a lot of people I've realised there are two sorts of people who are "imposters". There are those who have BS'd their way up and are in a role where they're out of their depth, and there are those who were lucky to have landed a role that's a bit beyond them (often because they have deep experience elsewhere.)
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.
There's no such thing as a judgment free zone when humans are involved :-)
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.
I'm a tech lead and I also tried to encourage the judgement free zone on the devs channel. I do this by intentionally asking question that I should know the answer to but don't as I just never got around to figuring it out as I have 16k other things to worry about. So rather than spend 2 hours chasing something down, I just ask. I know that this is a question a lot of juniors can answer. I avoid people thinking I am dumb by also taking time to answer the more technical questions and posting architecture and optimizations on the same channel.
This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.
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.
> It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.
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.
I’m on board with the overall point, though I’d actually flip the logic in this section:
> 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.
As a senior judgement is a real problem as others have suggested. I suspect its a reason why AI is popular. I can ask those dumb questions I should know without embarrassing myself by asking someone, or even worse put it in writing with my name on it.
This is also known as "driving your kids to school."
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.
Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never
* 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.
I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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.
Re-reading your own message should definitely be a bell for you to notice either your lack of trust in others and/or your twisted perspective that work is the goal of life.
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.
I’m neutral on this topic between you and GP, but I do think you’re discounting the fact that distrust can be legitimate. You’re assuming that we should trust blindly, it seems.
I don't think they're discounting that distrust can be legitimate, they're questioning whether it's useful to distrust somebody when it's not your job to micromanage them or they're providing adequate output.
Same here, I'll be fine, then bang I start getting like shiney sharp lines in my vision that spread from the outside to the center. When this happens I absolutely can't work, I can barely see anything (last time my vision was so messed up I couldn't read the pamthlet on my new migraine pills to know if I was to take 1 or 2).
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".
I have always had a hard time convincing people that I don’t have a headache, I have a migraine. The pain is not guaranteed, but I am still useless.
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.
> 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.
Interesting. When I do not feel up to the task of working, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or arbitrary cause, I use one of my provided PTO days and email the team a short "I will not be showing up to work today" message, without explaining the cause.
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 even use a PTO day if I’m just feeling “blah” as long as I’m available via Slack to answer questions and can attend ad-hoc meetings. There are so many times I’ve had to/chosen to work late, I don’t say anything.
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.
It's because the GP doesn't value you as a person or trust you. In that worldview, you cannot allow any autonomy and all time not spent at work must be tightly regulated. It will also spill in other areas, and you can bet the GP is not well liked by their colleagues.
If someone you work with and you otherwise trust e.g. with your code, servers, and business, says they are feeling under the weather, why should you not assume they are not telling the truth?
Especially as it’s obviously not a lie. A lie would be like, their 7th grandma to die or something. Saying you just feel under the weather is… exactly what someone who was just feeling under the weather and didn’t want to lie about it would say.
It’s that kind of controlling and judgmental mentality of that makes corporate employment so toxic, you are constantly in an adversarial environment where someone believes they have some cause to judge others. He says “I’m suspicious of anyone who says I’m under the weather” as if he had any ethical or moral cause to be so, a right to be controlling over others’ lives.
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.
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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 do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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.
It used to be common to say you're taking a "mental health day", which was a recognition that while maybe you were not physically ill (or were, just not in a way anyone else had to worry about or to an extent that you couldn't make it to the office), you were not in a state to contribute meaningfully to the work being done.
Which is fine. And better than the people who show up no matter what and drag others down by being miserable and making mistakes.
We shouldn’t make extra room for parents, we should just create a society where everybody has enough free time to handle kids. People without kids can enjoy their other outside work stuff.
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'm okay with parents getting more perks and time to deal with their kids.
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.
IMO it would be better to subsidize this at the government level than the employer level.
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?)
I don’t think it is a can of worms really; making special negative cases for subsets of the population is a can of poop! There’s nothing so complicated as a worm in there.
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
I will give you an easy answer: The person might have mental health issues (depression or anxiety) that they do not want to share. I use them from time to time to sleep a bit late just for the hell of it.
I get 3 weeks of sick time. While I rarely take more than a week, most of the time that sick day is because I am just sick of work and need a day. I never say why I'm sick, I just say, taking a sick day today.
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.
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.
You've added two conditions not present in the original comment.
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...
Given you're suspicious about these people and the way you talk about them, they are most likely well aware that you're on a fishing trip feigning interest.
People like you are always more transparent than you realise.
Apologies if it wasn't clear, I am a different person to the one you replied to, and am not suspicious - I was commenting on the other person's suspicion and indeed said that it wasn't normal.
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
One of the benefits (to me) of going remote is I'm sick a heck of a lot less often! In fact, I don't think I've even had a cold or upper respiratory infection since I started remote, where I used to get colds at least once a month, likely due to being in close concentration of other sick people in the office. Touching door handles everywhere to get from office to office, touching elevator buttons, eating together with 100 other people in the office cafeteria... yuck! Now that I'm remote, I'm in my hermetically sealed home office, and I can go weeks without even seeing another person, let alone touching things they touched and breathing their air.
> But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious
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.
I might not exactly be the benchmark for this but for the entirety of preschool and then the first 4 years of primary school I went in for a week and took 2 weeks of what I would now call sick leave. Left me with a heart disease and a real scare for what I should do if I ever have kids to avoid this happening to them.
Suspicious that it's probably a massive hangover rather than "a cold". And I assume it's during the week, otherwise noone but your liver cares what you do on a Friday or Saturday evening.
"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.
> "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.
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.
Yeah, children bring home all sorts of vile stuff that'll knock you out for a day. And sometimes, it'll just be something random. This morning I had - let's call it "digestive distress" to avoid describing the horrors - that would have definitely meant I wouldn't be able to work if it were a weekday, but I think I'm over it now, and I'll be showing up tomorrow just fine.
> So many reasons why you might be sick for one day.
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've been sick so often now (thanks kids) that I can feel _immediately_ when something is coming on. Rather than be down and useless at home and work for 2 or 3 more days, I tag out, go to bed and usually knock it out in a night. I feel like that's way better for me and everyone else overall.
Maybe they have heavy period cramps (see also endometriosis). Maybe they just need a break (taking a "mental health day" is encouraged by some employers). Maybe they have a cold, which means they will feel crappy for a day; speaking for myself, I can power through one of those but it would probably be better to take the day and rest up instead of powering through which may make the cold last longer. Maybe they had a vaccination, I know the covid shot hit me pretty hard.
Anyway, over-announcing is good; take away the stigma of calling in sick or taking time for yourself/your family.
Countries with a (still capitalist) social support system manage this with parents' time off; the mother and father can request a significant amount of paid time off, which is separate to the government mandated 20 or so days per year of paid vacation, and it essentially can't be denied.
Before you say it'll be exploited; the largest economy in Europe does this and it works wonderfully, and so do many others.
I am mostly onsite, but I am careful to watch for exactly this kind of behaviour from mostly remote staff. If I see it, they are moved to the bottom of my "inner card deck" of people to help, as they basically are never helpful as teammates.
One of the best parts of my day is to put on my straw cowboy hat on, no shirt and walk around the block at around 10am to get some raw sunlight on the body. No phone just walk around.
I can also vouch for this. Going to the park near my house to walk for 30 mins is great just for the sake of getting out the house and moving my body when I'm feeling anxious. It does wonders for me. Important part to is that I walk for as little or as long as I want, no guilt or shame, no expectations.
I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post. Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
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.
Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)
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.
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.
Better off Ted was sadly canceled way too early. Part of me wishes a streaming service would pick it up for a revival, but I know the monkey's paw there would be that it would be subverted by precisely the sort of corporation it set out to lampoon.
I think that was the first R rated movie I saw as a child (and probably the first movie I pirated, on pre-P2P networks). The grand wisdom of the Geto Boys (sic) has stuck with me ever since.
"The type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do [care about money]"
I've gotten way off topic
I've fotgotten: Did Napster eventually open up to sharing videos and software after MP3s? I can't remember if I'm just conflating it with memories of Kazaa (I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time, my memory is fuzzy lol). I know I got addicted to pirating and filesharing after being introduced to Hotline at an even younger age.
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.
Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.
When I told them the movie came out before they were born, yet depict their life damn near exactly as they were living it, their enlightenment lit the room anew hah.
> I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post
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)
Lol yep. Our company decided “sprints” were now to last 4 weeks, but there’s also no task scheduling, no retro, no sprint planning… just tasks get given whenever they come up based on what they feel like.
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.
The weird practices worked as reported, but as an accident of the context where they arose. Outside that, they're about as robust as really rare orchids, which I think to their credit the authors realized, hence all the "don't take our word for it!" with which they hedged around their wildly bestselling school of management consultancy.
I like to say that the outwardly visible practices and processes of highly effective teams are mostly symptoms, not causes of their success. You can't invert the causal relationship.
Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".
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.
Same idea as rubber-duck debugging or just explaining things to someone else. The work of translating the idea forces your mind to marshal and walk the structures from a fresh angle and you can gain insights that were lacking.
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.
Off topic, 10 years ago, I hated confluence and wanted my team to be able to continue using DokuWiki.
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.
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
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."
Nothing in this post suggests any kind of expectation, mandate, or obligation to post anything in any kind of channel.
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.
They say something about posting 3 times a week. Even if it’s not a formal obligation, it’ll certainly feel like one if they notice you never post whilst other people do.
it's pretty interesting to see this discrepancy in response to this idea
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"
> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
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)
Agreed, it’s one of those things that works well if it happens organically but not as a policy. I’ve got a personal wiki at work where I dump a bunch of useful stuff, it has helped people and attracted attention which is nice. I think the easiest solution is to have longer-form team meetings once a week.
I think the pos tog having a designated spot is to remove friction. Otherwise you can gummed up trying to decide where to post: “is this worth bothering the team? Maybe I should just message my friend? Or should I just bring it up in the next standup? Or maybe the retro…”
I'll add on to this that per-user channels could work well in teams where everyone is comfortable sharing, but could be absolutely paralyzing in other situations.
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.
Overlooked in this recap is a telling line from later in the article:
> 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.
Or they're just async standups, except less accessible since OP uses separate, exclusive channels instead of threads within a single shared channel.
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.
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.
Not me, a coworkers parents live in the coastal areas of our country and they grow olives and make homemade oliveoil (traditional processes), so yeah, when they make a batch, it's worth buying :)
Hack Club, the largest Slack instance I’ve ever been a part of, has a culture of personal channels and it is incredibly organic and fun. It’s largely restricted to students under 18, though!
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.
There is a kind of leader that's threatened when they don't control communication. In these cases, random thought bombs on slack feel like chaos. Like people are going in random directions not rowing together. I don't think this is true of course -- people are just sharing inspiration and ideas. But in some places / cultures just rambling on slack can be dangerous and put a target on your back. You can be labeled as "distracting" by these leaders that feel threatened / worried about the perception the team is not executing on their marching orders.
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.
This is true because it has happened to me. I was at a place where there was a very ingrained hierarchy in the culture where people were afraid to ask questions in public (slack), to discuss problems and solutions, because the "leaders" were so thin-skinned, doing anything outside of being ticket-solving machines was seen as wholly objectionable.
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.
Most people, myself included, cannot thrive in a culture of fear and control. I think what you did is the best way to handle it. Do the right thing and surrender to the outcome. Like you, I was happier that way.
Happened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats.
Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.
> Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment.
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.
Ah, yes. The control freak. However control freaking has more problems than this. I'm thinking bus factor = 1 unless team tries to solve problems for themselves but hiding it from the control freak
Also crawling exhaustion and burnout, later coming frustration and unrealisticly high standards for oneself and others. Hmm, why am I starting to describe myself...
> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk.
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’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.
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.
Although it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place.
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.
I’m not anti social by any means. Part of my job has been flying out to talk to customers, the business dinners, helping sells to close deals (I’m more of the post sales architect), etc.
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.
I would hope so that scheduled meetings would not translate to water cooler talk. I want to talk about the agenda and not some smalltalk. People tried crazy things during covid to replicate the water cooler talk through remote tools. If we can have some laughs together about the agenda, that's what i like. People are different i guess.
I usually ask people if they are open to a coffee talk. Just 15 minutes each month. Some people talk about their personal life, others talk about what's on their mind with regards to this and that work project. It‘s interesting how different people are. I‘m fine with any of those topics - I value the interaction more than the content.
We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team.
It helps a LOT.
We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.
We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.
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.
group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted
Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:
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
And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
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.
> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
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.
They call from their desks. Just like people did in the not so "old days." Back when I was a product manager I spent a good part of my day on the phone in my cubicle.
the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it
I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).
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.
> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak
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?
Discord is designed like this, because there is no special "presenter" or "organizer" and all participants are equal. Everyone can present simultaneously and you can mute individual speakers for yourself and not everyone else.
The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.
Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks
I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this
(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).
Felt like a few dozen toys and a handful of startups all came up with this same solution during 2020-21 as next-big-things and Zoom still came out on top for so many other reasons
> just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.
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.
This is how group conversations happen in person at an office too. I think it's fine, and everybody has reported feeling more connected / less isolated during our periodic polls since we started doing it.
I would honestly hate that so much. A meeting at the wrong time throws out half the day’s momentum and work is hard to get done. A _socially draining_ meeting? Forget 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.
I have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.
The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.
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 cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.
The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
That will last until the first person shares a link to their rambling channel or the first time a pair of team members discuss something at standup that only appeared in someone’s ramblings channel.
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.
But you still know they are there, and that your colleagues should perceive you as at least casually interested in what the others are up to. Even if muted, these channels inevitably become another liability.
I think everyone knows and silently understands that the people responding/emoji-ing in those channels all day every day are doing so at the cost of work output, and that there are a lot of people working that aren't typing away about the last audiobook they listened to. I think you've created a stressful situation out of something that isn't inherently stressing.
Generating business value is not your only responsibility, though. Most companies expect you to be a team player, to stay in touch, to communicate across departments, and so on.
So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.
Yeah. It's either channels that you actively engage with or you effectively block. For active communication purposes the "you might see it" in-between option isn't really very effective. It happens anyway to some degree. But isn't ideal.
Slack will turn them a muted colour, and they'll only get an unread indication if you're explicitly pinged by default, but I think you can turn even that off too.
I love using the unreads thing in slack while I'm brushing my teeth or waiting for my tea maker to finish. Tinder for work spam. Everything is processed as quickly as possible, into either "to-do" or "done/ignore"
Slack isn't really an organized way to do organizational knowledge or communication.
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.
Huh, just realised my team did this organically without realising it. People were often hesitant to ask questions they perceived as 'dumb' in the group chat, and definitely unwilling to post anything seen as complaining/moaning about problems. We created a second chat without any managers in it, with a description clarifying it was a dumping ground for questions and comments that didn't fit in other chats. It sees a small but steady flow of use, mostly questions that people probably should know, but can't remember the answer/process of the top of their head, and the occasional slightly less-than-professional complaint or criticism about a service/tool/process. My favourite part is that I can actually discuss things in there - in the main chat, once the question is answered/problem is solved, if we keep chatting about it it's seen as clutter/distraction. I think it's beneficial to have an outlet for these things.
I always ask the "dumb" questions, even when I already know the answer, because there are always people too intimidated to speak up, and it sometimes facilitates a deeper discussion.
It also gives you cover to ask questions that reveal politically inconvenient truths: you can pretend you had no idea that answer would pop out of it.
(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.)
It took me too long in my career to feel comfortable asking the dumb questions. I would have had a much easier time if I had just asked them. I eventually learned to ask dumb questions when I made a friend who was never afraid to ask then, and it was amazing how quickly he learned.
I strongly agree with the title but the prescribed details are not to my taste.
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.
I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code).
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.
In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.
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.
It depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.
After watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better. Even now there are people I will screenshot any DMs that have even a hint of conflict. I doubt I will ever participate in any work chats in a social way again.
There's a distinction between random (probably not for work, 'water cooler chat') and 'obviously divisive' topics like politics. Particularly in the US, those are the sort of things you avoid.
Must depend on the company/office. My team (200+ people) has a "offtopic/socialize" chat channel set up for this kind of rando chit chat, and it has never, not once in many years, even had a hint of divisiveness or politics. Yes, you do need to be working with grownups who can behave and leave that shit at home.
Thanks for that link. Wow, what a wild story. I agree with the top commenter: It looks like the company was composed entirely of children or adults with child-like communication skills/habits!
Huh? Thats just not true. We have channels for gamers, pets, golf, home automation, “lounge”, “memes”, etc. I’ve been at this company 4 years and can only thing if 3 times I’ve seen a dispute, and even that was very civil. It’s really not hard to leave politics at home.
Never do casual conversation on the record. It's always going to result in this kind of stuff. If you want to get to know your coworkers, go out to lunch with them or chat face to face. That way you can limit exactly who is listening, gauge the response. And anything you say will be lost to time.
Obviously you can still get in trouble if you say something very inappropriate, but anything middle of the road will be forgotten.
This type of writing down ideas and half-thoughts is useful even if you work alone. Thoughts are very fleeting, the instant you put them to paper (or bits) they materialize and it becomes much easier to evolve them.
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 stuff those in my logBook nowadays - a single ascii text file. Started as you say with notes on random scraps of paper. To relieve my mind of carrying that burden, when I have something more pressing to do. But yeah these half-thoughts, intuits etc have showed useful over time? Some made it into TODO, and latter even into the DONE entries. Even if mostly their final destination is DONTDO. :-)
I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that would just ruin this. The entire channel would be just be walls of his text. It's hard enough just to understand his wall of text emails that have a big report embedded somewhere in it.
Thank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic.
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 used to work for a small company, and I'd sometimes write short essays about things in general. It was rarely even related to programming, but people seemed to love that. Then I switched to corporate and I quickly understood to shut up because whenever I say something, someone might get upset over it for whatever reason and then it's going to be a problem.
I am actually surprised that people weren't upset over it in the startup side since a cousin of mine worked in a startup and he said that they were pretty immature and frankly "unprofessional"
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 what things like "water cooler chat" looks like for remote-first.
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.
It also shows that remote work requires work to work out. You simply cannot bump into your colleagues, so socializing needs to be planned. On a small scale, a regular coffee talk might work. But I love the idea of this being more of a "pull". Like, everyone can consume it at their own pace.
We’ve got a similar but different approach at work of having assorted channels that are around non-work topics. DIY, cooking, music, etc. It’s not quite the same as a water cooler, and we augment this with regular get togethers, but it does help give everyone a glimpse into people’s wider lives.
> Each ramblings channel should be named after the team member, and only that person can post top-level messages. Others can reply in threads, but not start new ones.
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.
I am conscious of double posting, and bumping other people's messages off of the page too soon. If I'm posting too much I get annoyed at myself on behalf of other people. So that would be a big plus of these channels to me.
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.
Common channels can also work nice, but sometimes there is a vocal few who absolutely dominates them, and then the other people won't participate at all. The idea in TFA is to everyone have their own channel, where others cannot start a topic, so they don't stifle those who communicate less.
The reason it's analogous to water-cooler talk for each person to have their own channel is because when you go to get some water, and see other coworkers milling about, you're going to know which coworker you're interested in talking to, who often has interesting insights, who might have something interesting going on in their personal life that you'd like to hear more about. So, in the absence of a common meeting space, you can go check out the channels of people you're interested in, and scroll through to see if they've got anything interesting going on in their life.
I’ve been working remotely for YC startups for the past 3.5+ years, and I completely agree. I went from being the quietest person in the room to someone who often ends up rambling on most calls. Remote work has not only given me the space to speak my mind - and sometimes even find answers to my own questions - but also the opportunity to learn so much from my colleagues.
No - focus on communication that adds value to your company and your career. Don't get sucked into distractions. Spend your time aligning yourself with projects, ideas, people etc that will boost your career
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
This reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked.
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.
This post talks about remote but I will generalize beyond remote.
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!
> - 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.
> Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO.
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.
This is formally/legally a work break that you’re not allowed to count as work time. If I have a half-hour conversation about a non-work topic, which I sometimes do, it means I’ll need to work half an hour more. At the office it’s effectively at everyone’s discretion how exactly they count it, but on a chat platform it can in principle be tracked if someone spends substantial time on #offtopic.
Legal definitions vary country to country: I wouldn't be so quick to insist on some universal definition. I'm pretty sure you're wrong about US law there - docking someone's pay for "chatting" sounds extremely difficult to defend.
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.
I’m not in the US, so that may be right. In my view this is more about how the employee feels about it: I don’t want to get into a dispute whether the half hour a day I spent on the rambling channel counts as work or not. For that it makes a significant difference if people use the channel to discuss their hobbies or whether they discuss work-related ideas. I also don’t want to miss the work-related topics just because I’m not interested in the hobby discussions.
In my country, we are allowed an half an hour break that is not deducible from your work time. It is expected that you need to take breaks in a 8h or 8h24 shift and you are free to decide if you want to take one long one or several shorter ones. Also going into the bathroom is not deducted, even if one day you need 15 minutes to take a proper dump or another day you have stomach issues and need to go more often.
bottom line: YMMV. check your local laws and/or collective agreements.
Where rambling might not have a positive connotation, imagining them as "musing" channels seemed to resonate.
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.
They had these at BigCorp I worked at. Anyone can make a channel like #x-gardner and then people can join that channel if they choose. The way that you find them organically is by searching the chat app for some random thing that you are interested in and then finding a few people discussing it in an X channel.
It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.
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.
I think it is significant that this rambling channel supplements the yearly in-person meeting. Presumably, that's where one tends to form deeper social connections and get a feel for what different people find interesting to talk about? That is, if the team is varied enough so that there is little overlap in hobby interests or daily life.
I worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break.
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
I agree. Group channels on relevant topics is very helpful. Especially on technical details relevant to getting work done.
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’m also an old guy at 51. I have been in cloud consulting for the last five+ years and I’m perfectly capable of leading large projects remotely.
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.
The channels I'm talking about weren't about work, they were about hobbies - biking, cars, cats. I found that interaction quite fun and actually much better than in-person chats because I could choose to interact at my pace and comfort level.
I've tried to create or revive a watercooler channel in every remote company I've worked in last 10 years. For some reason it usually doesn't work. Some people don't needed it, some people just call each other and vent out privately. I miss watercooler talk.
TBH one of the best part of watercooler talk was the limited range (only the people who're there) and no trace of the exchange (all verbal)
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.
At my work place we have a meeting on friday afternoon. It was initially a meeting dedicated to quick knowledge transfer or helping out a member of a team who needs help on a particular topic but is also used to chit chat a bit before wishing everyone a nice weekend. We don't do transcript nor recording of these.
We had watercooler meetings some at remote companies I worked at, but yeah they usually don't really work. One problem is that the stream always attenuates to one person (which is good in normal meetings to not pick up too much random background noise), but it completely kills spontaneity. Also, there are always people with horrendous mic quality or background noise.
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.
Venting privately is usually a symptom of bad management. Employees feel that they can't discuss any grievance publicly, for whatever reason, and so choose more careful means of communication
For one of my small-biz clients, I could use what the author outlines - restrictions and all (if I'm an outlier, is fine).
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.
This sounds like Twitter for Enterprises - how about setting up a local instance of Bluesky or Mastodon or one of those? People can then follow whomever they want to and the rest of us can continue not being interested in that sort of thing.
Or if you use M365 then Viva Engage/Yammer can be great!
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
I put my work ramblings in daily journal notes in Markdown files in a git repository. Unfortunately, I don't spend the time to then ensure that they're accessible to my co-workers - and given the amount of value that I would get if they did that, I should do it myself.
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.
Try using a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo with GitHub Pages to automatically publish your Markdown ramblings - minimal setup, preserves your workflow, and gives teammates a simple URL to bookmark.
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).
We did something like that on a private Minecraft server 15 years ago, where everybody was required to have an identi.ca account for this server (status.net, like mastodon today). All messages appeared posted to the walls of a large library building in the middle of the world and people could post to their accounts from the ingame chat.
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've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.
At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication
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
I would hate this. More than the commute, the reason I hated in office work are the constant interruptions. Now when I need to do “deep work”, I turn off Slack, email etc and block off my calendar.
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…
> when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too.
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.
At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use is my own chat, with my own Name, where i post links that mostly can catch my interests and use for future reference.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
Why would I? It is boring and adds no value. Much better to work instead. If I need something, I ask. If people need something from me, they ask. I think the biggest increas in productivity for me was when we banned chatting and moved all communication to email. The amount of distractions was reduced significantly!
A post encouraging more performative behavior at work, as if there wasn't enough already. By the way, my scrum update is yesterday I was mostly in meetings.
"My scrum update is: I spent all day in meetings" can be both true and performative. We don't care what your meetings were about, so you're performing the "meetings are a waste of my time" geek trope. For comparison you wouldn't say "I spent all day at a desk" you'd say "I fixed a race condition" or "I designed the Foo service". You might say "I spent all day driving" and not "I drove 50 miles on I40 and waited 20 minutes at junctions", because the details of driving are unimportant. But presumably the people asking for your update do care about the work being discussed in meetings and want to know things about them.
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.
> Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about?
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.
The performance isn't there, it's here. Why is that person telling HN "my update is: I spent all day in meetings"? What value or contribution or discussion does it serve on HN in a topic about rambling while being remote?
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"?
Long back, I used to set up P2 for teams, inspired by WordPress’s theme-based personal/team updates. The current theme seem to have changed over time but the early versions where tweet-ish kinda flow of events which people/team wrote.
Love this idea for 2-10 person orgs, but it really doesn't scale.
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?
> Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels.
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.
I like having an #offtopic and #thoughts channel for not worrying about burying important info in. If something meaningful happens it'll get captured, otherwise it serves to connect and relate.
In each of these activities you listed, you know it's for yourself only. The case described in the post is very different: it suggests rambling in a place where others are, but just don't care about what you say.
A social channel seperate from work stuff is good. It lets you post the messages that otherwise be "oh won't post that as it'll bother 20 people who meed to decide if it's urgent"
This doesn't work top well with teammates who don't like to write to communicate, which is a surprising amount of people around me. (I'm the only one who writes tech docs)
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?
We had this, but they were called journal channels. It worked great cause I always have something to say but it's not worth putting in a shared channel.
I feel that part of what I’m paid for is to structure those ramblings into clear communications to be shared at the right time in the right meeting or channel.
I really cannot imagine working remote full-time, it sounds so depressing. We already don't go to church or bars or movies or clubs anymore. Work is one of the few remaining places to interact with other humans.
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.
People are different. I have been fully remote for 5 years after 5 in-office, so I've seen both.
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.
People are different. I worked around 1.5 years on fully remote gig and it was the best time of my life ever.
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.
Sure. At that time, I was in my early 20s and I was single. Currently married and one small kiddo. And I'd argue that I'd easily take 1/3 pay cut to go back from my current hybrid job to full remote right now. Days are so much easier for both of us when I'm working from home. Being able to quickly go afk and change a diaper, or take care of the kiddo for 10 mins when mommy takes a dump (real life heh) is incredibly valuable.
Did I claim that someone was stopping me from doing those things? My point was that traditional gathering formats that are conducive to community-forming are diminishing. It's not a matter of an individual choosing not to participate.
Yea, different strokes for different folks. Since going remote, I now have the choice about if, where, and when to interact with other people, and who those people should be. If I want to go two weeks without seeing another person (IRL, not counting video conference), I can do it. If I want to go out and socialize, I have 4 formerly-commuting hours back every day that I can use to do so.
No thanks. One of the best parts of going remote is letting your work truly speak for itself to a much broader audience. This would have been impossible in person.
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.
In my experience, these kind of channels end up being filled with complaints about the company/processes/managers/c-levels… (ofc, managers are not invited to these private channels)
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.
Good point. You do need to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about anything, But it shouldn’t just become an endless complaint loop about the company.
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.
> All the ramblings channels should be in a Ramblings section at the bottom of the channel list. They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them.
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.
This is so anglo-saxon to be individual channels for ramblings. We have group wide channel. It's supposed to be social - no pressure to post. Lurkers welcome. Just share. Naturally, some are more talkative than others. The idea is to foster a group/social culture - not have atomized diaries about individuals.
Every place I’ve been to has a dedicated “random” or “off topic” channel and it’s where all the good team building happens. There are usually a few more narrow channels for specific topics (video games, music, pets, food, etc) which can help if there are big personalities that dominate a channel.
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.
struggling to create the organic interactions you had in-person? Here's a reomte process you can mandate and measure to ensure everyone is casually interacting in the correct, company-approved way!
"Well, Mike, let's talk performance: your code is good, you get along well with your teammates, but you just haven't been rambling enough in the rambling channel. So unfortunately I'm going to have to put you on a PIP. If we don't see an improvement to at least 3 ramblings per week, further action may be taken, up to and including termination. Sorry it has to be this way, but we've got KPIs to hit."
Channels should also include a #roast-the-product channel which encourages harsh, direct but valid criticism of the product (NOT people / feature authors etc).
It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.
I think perhaps counter intuitively this harms the team spirit. Those things still get voiced in chat threads and more importantly in 1:1 calls/chats, allowing individuals to bond more intimately over non strictly project related things.
I have a whole private discord server with multiple channels just for this, for my personal projects. Yes yes, walled garden and all, I know. But it's incredibly useful even though I'm the only one in there.
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.
I hate this idea. If I have an idea I think we should implement when I was a mod level developer [1] and had to get buy in for it, I would think it through and ask for a coworkers opinion, take their suggestions, and then keep reaching out to who I thought would be my toughest critics until I got their buy in.
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.
We used to have something very similar with our office coffee machine – spontaneous 1‑2 minute chats while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it was just, “Sorry, can’t talk, swamped right now,” and the other person would rush off – but even that told you something.
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.
There are certain things in life that are meant to be unstructured and spontaneous. The moment you try to sandbox them they tend to devolve into noise which then calls for more structure or "rules", it's a slippery slope. If you're remote, you can always start a huddle and talk while you work, or if talking is not your thing, a good old DM can work. If you're worried about noise or things getting lost, you can always move the work related things into their own channel as they come up. Just 2 cents.
If you want your remote teams to have increased cohesion you need to fly them all to the same location (at company expense, only during weekdays) multiple times per year and give them the opportunity to actually get to know each other.
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.
This is unreadable. Increase the contrast, please...
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.
It was unreadable for me too initially. Quick guesstimate:
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.
Maybe there is some
technical issue for you regarding the automatic switch between light and dark mode. Under normal circumstances, it is perfectly readable.
Just saw your imgur. That is broken, yeah. The text should have a far more darker color. As another commenter pointed out, maybe there is an issue with the Javascript on this page.
Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".
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.
> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".
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.
Always funny to see these sort of missed connections on HN.
> 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
From my personal experience, internal Wikis are 90+% written by about 5% of the workforce. The vast majority of internal Wiki users are "read-only". That is fine. Really: Read that twice. It is OK that the vast majority of docs are written by the few who are highly motivated to do it. When I write for an internal Wiki, I am trying to reduce the number of future questions that people will ask me. If they do come with a question, my first answer is always: Did you search our Wiki? It only takes once or twice for them to change.
Appreciate the answer, I do think that is a good perspective.
I'm not sure it's really cynical at all, in my experience, even with a LOT of wiki documentation, it is almost always severely out of date and many people don't know what is where... after a while, there's new, new, new versions of docs because people didn't want to refactor existing docs someone else created. And, in the end, almost nobody reads it and just ask other, more senior people within the team/org.
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.
But the non-premiere companies also do not hire the talent that is capable of doing this (and that might be fine, they might not really need that specific talent).
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 rather likely to get worse.
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.
Internal blog is another thing, but indeed related to chat. Once we figured some techical thing out, I often put it under "personal blog" on wiki under something like ~marek/date-slug. (I'm actually quite upset about jira removing slug from the url and replacing it with random number, this makes url completion much worse. I often titled the wikis funny/witty to make it easier to remember and find)
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:
Total 784 over 11 years.I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and 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.
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.
A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.
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.
IMO, the greatest force multiplier in onboarding is automation... How many user interactive steps does a dev need to walk through to get up and running?
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.
Heavily seconding the “setup script” method for anything that can be scripted in lieu of documentation and handholding. I’ve done this at multiple companies and it proved valuable. Even if it eventually breaks it’s easy to fix, and it’s usually pretty self-documenting, so anyone who’s even a little curious what’s going on, they have access to all the “secrets” of how it’s being done (and can also improve it).
> 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
Isn’t the GP describing exactly that?
This is a great comment. Thanks.
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.
OTOH I hugely appreciate my manager who makes a conscious effort to direct people to ask questions in public channels and not just ping “hey” in my DMs all day. And it saves them time too, because my response is going to be “you should ask in channel xyz”. (And yes, in that public channel I am likely to be the one who answers it, but not always, and it’s now visible for other people who also need to know - the exact problem you were so proud of solving!)
The best Slack culture I ever saw also had a strict “No DMs” policy. All discussions had to take place in public or semi-public channels. DMs were reserved for “hey you’re missing standup” or similarly trivial stuff.
> 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.
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.
A slightly different viewpoint is that sharing in public or larger private channels allows for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Sometimes the key person is wrong because they aren't the only one working on something. I know that ego might get in people's way sometimes but other people in the team and in the organization also have valid perspectives. As a manager, its important to try and get to a best solution and that means collaboration, not a specific person's approach all the time.
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.
"WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. YOUR UNIQUENESS WILL BE ADDED TO OUR COLLECTIVE. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."
It does feel a bit like that fighting institutional pressure to "optimise efficiency" and "reduce individual dependence".
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
I like this post. It has the right balance between uncomfortable reality and some humour!
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).
Thanks, the humour helps keep the melancholy at bay.
Agreed, you never want to be the one holding no secrets when the music stops.
> Maybe there should be an option to... move conversation threads across channels?
I believe Zulip can do this, but Zulip is not really favored in these parts
That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting".
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."
The worst manager I ever had literally told the team off for discussing things in a 1:1 setting, it was wild.
Ouch, my wife has encountered almost exactly that in a recent brush with a biotech company that seems to have been infected by FAANG expats. She was advised that any kind of sidebar conversation is a faux pas.
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?
Probably cargo culting from companies with 50k+ employees (where minor friction for one is way outweighed by more availability for all).
I've found the best way to kill a conversation is to point out the appropriate place the conversation should have started.
More productive, on both counts, is to move the conversation to that channel.
That is, don't put the burden on the initiating party, but also don't continue the dark-channel discussion.
This is why so few people have loyalty to a job. Managements role appears to be simply killing all individuality and fun in the workplace.
"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.
This is the difference between a good idea and the implementation.
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.
yep, also doscoverability is not an issue with Slack. You can find most things with a search, people typically don't go scrolling through a channel to find something.
What a Poe's Law of a comment.
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-…
> search still can't a.) rank the alert bot that is just spamming the alerts channel as "not relevant"
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.
Yes - not only is Slack search underpowered, but also records management folks are likely to configure pruning of Slack content older than a couple years or so. This is IME less likely to be a problem with wiki pages.
People start by searching within a channel, especially when terms are vague or frequently used.
Oof. From a manager’s perspective why don’t you focus on getting this information being in place for your team so that they are productive? You could feed that content into a platform the is searchable, categorized and part of onboarding. Utilize utilities that will automate collecting information, rather than discouraging learning.
Focus on eliminating tribal knowledge, implementing a learning culture.
This is a terrible suggestion, please ignore it.
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!"
> from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid
I'd rather avoid the manager's perspective.
yeah, total buzzkill.
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.
The blog post is from a manager’s perspective. It’s a manager explaining what they had their employees do.
FWIW it's not something I asked anyone to do. The practice started organically and continues to exist because everyone created their own channel and kept going with it.
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.
As a CEO 'manager' myself, I try to let people just be. Getting too granular about person vs. topic and redirecting people to the right room sucks the fun out of everything. Let people mess up and post in the wrong place, who cares?
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.
> doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability
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.
> I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.
These just become apologetics channels. Not productive.
> I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel.
What if it is a specific technical question but does not clearly belong to a specific project?
We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.
>and they know it's a judgement free zone.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, maybe I’m small-minded, but if someone I’m not familiar with, say a new hire asks a question way beneath their presumed experience level I’m absolutely gonna judge, judgement free be damned; and if they’re my report I’m gonna question the hiring (in my mind). There’s no shortage of imposters in the industry, most of them who’re capable of landing jobs above them are probably also smart enough to scoff at pure fantasy like “judgement free zone”.
Having spent a long time in tech and worked with a lot of people I've realised there are two sorts of people who are "imposters". There are those who have BS'd their way up and are in a role where they're out of their depth, and there are those who were lucky to have landed a role that's a bit beyond them (often because they have deep experience elsewhere.)
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.
There's no such thing as a judgment free zone when humans are involved :-)
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.
In work and job markets like this.
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.
I'm a tech lead and I also tried to encourage the judgement free zone on the devs channel. I do this by intentionally asking question that I should know the answer to but don't as I just never got around to figuring it out as I have 16k other things to worry about. So rather than spend 2 hours chasing something down, I just ask. I know that this is a question a lot of juniors can answer. I avoid people thinking I am dumb by also taking time to answer the more technical questions and posting architecture and optimizations on the same channel.
This is going to depend a lot on culture.
This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.
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.
> It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.
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.
I’m on board with the overall point, though I’d actually flip the logic in this section:
> 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.
As a senior judgement is a real problem as others have suggested. I suspect its a reason why AI is popular. I can ask those dumb questions I should know without embarrassing myself by asking someone, or even worse put it in writing with my name on it.
And it still lives on today where we reposted this post!
Fwiw, Marek's technical corner still exists and still gets some activity.
I've noticed a trend in the last few years toward more and more DMs within our teams, and I really don't think it is a good thing.
An amazingly large number of questions are generally applicable, but it is really hard to maintain a culture that actively encourages that.
Not to be pedantic but I spent at least a solid minute trying to understand how you collaborated with a piece of artwork.
Then I realized you meant colleague.
;)
Not to mention, its how people bond...
I did read the post, but allow me to also recommend rambling when you’re remote.
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.
This is also known as "driving your kids to school."
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.
Ideally not driving, as the walk is at least half the benefit.
not to be confused with “dropping the kids off at the pool,” right?
No. That happens once you get to work and you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
How do you mean?
Dropping the kids off at the pool is a euphemism for a bodily function that diuretics like coffee help with…
You must not be a coffee drinker!
Double meaning. Coffee helps you deuce, but there is also the classic saying... Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.
Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never
* 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.
What you're describing is life, not slacking.
It sounds like those people have their priorities and you have yours. Personally, theirs sound much more sustainable than yours.
I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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.
Re-reading your own message should definitely be a bell for you to notice either your lack of trust in others and/or your twisted perspective that work is the goal of life.
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.
I’m neutral on this topic between you and GP, but I do think you’re discounting the fact that distrust can be legitimate. You’re assuming that we should trust blindly, it seems.
I don't think they're discounting that distrust can be legitimate, they're questioning whether it's useful to distrust somebody when it's not your job to micromanage them or they're providing adequate output.
I get migraines that can disappear as fast as they hit me. Can’t see, can’t feel my face and sometimes a limb, can’t focus or form sentences.
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”.
Same here, I'll be fine, then bang I start getting like shiney sharp lines in my vision that spread from the outside to the center. When this happens I absolutely can't work, I can barely see anything (last time my vision was so messed up I couldn't read the pamthlet on my new migraine pills to know if I was to take 1 or 2).
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".
I have always had a hard time convincing people that I don’t have a headache, I have a migraine. The pain is not guaranteed, but I am still useless.
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.
> 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.
Interesting. When I do not feel up to the task of working, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or arbitrary cause, I use one of my provided PTO days and email the team a short "I will not be showing up to work today" message, without explaining the cause.
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 even use a PTO day if I’m just feeling “blah” as long as I’m available via Slack to answer questions and can attend ad-hoc meetings. There are so many times I’ve had to/chosen to work late, I don’t say anything.
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.
It's because the GP doesn't value you as a person or trust you. In that worldview, you cannot allow any autonomy and all time not spent at work must be tightly regulated. It will also spill in other areas, and you can bet the GP is not well liked by their colleagues.
If someone you work with and you otherwise trust e.g. with your code, servers, and business, says they are feeling under the weather, why should you not assume they are not telling the truth?
Especially as it’s obviously not a lie. A lie would be like, their 7th grandma to die or something. Saying you just feel under the weather is… exactly what someone who was just feeling under the weather and didn’t want to lie about it would say.
It’s that kind of controlling and judgmental mentality of that makes corporate employment so toxic, you are constantly in an adversarial environment where someone believes they have some cause to judge others. He says “I’m suspicious of anyone who says I’m under the weather” as if he had any ethical or moral cause to be so, a right to be controlling over others’ lives.
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.
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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 do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
That's one reason people feel like they have to keep hiding it and it builds up to burnout.
>I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
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.
It used to be common to say you're taking a "mental health day", which was a recognition that while maybe you were not physically ill (or were, just not in a way anyone else had to worry about or to an extent that you couldn't make it to the office), you were not in a state to contribute meaningfully to the work being done.
Which is fine. And better than the people who show up no matter what and drag others down by being miserable and making mistakes.
We shouldn’t make extra room for parents, we should just create a society where everybody has enough free time to handle kids. People without kids can enjoy their other outside work stuff.
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'm okay with parents getting more perks and time to deal with their kids.
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.
IMO it would be better to subsidize this at the government level than the employer level.
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?)
Sure, it's better for governments to provide the incentives.
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.
I don’t think it is a can of worms really; making special negative cases for subsets of the population is a can of poop! There’s nothing so complicated as a worm in there.
I get 3 weeks of sick time. While I rarely take more than a week, most of the time that sick day is because I am just sick of work and need a day. I never say why I'm sick, I just say, taking a sick day today.
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.
Um, why?
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.
To defend @bagacrap, they said they tend to be a bit suspicious.
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.
You've added two conditions not present in the original comment.
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...
> 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'd say you're missing the hint that it is none of your business.
If someone was ill, then they're back, asking them if they're feeling better is totally normal conversation.
The suspicion etc may not be, but the question is obviously fine.
Given you're suspicious about these people and the way you talk about them, they are most likely well aware that you're on a fishing trip feigning interest.
People like you are always more transparent than you realise.
Apologies if it wasn't clear, I am a different person to the one you replied to, and am not suspicious - I was commenting on the other person's suspicion and indeed said that it wasn't normal.
My apologies - I had misread the chain!
Do they perform adequately at their job in general? If so, who cares?
And if not, that's a much better thing to focus on vs whether they took a few days off for whatever reason.
Exactly
I cannot say all of them were performing bad
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
Typically if such a thing catches your eye it’s because in fact they aren’t performing adequately.
One of the benefits (to me) of going remote is I'm sick a heck of a lot less often! In fact, I don't think I've even had a cold or upper respiratory infection since I started remote, where I used to get colds at least once a month, likely due to being in close concentration of other sick people in the office. Touching door handles everywhere to get from office to office, touching elevator buttons, eating together with 100 other people in the office cafeteria... yuck! Now that I'm remote, I'm in my hermetically sealed home office, and I can go weeks without even seeing another person, let alone touching things they touched and breathing their air.
> But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious
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.
For anyone curious: an average of 1.2 instances per month the first year and a half. During the worst season, it can be twice in a month, sure. https://entropicthoughts.com/how-often-does-a-child-get-sick
(Child spent 16 % of the year sick. Across two parents, that is nearly a month of absence in a year.)
I might not exactly be the benchmark for this but for the entirety of preschool and then the first 4 years of primary school I went in for a week and took 2 weeks of what I would now call sick leave. Left me with a heart disease and a real scare for what I should do if I ever have kids to avoid this happening to them.
Suspicious that it's probably a massive hangover rather than "a cold". And I assume it's during the week, otherwise noone but your liver cares what you do on a Friday or Saturday evening.
"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.
> "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.
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.
Are you sure you aren’t projecting your substance abuse issues onto others? Assuming someone has a hangover in the middle of the week is odd behaviour
>> Assuming someone has a hangover in the middle of the week is odd behaviour
Sure, this never happens. Literally, noone in the history of mankind has gotten wasted in the middle of the week.
Maybe they're in recovery or had a family member with substance abuse problems.
Who cares? Only their manager should. And it's not about butts in seats but overall productivity. This attitude is why companies ate pushing for RTO.
Yeah, children bring home all sorts of vile stuff that'll knock you out for a day. And sometimes, it'll just be something random. This morning I had - let's call it "digestive distress" to avoid describing the horrors - that would have definitely meant I wouldn't be able to work if it were a weekday, but I think I'm over it now, and I'll be showing up tomorrow just fine.
So many reasons why you might be sick for one day. Colds start light, peak and fade off, sometimes you just need one day to sleep off the worst of it.
> So many reasons why you might be sick for one day.
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've been sick so often now (thanks kids) that I can feel _immediately_ when something is coming on. Rather than be down and useless at home and work for 2 or 3 more days, I tag out, go to bed and usually knock it out in a night. I feel like that's way better for me and everyone else overall.
Maybe they have heavy period cramps (see also endometriosis). Maybe they just need a break (taking a "mental health day" is encouraged by some employers). Maybe they have a cold, which means they will feel crappy for a day; speaking for myself, I can power through one of those but it would probably be better to take the day and rest up instead of powering through which may make the cold last longer. Maybe they had a vaccination, I know the covid shot hit me pretty hard.
Anyway, over-announcing is good; take away the stigma of calling in sick or taking time for yourself/your family.
Countries with a (still capitalist) social support system manage this with parents' time off; the mother and father can request a significant amount of paid time off, which is separate to the government mandated 20 or so days per year of paid vacation, and it essentially can't be denied.
Before you say it'll be exploited; the largest economy in Europe does this and it works wonderfully, and so do many others.
I am mostly onsite, but I am careful to watch for exactly this kind of behaviour from mostly remote staff. If I see it, they are moved to the bottom of my "inner card deck" of people to help, as they basically are never helpful as teammates.
One of the best parts of my day is to put on my straw cowboy hat on, no shirt and walk around the block at around 10am to get some raw sunlight on the body. No phone just walk around.
I can also vouch for this. Going to the park near my house to walk for 30 mins is great just for the sake of getting out the house and moving my body when I'm feeling anxious. It does wonders for me. Important part to is that I walk for as little or as long as I want, no guilt or shame, no expectations.
Yeah... Maybe read the post because this is complete off topic.
I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post. Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
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.
“I see you’ve only had 15 rambles this week”
“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”
Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)
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.
> 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.
One of my favorite dialogs is from the pilot:
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.
Veronica Palmer: Pie.
Better off Ted was sadly canceled way too early. Part of me wishes a streaming service would pick it up for a revival, but I know the monkey's paw there would be that it would be subverted by precisely the sort of corporation it set out to lampoon.
Fun fact: I was a key player in actualizing the plan for Project Jabberwocky.
> general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA
there is white people rapping and Michael Bolton is ashamed of his name. Tread carefully folks!
There’s a scene where they smash the shit out of a printer and that still rings true
I think that was the first R rated movie I saw as a child (and probably the first movie I pirated, on pre-P2P networks). The grand wisdom of the Geto Boys (sic) has stuck with me ever since. "The type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do [care about money]" I've gotten way off topic
The first movie I can remember pirating was the original Fast and Furious movie using Napster (or KaZaA).
I've fotgotten: Did Napster eventually open up to sharing videos and software after MP3s? I can't remember if I'm just conflating it with memories of Kazaa (I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time, my memory is fuzzy lol). I know I got addicted to pirating and filesharing after being introduced to Hotline at an even younger age.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
It’s so much like real work I can’t watch it. Same with The Office series.
Pay more attention to your surroundings, and eventually you can feel the same way about Schizopolis
Don't watch Silicon Valley.
I don't know, I kind of like those cubicles.
Its crazy how that movie has stood the test of time
Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.
The scene with the Bobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwfNjGxa_D4
When I told them the movie came out before they were born, yet depict their life damn near exactly as they were living it, their enlightenment lit the room anew hah.
Someone please save my soul..
Mine certainly is. If my employees don't fill out their timesheets and tps reports how will I do payroll
A question I’ve always been afraid to ask: wouldn’t it be easier to do it yourself?
i hire people to do work i dont wanna
I don’t work for people I don’t wana
Bro, some of my employees don’t put the new covers on their TPS reports. Do you know how much we paid the consultant for the new designs?!
That's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over them
Yeah, but Obsidian is a startup. A remote startup.
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.
.. yet "being disruptive" is supposed to be the goal of a startup innit?
You want to disrupt the market, not the team.
> Don’t ever go full [disrupt].
The work of Mike Judge is just eerily prescient on all accounts. Spooky and amazing.
If this is your attitude, then you are not part of a team of 2 to 10
Reminds me of the novel "The Circle"
> Hey Veo, guess what? New plot for another Black Mirror episode just dropped
> I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post
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)
Maybe Agile was one of these things, but then a bunch of people started doing it literally.
The original manifesto wasn't[0], but it's certainly likely a lot of cargo-cult "Agile" is.
[0] https://agilemanifesto.org/
> but then a bunch of people started doing it literally
Most people doing "agile" do literally the opposite of what is on the manifesto.
Lol yep. Our company decided “sprints” were now to last 4 weeks, but there’s also no task scheduling, no retro, no sprint planning… just tasks get given whenever they come up based on what they feel like.
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.
You already got to oppose of the manifesto in the "Our company decided" part...
Other way round, i think. The original form had a lot of weird practices which actually worked. The form most common today is just lip service.
The weird practices worked as reported, but as an accident of the context where they arose. Outside that, they're about as robust as really rare orchids, which I think to their credit the authors realized, hence all the "don't take our word for it!" with which they hedged around their wildly bestselling school of management consultancy.
I like to say that the outwardly visible practices and processes of highly effective teams are mostly symptoms, not causes of their success. You can't invert the causal relationship.
Or maybe they know that saying something wrong gets more comments / "engagement" than something more reasonable.
"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric"
Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".
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.
Same idea as rubber-duck debugging or just explaining things to someone else. The work of translating the idea forces your mind to marshal and walk the structures from a fresh angle and you can gain insights that were lacking.
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.
So once upon a Time, jireh and confluence were far better solutions than things like bugzilla and other "solutions".
The last 10 years I've seen jira and confluence groaned about, what has replaced what they do?
Off topic, 10 years ago, I hated confluence and wanted my team to be able to continue using DokuWiki.
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.
Confluence as well as other atlassian tools have evolved quite a bit, in the good direction (minus the ai fluff)
uBlock Origin filters have worked nicely to remove the AI noise
The new Confluence editor is tied with Word in how infuriating it is for me to put an image into a document and then move it.
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
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."
Nothing in this post suggests any kind of expectation, mandate, or obligation to post anything in any kind of channel.
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.
They say something about posting 3 times a week. Even if it’s not a formal obligation, it’ll certainly feel like one if they notice you never post whilst other people do.
it's pretty interesting to see this discrepancy in response to this idea
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"
> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
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)
Agreed, it’s one of those things that works well if it happens organically but not as a policy. I’ve got a personal wiki at work where I dump a bunch of useful stuff, it has helped people and attracted attention which is nice. I think the easiest solution is to have longer-form team meetings once a week.
I think the pos tog having a designated spot is to remove friction. Otherwise you can gummed up trying to decide where to post: “is this worth bothering the team? Maybe I should just message my friend? Or should I just bring it up in the next standup? Or maybe the retro…”
I'll add on to this that per-user channels could work well in teams where everyone is comfortable sharing, but could be absolutely paralyzing in other situations.
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 don't think he mentioned anywhere "expected"? it's more a kind of log, of stuff you'd like to share in a fuzzy way, but don't know where
Overlooked in this recap is a telling line from later in the article:
> 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.
Or they're just async standups, except less accessible since OP uses separate, exclusive channels instead of threads within a single shared channel.
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.
"Illusions."
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
It all comes down to company culture.
Yep this.
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.
Do you grow the olives as well
Not me, a coworkers parents live in the coastal areas of our country and they grow olives and make homemade oliveoil (traditional processes), so yeah, when they make a batch, it's worth buying :)
Hack Club, the largest Slack instance I’ve ever been a part of, has a culture of personal channels and it is incredibly organic and fun. It’s largely restricted to students under 18, though!
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.
There is a kind of leader that's threatened when they don't control communication. In these cases, random thought bombs on slack feel like chaos. Like people are going in random directions not rowing together. I don't think this is true of course -- people are just sharing inspiration and ideas. But in some places / cultures just rambling on slack can be dangerous and put a target on your back. You can be labeled as "distracting" by these leaders that feel threatened / worried about the perception the team is not executing on their marching orders.
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.
This is true because it has happened to me. I was at a place where there was a very ingrained hierarchy in the culture where people were afraid to ask questions in public (slack), to discuss problems and solutions, because the "leaders" were so thin-skinned, doing anything outside of being ticket-solving machines was seen as wholly objectionable.
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.
Most people, myself included, cannot thrive in a culture of fear and control. I think what you did is the best way to handle it. Do the right thing and surrender to the outcome. Like you, I was happier that way.
Happened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats.
Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.
> Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment.
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.
Ah, yes. The control freak. However control freaking has more problems than this. I'm thinking bus factor = 1 unless team tries to solve problems for themselves but hiding it from the control freak
Also crawling exhaustion and burnout, later coming frustration and unrealisticly high standards for oneself and others. Hmm, why am I starting to describe myself...
And these leaders are fairly common. And more so during tough times when it's every man for himself
> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk.
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’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.
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.
Although it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place.
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.
I’m not anti social by any means. Part of my job has been flying out to talk to customers, the business dinners, helping sells to close deals (I’m more of the post sales architect), etc.
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.
I would hope so that scheduled meetings would not translate to water cooler talk. I want to talk about the agenda and not some smalltalk. People tried crazy things during covid to replicate the water cooler talk through remote tools. If we can have some laughs together about the agenda, that's what i like. People are different i guess.
I usually ask people if they are open to a coffee talk. Just 15 minutes each month. Some people talk about their personal life, others talk about what's on their mind with regards to this and that work project. It‘s interesting how different people are. I‘m fine with any of those topics - I value the interaction more than the content.
We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team. It helps a LOT. We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.
We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.
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.
group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted
Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:
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
And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
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.
> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
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.
They call from their desks. Just like people did in the not so "old days." Back when I was a product manager I spent a good part of my day on the phone in my cubicle.
the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it
There are two rules about any job I take these days.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
Hard to follow this rules unless you are living in a low cost of living area.
Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.
I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).
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.
Sp you want to be the special remote guy?
I said just the opposite. I don’t want to be the special remote guy. I want to work for a company where everyone is remote.
Ah, missed a word.
> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak
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?
Discord is designed like this, because there is no special "presenter" or "organizer" and all participants are equal. Everyone can present simultaneously and you can mute individual speakers for yourself and not everyone else.
The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.
There are a handful of Spatial Audio videoconferencing solutions that work pretty well to allow multiple simultaneous conversations.
Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks
I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this
(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).
Felt like a few dozen toys and a handful of startups all came up with this same solution during 2020-21 as next-big-things and Zoom still came out on top for so many other reasons
EDIT: Even MS Teams implemented it!
sure... I'm just saying mixing on client already exists.
> just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.
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.
This is how group conversations happen in person at an office too. I think it's fine, and everybody has reported feeling more connected / less isolated during our periodic polls since we started doing it.
I would honestly hate that so much. A meeting at the wrong time throws out half the day’s momentum and work is hard to get done. A _socially draining_ meeting? Forget 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.
I have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.
> Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings,
.. 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".
The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.
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 cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.
The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
That will last until the first person shares a link to their rambling channel or the first time a pair of team members discuss something at standup that only appeared in someone’s ramblings channel.
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.
But you still know they are there, and that your colleagues should perceive you as at least casually interested in what the others are up to. Even if muted, these channels inevitably become another liability.
I think everyone knows and silently understands that the people responding/emoji-ing in those channels all day every day are doing so at the cost of work output, and that there are a lot of people working that aren't typing away about the last audiobook they listened to. I think you've created a stressful situation out of something that isn't inherently stressing.
What is "inherently stressing"? Is it not enough that some people feel stressed by something for it to actually be stressing?
I know that also for me these rambling channels would add to my stress.
Generating business value is not your only responsibility, though. Most companies expect you to be a team player, to stay in touch, to communicate across departments, and so on.
So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.
Yeah. It's either channels that you actively engage with or you effectively block. For active communication purposes the "you might see it" in-between option isn't really very effective. It happens anyway to some degree. But isn't ideal.
In teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?
Mattermost can truly mute. Doing so disables the behavior that makes the channel name bold when there are unread messages.
Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".
Slack will turn them a muted colour, and they'll only get an unread indication if you're explicitly pinged by default, but I think you can turn even that off too.
Hmm ok we don’t use Slack and it would have to be on prem due to company policy
Muted channels in Slack do not indicate in any way when there's a new message.
Mattermost truly mutes.
Slack mutes fine.
I love using the unreads thing in slack while I'm brushing my teeth or waiting for my tea maker to finish. Tinder for work spam. Everything is processed as quickly as possible, into either "to-do" or "done/ignore"
If you’re working while brushing your teeth, you may want to question your working habits…
Slack isn't really an organized way to do organizational knowledge or communication.
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.
Do you really pursue "inbox zero" on slack? That sounds like a full-time job in itself.
I do. At Walmart. It drives me slightly insane. Wish I could turn that part of myself off more often.
I'm also like this.
Have never been like this with email though (but email is much higher volume/more individual things to click on... and less interesting :D)
Dude. You gotta train people to mention you when you're relevant, do the same for them, and trust each other enough to let that be enough.
Huh, just realised my team did this organically without realising it. People were often hesitant to ask questions they perceived as 'dumb' in the group chat, and definitely unwilling to post anything seen as complaining/moaning about problems. We created a second chat without any managers in it, with a description clarifying it was a dumping ground for questions and comments that didn't fit in other chats. It sees a small but steady flow of use, mostly questions that people probably should know, but can't remember the answer/process of the top of their head, and the occasional slightly less-than-professional complaint or criticism about a service/tool/process. My favourite part is that I can actually discuss things in there - in the main chat, once the question is answered/problem is solved, if we keep chatting about it it's seen as clutter/distraction. I think it's beneficial to have an outlet for these things.
I always ask the "dumb" questions, even when I already know the answer, because there are always people too intimidated to speak up, and it sometimes facilitates a deeper discussion.
It also gives you cover to ask questions that reveal politically inconvenient truths: you can pretend you had no idea that answer would pop out of it.
(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.)
It took me too long in my career to feel comfortable asking the dumb questions. I would have had a much easier time if I had just asked them. I eventually learned to ask dumb questions when I made a friend who was never afraid to ask then, and it was amazing how quickly he learned.
I always respected leaders who did this, preprogramming the dumb questions in a presentation for the benefit of the timid ones
I strongly agree with the title but the prescribed details are not to my taste.
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.
> "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.
I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code).
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.
“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit
Yeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams
In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.
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.
> 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).
That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?
In my experience some orgs use it as all-hands (with #random for chitchat), others as water-cooler.
As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.
It depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.
#random
After watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better. Even now there are people I will screenshot any DMs that have even a hint of conflict. I doubt I will ever participate in any work chats in a social way again.
There's a distinction between random (probably not for work, 'water cooler chat') and 'obviously divisive' topics like politics. Particularly in the US, those are the sort of things you avoid.
Those distinctions evaporated in 2020 and never returned.
Must depend on the company/office. My team (200+ people) has a "offtopic/socialize" chat channel set up for this kind of rando chit chat, and it has never, not once in many years, even had a hint of divisiveness or politics. Yes, you do need to be working with grownups who can behave and leave that shit at home.
Basecamp is a well-known example. I saw it personally at 3 different companies, including one in Germany. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032627
Thanks for that link. Wow, what a wild story. I agree with the top commenter: It looks like the company was composed entirely of children or adults with child-like communication skills/habits!
Not in any company I’ve been in, but I don’t live in America
Huh? Thats just not true. We have channels for gamers, pets, golf, home automation, “lounge”, “memes”, etc. I’ve been at this company 4 years and can only thing if 3 times I’ve seen a dispute, and even that was very civil. It’s really not hard to leave politics at home.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27032627
So a tiny company of 60 people had immature employees, so what?
Never do casual conversation on the record. It's always going to result in this kind of stuff. If you want to get to know your coworkers, go out to lunch with them or chat face to face. That way you can limit exactly who is listening, gauge the response. And anything you say will be lost to time.
Obviously you can still get in trouble if you say something very inappropriate, but anything middle of the road will be forgotten.
This type of writing down ideas and half-thoughts is useful even if you work alone. Thoughts are very fleeting, the instant you put them to paper (or bits) they materialize and it becomes much easier to evolve them.
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 stuff those in my logBook nowadays - a single ascii text file. Started as you say with notes on random scraps of paper. To relieve my mind of carrying that burden, when I have something more pressing to do. But yeah these half-thoughts, intuits etc have showed useful over time? Some made it into TODO, and latter even into the DONE entries. Even if mostly their final destination is DONTDO. :-)
I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that would just ruin this. The entire channel would be just be walls of his text. It's hard enough just to understand his wall of text emails that have a big report embedded somewhere in it.
Thank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic.
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 used to work for a small company, and I'd sometimes write short essays about things in general. It was rarely even related to programming, but people seemed to love that. Then I switched to corporate and I quickly understood to shut up because whenever I say something, someone might get upset over it for whatever reason and then it's going to be a problem.
I am actually surprised that people weren't upset over it in the startup side since a cousin of mine worked in a startup and he said that they were pretty immature and frankly "unprofessional"
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?
I think they meant each person has a public channel of their own.
Like the Confluence spaces they ignore /s
This is what things like "water cooler chat" looks like for remote-first.
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.
It also shows that remote work requires work to work out. You simply cannot bump into your colleagues, so socializing needs to be planned. On a small scale, a regular coffee talk might work. But I love the idea of this being more of a "pull". Like, everyone can consume it at their own pace.
We’ve got a similar but different approach at work of having assorted channels that are around non-work topics. DIY, cooking, music, etc. It’s not quite the same as a water cooler, and we augment this with regular get togethers, but it does help give everyone a glimpse into people’s wider lives.
Our ramble channel is literally called "Water Cooler". After reading this post I will ramble in there more often, I think.
I already have fatigue from too many chats and channels. Please don't make me track and check another ten.
A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.
> Each ramblings channel should be named after the team member, and only that person can post top-level messages. Others can reply in threads, but not start new ones.
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.
I am conscious of double posting, and bumping other people's messages off of the page too soon. If I'm posting too much I get annoyed at myself on behalf of other people. So that would be a big plus of these channels to me.
I see your point.
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.
Common channels can also work nice, but sometimes there is a vocal few who absolutely dominates them, and then the other people won't participate at all. The idea in TFA is to everyone have their own channel, where others cannot start a topic, so they don't stifle those who communicate less.
The reason it's analogous to water-cooler talk for each person to have their own channel is because when you go to get some water, and see other coworkers milling about, you're going to know which coworker you're interested in talking to, who often has interesting insights, who might have something interesting going on in their personal life that you'd like to hear more about. So, in the absence of a common meeting space, you can go check out the channels of people you're interested in, and scroll through to see if they've got anything interesting going on in their life.
I’ve been working remotely for YC startups for the past 3.5+ years, and I completely agree. I went from being the quietest person in the room to someone who often ends up rambling on most calls. Remote work has not only given me the space to speak my mind - and sometimes even find answers to my own questions - but also the opportunity to learn so much from my colleagues.
I use something similar, but call them “Rubber-duck channels.”
http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...
Mildly related are written standups [1] when treated as journal/logbook.
[1] https://www.bobek.cz/the-power-of-written-standup/
No - focus on communication that adds value to your company and your career. Don't get sucked into distractions. Spend your time aligning yourself with projects, ideas, people etc that will boost your career
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
This reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked.
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.
This post talks about remote but I will generalize beyond remote.
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!
> Common topics include:
> - 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.
> Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO.
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.
Agreed. Some of the solutions I've seen and even experienced seem like something right out of severance
Please engage in the mandatory socialization experience
> There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.
So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?
This is formally/legally a work break that you’re not allowed to count as work time. If I have a half-hour conversation about a non-work topic, which I sometimes do, it means I’ll need to work half an hour more. At the office it’s effectively at everyone’s discretion how exactly they count it, but on a chat platform it can in principle be tracked if someone spends substantial time on #offtopic.
Legal definitions vary country to country: I wouldn't be so quick to insist on some universal definition. I'm pretty sure you're wrong about US law there - docking someone's pay for "chatting" sounds extremely difficult to defend.
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.
I’m not in the US, so that may be right. In my view this is more about how the employee feels about it: I don’t want to get into a dispute whether the half hour a day I spent on the rambling channel counts as work or not. For that it makes a significant difference if people use the channel to discuss their hobbies or whether they discuss work-related ideas. I also don’t want to miss the work-related topics just because I’m not interested in the hobby discussions.
In my country, we are allowed an half an hour break that is not deducible from your work time. It is expected that you need to take breaks in a 8h or 8h24 shift and you are free to decide if you want to take one long one or several shorter ones. Also going into the bathroom is not deducted, even if one day you need 15 minutes to take a proper dump or another day you have stomach issues and need to go more often.
bottom line: YMMV. check your local laws and/or collective agreements.
What a terrible situation in which to find oneself.
> work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t
All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?
What do you mean? Your employment contract says you need to work n hours per week. Private activities obviously don’t count as work.
I think building rapport with your team counts as work.
Depending on how much time you spend “building rapport”, HR might disagree.
My point is that channels should be set up such that it’s well-defined whether they are work-related or not.
I have never once had a contract that said I’m expected to work n hours a week.
In fact it is just the opposite, salaried employees are paid the same no matter how many hours worked.
Where rambling might not have a positive connotation, imagining them as "musing" channels seemed to resonate.
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.
They had these at BigCorp I worked at. Anyone can make a channel like #x-gardner and then people can join that channel if they choose. The way that you find them organically is by searching the chat app for some random thing that you are interested in and then finding a few people discussing it in an X channel.
It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.
Related: Rubber duck channels. https://wolfgangschuster.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ducks/
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.
I think it is significant that this rambling channel supplements the yearly in-person meeting. Presumably, that's where one tends to form deeper social connections and get a feel for what different people find interesting to talk about? That is, if the team is varied enough so that there is little overlap in hobby interests or daily life.
I worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break.
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
I agree. Group channels on relevant topics is very helpful. Especially on technical details relevant to getting work done.
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’m also an old guy at 51. I have been in cloud consulting for the last five+ years and I’m perfectly capable of leading large projects remotely.
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.
The channels I'm talking about weren't about work, they were about hobbies - biking, cars, cats. I found that interaction quite fun and actually much better than in-person chats because I could choose to interact at my pace and comfort level.
Can you not just create those channels? I did at my 10 person company and at my 100k company, no body seems to mind
Yes but they get very lonely all by yourself.
I've tried to create or revive a watercooler channel in every remote company I've worked in last 10 years. For some reason it usually doesn't work. Some people don't needed it, some people just call each other and vent out privately. I miss watercooler talk.
TBH one of the best part of watercooler talk was the limited range (only the people who're there) and no trace of the exchange (all verbal)
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.
At my work place we have a meeting on friday afternoon. It was initially a meeting dedicated to quick knowledge transfer or helping out a member of a team who needs help on a particular topic but is also used to chit chat a bit before wishing everyone a nice weekend. We don't do transcript nor recording of these.
We had watercooler meetings some at remote companies I worked at, but yeah they usually don't really work. One problem is that the stream always attenuates to one person (which is good in normal meetings to not pick up too much random background noise), but it completely kills spontaneity. Also, there are always people with horrendous mic quality or background noise.
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.
Venting privately is usually a symptom of bad management. Employees feel that they can't discuss any grievance publicly, for whatever reason, and so choose more careful means of communication
For one of my small-biz clients, I could use what the author outlines - restrictions and all (if I'm an outlier, is fine).
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.
This sounds like Twitter for Enterprises - how about setting up a local instance of Bluesky or Mastodon or one of those? People can then follow whomever they want to and the rest of us can continue not being interested in that sort of thing.
Or if you use M365 then Viva Engage/Yammer can be great!
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
I put my work ramblings in daily journal notes in Markdown files in a git repository. Unfortunately, I don't spend the time to then ensure that they're accessible to my co-workers - and given the amount of value that I would get if they did that, I should do it myself.
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.
Try using a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo with GitHub Pages to automatically publish your Markdown ramblings - minimal setup, preserves your workflow, and gives teammates a simple URL to bookmark.
Oh, that's a great idea - thank you.
Seconding OP with my own experiences:
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).
We did something like that on a private Minecraft server 15 years ago, where everybody was required to have an identi.ca account for this server (status.net, like mastodon today). All messages appeared posted to the walls of a large library building in the middle of the world and people could post to their accounts from the ingame chat.
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.
So, if you're remote, why not just talk to your real friends on discord or whatever?
I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.
Right. Not everybody wants, needs or has these interactions even in-person.
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.
I've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.
At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication
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
It's http://gather.town
I would hate this. More than the commute, the reason I hated in office work are the constant interruptions. Now when I need to do “deep work”, I turn off Slack, email etc and block off my calendar.
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…
> when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too.
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.
At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use isnky own chat (where inam alone), where in post links that mostly interest me.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use is my own chat, with my own Name, where i post links that mostly can catch my interests and use for future reference.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
Too many typos
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.
Sorry for typos. The keyboard I am using (Helio on Android) hasn't corrected the typo and I was too fast with the submission.
…I use is my own chat (where I am alone)…
Why would I? It is boring and adds no value. Much better to work instead. If I need something, I ask. If people need something from me, they ask. I think the biggest increas in productivity for me was when we banned chatting and moved all communication to email. The amount of distractions was reduced significantly!
A post encouraging more performative behavior at work, as if there wasn't enough already. By the way, my scrum update is yesterday I was mostly in meetings.
More performative “I’m cynicaler than thou” comments as if there aren’t enough on HN anyway.
My comment isn't performative, I really mean it :)
"My scrum update is: I spent all day in meetings" can be both true and performative. We don't care what your meetings were about, so you're performing the "meetings are a waste of my time" geek trope. For comparison you wouldn't say "I spent all day at a desk" you'd say "I fixed a race condition" or "I designed the Foo service". You might say "I spent all day driving" and not "I drove 50 miles on I40 and waited 20 minutes at junctions", because the details of driving are unimportant. But presumably the people asking for your update do care about the work being discussed in meetings and want to know things about them.
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.
> Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about?
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.
The performance isn't there, it's here. Why is that person telling HN "my update is: I spent all day in meetings"? What value or contribution or discussion does it serve on HN in a topic about rambling while being remote?
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"?
One of these is not like the others:
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"?
Simply, it is an unpolished thought. It gives coworkers a lens into what you're thinking and gives space for ideas that are not fully baked.
Long back, I used to set up P2 for teams, inspired by WordPress’s theme-based personal/team updates. The current theme seem to have changed over time but the early versions where tweet-ish kinda flow of events which people/team wrote.
https://wordpress.com/p2/
Ramble in the panopticon?
We do something similar that we call « Office a la Zoom »:
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)
Love this idea for 2-10 person orgs, but it really doesn't scale.
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 whole post is unnecessary if you have threaded replies and threaded conversations.
> Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels.
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.
I like having an #offtopic and #thoughts channel for not worrying about burying important info in. If something meaningful happens it'll get captured, otherwise it serves to connect and relate.
"with no expectation that anyone else will read them" => this is depressing, why would anyone ramble (or do anything actually) with this in mind?
Why do people write in a journal?
Why do people pray?
Why do people do rubber-duck debugging?
In each of these activities you listed, you know it's for yourself only. The case described in the post is very different: it suggests rambling in a place where others are, but just don't care about what you say.
One could say that's just a regular team channel.
A social channel seperate from work stuff is good. It lets you post the messages that otherwise be "oh won't post that as it'll bother 20 people who meed to decide if it's urgent"
This doesn't work top well with teammates who don't like to write to communicate, which is a surprising amount of people around me. (I'm the only one who writes tech docs)
This speaks to me!
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?
Machine Stops comes to mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
The first thing this puts me in mind of is mcom.bad-attitude, the internal Netscape newsgroup for this sort of thing.
jwz wrote about how well that worked out on his blog.
We had this, but they were called journal channels. It worked great cause I always have something to say but it's not worth putting in a shared channel.
Steve Martin is a Ramblin' Guy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frcRMQ2m1B4
I feel that part of what I’m paid for is to structure those ramblings into clear communications to be shared at the right time in the right meeting or channel.
I created a "watercooler" channel at my company to keep chitchat out of the main channel. It's a lot easier than juggling multiple channels.
Why not a shared "Ramblings" channel? And at that point, why not re-use something like "Random" that many companies already have?
OP is proposing something more like internal blogging.
I really cannot imagine working remote full-time, it sounds so depressing. We already don't go to church or bars or movies or clubs anymore. Work is one of the few remaining places to interact with other humans.
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.
People are different. I have been fully remote for 5 years after 5 in-office, so I've seen both.
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.
I can’t relate to text chat sufficing for face-to-face interaction. All the micro nonverbal communication seems important to me.
But fair enough, everyone’s different. Having a family would certainly make wfh easier.
People are different. I worked around 1.5 years on fully remote gig and it was the best time of my life ever.
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.
Glad it works for you.
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.
Sure. At that time, I was in my early 20s and I was single. Currently married and one small kiddo. And I'd argue that I'd easily take 1/3 pay cut to go back from my current hybrid job to full remote right now. Days are so much easier for both of us when I'm working from home. Being able to quickly go afk and change a diaper, or take care of the kiddo for 10 mins when mommy takes a dump (real life heh) is incredibly valuable.
Or at least that's my point of view.
I mean, no one is stopping you from going to church or bars or movies or clubs. All of those things are still there if that's what you fancy.
Did I claim that someone was stopping me from doing those things? My point was that traditional gathering formats that are conducive to community-forming are diminishing. It's not a matter of an individual choosing not to participate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Yea, different strokes for different folks. Since going remote, I now have the choice about if, where, and when to interact with other people, and who those people should be. If I want to go two weeks without seeing another person (IRL, not counting video conference), I can do it. If I want to go out and socialize, I have 4 formerly-commuting hours back every day that I can use to do so.
You should do this in normal channels relevant to the discussion topic to facilitate discussion, not a separate channel per person. What.
Hey at least it's not T5T (top 5 thing)that you're forced to do every other week because your founder read one nvidia blog post
This used to be the #random channel on Slack iirc
This is just rubberducking into a private channel. It's really not that new.
I actually do this, but into a personal google doc.
Internal Twitter should be more of a thing.
No thanks. One of the best parts of going remote is letting your work truly speak for itself to a much broader audience. This would have been impossible in person.
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.
Rambling also makes you visible which is not a bad thing when you're remote.
In my experience, these kind of channels end up being filled with complaints about the company/processes/managers/c-levels… (ofc, managers are not invited to these private channels)
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.
Good point. You do need to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about anything, But it shouldn’t just become an endless complaint loop about the company.
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.
You can't "steer" people like that. Good fences make good neighbors.
I would prefer this so much to enforced daily meetings. This is much more natural and interesting.
Reads like pro-tips for middle management avoiding losing knowledge captured in DMs from layoffs
> All the ramblings channels should be in a Ramblings section at the bottom of the channel list. They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them.
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.
This is so anglo-saxon to be individual channels for ramblings. We have group wide channel. It's supposed to be social - no pressure to post. Lurkers welcome. Just share. Naturally, some are more talkative than others. The idea is to foster a group/social culture - not have atomized diaries about individuals.
Every place I’ve been to has a dedicated “random” or “off topic” channel and it’s where all the good team building happens. There are usually a few more narrow channels for specific topics (video games, music, pets, food, etc) which can help if there are big personalities that dominate a channel.
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.
There's no such thing as a dumb question. There are only dumb people.
struggling to create the organic interactions you had in-person? Here's a reomte process you can mandate and measure to ensure everyone is casually interacting in the correct, company-approved way!
"Well, Mike, let's talk performance: your code is good, you get along well with your teammates, but you just haven't been rambling enough in the rambling channel. So unfortunately I'm going to have to put you on a PIP. If we don't see an improvement to at least 3 ramblings per week, further action may be taken, up to and including termination. Sorry it has to be this way, but we've got KPIs to hit."
There's no such thing as a dumb question. Only dumb people.
Channels should also include a #roast-the-product channel which encourages harsh, direct but valid criticism of the product (NOT people / feature authors etc).
It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.
I think perhaps counter intuitively this harms the team spirit. Those things still get voiced in chat threads and more importantly in 1:1 calls/chats, allowing individuals to bond more intimately over non strictly project related things.
Team chat is for the project.
I have a whole private discord server with multiple channels just for this, for my personal projects. Yes yes, walled garden and all, I know. But it's incredibly useful even though I'm the only one in there.
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.
my team just has a couple off-topic channels we use from time to time to chat about random things. i'd say that's pretty sufficient. ymmv of course.
We do the same, just topic specificaties channels like kids, random or pets... Works very well and you only need to join if you want to...
I hate this idea. If I have an idea I think we should implement when I was a mod level developer [1] and had to get buy in for it, I would think it through and ask for a coworkers opinion, take their suggestions, and then keep reaching out to who I thought would be my toughest critics until I got their buy in.
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.
So... basically use a private-messaging feature?
I think what is distinct in this proposal is that there are n 1:n channels
We used to have something very similar with our office coffee machine – spontaneous 1‑2 minute chats while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it was just, “Sorry, can’t talk, swamped right now,” and the other person would rush off – but even that told you something.
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.
There are certain things in life that are meant to be unstructured and spontaneous. The moment you try to sandbox them they tend to devolve into noise which then calls for more structure or "rules", it's a slippery slope. If you're remote, you can always start a huddle and talk while you work, or if talking is not your thing, a good old DM can work. If you're worried about noise or things getting lost, you can always move the work related things into their own channel as they come up. Just 2 cents.
any tips for a team of one and claude code?
that's what this site is for.
Volunteer in your local community.
sometimes I complain about the team to chatgpt or gemini.
yeah my coworkers deal with this in our "banter" channel, my raw thoughts.
Why not one common channel?
If you want your remote teams to have increased cohesion you need to fly them all to the same location (at company expense, only during weekdays) multiple times per year and give them the opportunity to actually get to know each other.
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.
We use #random for this.
This is unreadable. Increase the contrast, please...
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.
It was unreadable for me too initially. Quick guesstimate:
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.
There's nothing wrong with the contrast, it's more than 10:1. For reference 4.5:1 is AA and 7:1 is AAA in WCAG
Maybe there is some technical issue for you regarding the automatic switch between light and dark mode. Under normal circumstances, it is perfectly readable.
I tried both light and dark. Ended up switching to reader mode.
Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.
Just saw your imgur. That is broken, yeah. The text should have a far more darker color. As another commenter pointed out, maybe there is an issue with the Javascript on this page.
On my lower end smartphone, the font is so fine that there's dropped pixels that is upsetting my eyes.
It's almost-white light gray on almost black. What are you on about?
yup
Nah not another useless channel to maintain, I'm good.
In my experience, every business social/communication channel will be gamed for (stealth or blatant) personal promotion.
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.
Or just show up at the office once in a while.
This article is about nothing, how does this kind of stuff hit the front page? Is it because of bots?