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Building a walkie-talkie for remote work
- p_l 7y agoSo it removes one of the biggest benefits of remote work, ability to concentrate?
- hyfgfh 7y agoYou can also include a camera in your face and screenshare all the time...
- p_l 7y agoI think the approach from some remote companies, which involved dedicated display with a camera that was _usually_ on (but could be _switched off_, just like closing doors to your office!) would be better than this "walkie-talkie"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- samstave 7y agoI e always found it funny how HN seems to put remote work on such a pedestal... some people cant concentrate remotely. Kids are a huge distraction, as are many other comforts of the home.
- gardnr 7y agoIt's funny how you make a generalisation and then are very specific. Not everyone decided to have children. I have designed my own living situation to be quiet and to minimize distractions. Even if your home is a very distracting place, working remotely doesn't have to mean working from home. You still get all the other benefits of openness and communication and you can rent your own small office with a door that closes. I find it challenging to concentrate in an open floor plan office that is full of people. I find it absurd that it has become the status quo for software development.
- samstave 7y agoPoint taken. The open office layout is a scam - pushed based on the build-out costs of new office space in a very rapidly expanding market in Silicon valley over the last two decades. Companies needed lots of office space very fast. Companies also dies fast. Building out office space is expensive and the push for open office layouts as a "culture" bit was just as much marketing as anything else...
- ironmagma 7y agoIt’s definitely possible to concentrate in an open office, it’s just an acquired/cultivated skill. Besides that, if someone on your team interrupts you and they’re not just being inconsiderate, they are actually enabling you to concentrate on the thing you need to be, which is this other person’s question.
- katzgrau 7y agoBut there's no way for the interruptor to know the priority of their issue relative to the your priorities. This creates a major time management issue. If you have time blocked off for important, high value tasks, you can be easily distracted by someone else's lower level tasks. Task switching, especially to focus on low level tasks, is highly inefficient in both the short and long term and should be avoided at most costs.
- ironmagma 7y agoSure, but isn’t that true in the remote world as well? I can’t imagine it’s very good form to just reject a call or ignore it when you’re busy doing something else, you have to provide a reply to the person about why you can’t talk, and then that’s just as good as having done the same thing to a person physically in your office.
- errantmind 7y agoIn my experience, ignoring someone stopping by your desk is very different from not answering the phone. A phone call doesn't have the same degree of immediacy nor the same expectations of a response
- ironmagma 7y agoHow is a phone call not the highest form of immediacy? Short of an actual pager event implying downtime and process, what could be higher priority to someone working out of office?
- dsaffy 7y agoTake a look at the section "Solving Distraction: Presence + Statuses + Calendar" in the article - I dive into our attempt to solve this problem.
- drmpeg 7y agoBefore I retired, I avoided getting a cell phone because of this. Where I was working, I could see that my co-workers were using their cell phones as a company intercom. I didn't want any part of that.
- andyfleming 7y agoWe use Pragli, and I feel like it's the opposite. Rather than a Slack back and forth to see if someone is available, setting up a video conference, connecting, etc, you can pop in and say "hey, you have a minute?". They can say "no" or "can you come back in 10?". It's like stopping by someone's desk. If they really wanted to be heads down they can be in do not disturb mode. They can still show as online (so their presence can be "felt"), but have a status that says "Focusing" and block "calls". I think it's great.
- moltar 7y agoProblem is most people are socially inclined to say yes. It’s just human nature. They are more willing to break the flow than to break the social norms.
- hinkley 7y agoI really feel like this part is something you could automate. Give me a choice box of now, snooze bar, or several other options culminating in “take it to email, my hair is on fire.”
- steve1977 7y ago>They can say "no" or "can you come back in 10?" By then, the damage to concentration has already been made. Yes, you can set your status to "do not disturb". But you have to remember to do that.
- andyfleming 7y agoSure, it's still an interruption, but I don't think it's completely derailing. That's why I compared it to stopping by someone's desk. It still requires both parties to be responsible and aware.
- dorkley 7y agoYou've clearly not got a clue how a software engineer works if you think its not derailing.
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- whalesalad 7y agoThis is an even more egregious violation of someone’s attention than IM. We tried to use mumble on one team with push-to-talk and it only lasted a few hours.
- reificator 7y agoI grew up with IM and distributed teams online, and am very comfortable with it. It's my platonic ideal for remote/distributed communication... until expectations around response times are put into place. If I can receive a message, respond to it four hours or a day later, and receive a phone call for anything more urgent than that, I'm happy to use IM platforms for collaboration.
- phonebanshee 7y agoYou just described email.
- reificator 7y agoNo, because I can also communicate in real time over IM. Additionally the social protocols are different. An email requires (some level of) planning and completeness. An IM can include just one question without reams of context, or it can involve a long detailed back-and-forth. Questions over IM can be resolved in minutes or hours. Questions over email somehow morph into hideous monstrosities that waste days without anyone being satisfied with the answers. And of course your mileage may vary, different organizations are different, etc...
- dewey 7y ago> If I can receive a message, respond to it four hours or a day later, and receive a phone call for anything more urgent than that, I'm happy to use IM platforms for collaboration. Isn't that exactly Slack with the "Do not disturb" mode on does or email?
- swiley 7y agoI really like the calendar feature, I feel like (if it’s used appropriately) it might encourage legitimate conversation.
- speedgoose 7y agoIt would be interesting to have an independent study of the system, perhaps qualitative. Reading the other comments, not everyone is convinced by the idea and having scientific data may help. If the data hurts, that's life.
- chrisfrantz 7y agoI’m pretty sure we don’t actually need any remote specific tools. The last thing I want is random coworkers suddenly speaking in my headphones.
- andyfleming 7y agoYou can opt-out of the click to connect type of calls by setting the option in your status.
- mprev 7y agoOpting out isn't free, though. It's a social signal and one that, potentially, brings with it additional stress as you're actively opting out of something your colleagues/superiors believe is good enough an idea that they've implemented it.
- jdauriemma 7y agoThis is the most eloquent and succinct summary of this concept I’ve read so far, well done.
- dsaffy 7y agoThis is a good point. If the manager is going to implement Pragli, they need to make it very clear that opting out is very OK and even encouraged... we need to do a better job of making this feel socially OK in the app.
- CathedralBorrow 7y ago> we What a strange way to spell "I"
- lazyant 7y agowhat's the benefit of this compared to a chat/slack request for a phone/videoconference call?
- dstaley 7y agoNot trying to be snarky, but did you read the article or did you skim it? The author explains the reasoning behind the walkie-talkie approach versus a phone call.
- mc3 7y agohe does but I am not sold on the benefits. A slack message "can we talk, call me" would be async and non-distracting (just turn off slack alerts when you want to focus). Using an online call rather than on/off (like a walkie talkie) then seems much of a muchness.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoYes, and setting your status to "in a meeting", "away", "code sprint", etc. is helpful. These are things that could be automated, I'd consider that a better approach to the problem. Let people know subtly you don't want to be disturbed unless it's important, otherwise you will be.
- thrower123 7y agoNever in my life have I wanted to use a walkie talkie in an office. I've used walkie talkies a fair bit on construction sites and industrial plants, and there the value is obvious. Walkie talkies are a broadcast mechanism - everyone stays on the public channel, and you don't squelch unless you have something urgent to say.
- donpdonp 7y agoIt would be easy to describe pragli as a conference call that never ends, but I'm not sure thats fair. Its one of various forms of telepresence, like a video wall or telepresence robot. If text messaging has taught us anything is that a chatroom is the right amount of distraction most of the time - until the VR workplace apps come (soon).
- fortran77 7y agoWe have a lot of fun with this walkie-talkie https://cb.virtualairwaves.com/channel/1 https://cb.virtualairwaves.com/channel/1 WebRTC Push to talk. It "just works" in most desktop browsers. No login, no registration. You can make private channels and there's several public ones. There's an iOS and Android client, too. We really like the "push to talk" model. You can leave the client up and quickly say something to everyone else in your group. Especially good for non-critial, time sensitive things (i.e., "Y'all want to get lunch?") that are still important for a sense of "team"
- TenXProgrammer 7y agoAgreed. I like Walkie Talkies -- both real ones, and virtual ones. Push-To-Talk is a great way to communicate, and deserves to come back! It was very popular in the 70s, and remains useful among "hams" and people who work on movie sets, construction sites, etc.
- LeonB 7y agoI have a friend who uses an always on audio for his entirely remote team and swears by it. I think it might depend on personality types. I’m willing to admit it does work for some teams even if my own initial reaction is “no way!”
- dsaffy 7y agoMaking it very customizable is key. Different teams have different workflows.
- leetrout 7y agoI LOVE having always on push to talk audio like mumble or discord. If you want to focus just log off. If you want to chat with the group jump in. Want to have a side convo without screen share? Pop to another channel. Mumble (speex codec) is great quality and low latency. Just has a poor UI / UX.
- RL_Quine 7y agoThe UX isn't all that bad other than on mobile, which is one of the worst experiences imaginable. I use it pretty regularly and the comments about the quality and latency really bear out. There's a weird issue with the server that the longer it stays up, the longer authentication takes (up to 60s on our server now), but that's only a minor issue that's probably fixable trivially if we cared.
- xfalcox 7y agoI'm trying to convince my team to adopt a opt-in, voice only watercooler like that for some time, without success so far. I makes a lot of sense to me, who have been doing this for over a decade with my friends. Are you busy, don't join / mute yourself / go to the afk channel. Are you waiting for a long build, just reading HN, between tasks? Join the channel and people can bond and talk about work/life.
- ikeyany 7y agoSo essentially a conference call that lasts all day, every day? I can see why your team did not approve.
- dstaley 7y agoAs a remote worker (and as someone who prefers remote work) I feel like this is attempting to recreate the feeling of stopping by someone's desk in an office. If that's what you want to recreate, I think this is an interesting approach, but I've always felt that remote workers do so specifically because they prefer not having in-office distractions. (Assuming those working remotely prefer to do so of course. I realize that's not always the case.)
- Spooky23 7y agoDepends on what you do. My first job out of college was a database ops team that was distributed across 6 locations across the country. We basically lived and died over Nextel direct connect voice channels and AOL IM. It was a superpower.
- dsaffy 7y agoWe hope that statuses / our calendar integration provide the outlet for remote workers to have focus time. It's definitely a balance!
- peteretep 7y ago> I've always felt that remote workers do so specifically because they prefer not having in-office distractions Some, probably, but I miss that specific aspect about being in an office. I like that I can temperature and sound control my office, and be somewhere super sunny and cheap when the office is gloomy and expensive. I quite like this idea.
- tommoor 7y agoI have worked remotely for 10 years and raised VC funding for an idea very similar to this in the past – we failed to build a sustainable business, although the product did have a couple of hundred teams that swore by the product. In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is really a problem that only small startup teams (usually a group of founders) have, as they need to keep in constant sync. It doesn't really scale past that. As soon as you have any sort of mixture of roles, personalities, or start to grow the team this is a communication method that just inherently doesn't scale well. I do believe there is something here for small groups of founders/friends though, good luck!
- lukethomas 7y agoI used Sqwiggle back in 2013 and while I appreciated the idea in theory, as an employee, it felt like an employee oversight tool. Essentially, it gave the impression that my boss didn't trust that I was doing my work. This tool made it so someone could see if I was actually at the computer doing work. It also drained my battery, so I always needed to have my computer plugged-in.
- juandazapata 7y agoWe used Sqwiggle back in the day until a picture of the naked wife of one of our coworkers got captured and stood there for over 5 minutes. That was the last day we used it.
- nathancahill 7y agoOh you're the company from that story? A true urban legend.
- juandazapata 7y agoI'm sure it happened multiple times in multiple companies.
- mr_justin 7y agoI love the idea of taking well understood analog concepts and applying them to the digital remote workplace, but man, forced sync calls coming in on a whim without my control to ignore them sounds like my absolute worst nightmare.
- dsaffy 7y agoIf you haven't already, take a look at the section "Solving Distraction: Presence + Statuses + Calendar" in the article - I dive into our attempt to solve this problem. Do you think our solution is insufficient? If so, any ideas on how we could further solve it?
- tom_mellior 7y agoI think having to clutter my work calendar with "I'm working" entries is a pretty clumsy way of signaling that I don't want people to randomly speak over Beethoven in my headphones. I my company introduced this, I would invariably "forget" to start the software at all, or would leave it on DND status permanently. Personally I just don't see the benefit over a chat message saying "time for a quick call about <topic>? <zoom link>".
- Y-Bopinator 7y agoFunctionally no different from ventrilo,discord,teamspeak
- donpark 7y agoWhile I don't think Walkie-Talkie metaphor works for remote teams in general due to becoming an open invite to interruption, it may work for teams that need to work in tight collaboration, like in rapid emergency response and battle management even when everyone is in the same building.
- steve1977 7y agoWhy not just set up a conf bridge for something like that?
- nautilus12 7y agoIts good until it becomes aware that you can use it to silently judge how productive you think other people are being, which then changes the way you work totally. Major benefiet of remote work is that you can work at a reasonable pace without being monitored constantly, and end up producing more because you are working at a pace thats more natural for creative work.
- granshaw 7y agoYeah slack statuses are already bad enough for micromanaging bosses
- andyfleming 7y agoI think this is a cultural issue. You could say the same about JIRA. I've been on teams that have used it to closely track developer productivity and micromanage. In contrast, I've been on healthier teams that just use it how it works best for them.
- redis_mlc 7y agoDear Founders, This is an inane project. Drown this puppy fast! Sincerely, the Internet.
- amatecha 7y agoOh... I was a little disappointed that this wasn't literally about walkie-talkies or a comparable technology, but rather some centralized internet-dependent computer software :(
- dsaffy 7y agoQuick note from the author: Pragli has a feature that is inspired by a walkie-talkie. Pragli itself is not just an online walkie-talkie. Check out our homepage if you want to learn more about Pragli (pragli.com)
- _-___________-_ 7y agoMay I suggest that "Building a walkie-talkie for remote work" might not be a good way to market it then? As a remote worker for more than 10 years, the horror of the idea almost stopped me even clicking the link.
- samstave 7y ago“Marco Polo” is a pretty bad ass app for this...
- ollifi 7y agoI've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get really bothered about this idea and probably if you are working on independent tasks you don't need to be so connected. For tight teamwork I found it to be the least bad option.
- thrwaway69 7y agoThat sounds weird and awesome at the same time. Does the face move at all? Have you thought of using facerigging software? I wonder what you think of virtual remote space with advanced face rigged avatars as the future? 0] https://facerig.com https://facerig.com
- dsaffy 7y agoWe actually have a feature in Pragli that sort of does this... https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/ https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/
- thrwaway69 7y agoYeah I saw that but it's not as fluid yet. I am thinking of 3d faces with realistic facial texture and expressions. Btw, nice product!
- buu700 7y agoWe actually built a "walkie-talkie mode" in Cyph (cyph.com) for a lot of the same reasons. Interesting to know that other people are thinking about this!
- torgian 7y agoEh. Slack and other chat programs are just as fine, and would enable less distractions. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a good idea. As a remote worker, I would not go for this solution. I already use slack, and google calendars. IMO I don’t need more than that. And I think your solution is convenience oriented. Nothing wrong with that of course, people pay for convenience. This seems more suitable for companies / employees that are semi-remote. I don’t think people who are fully remote would be for this.
- hadlock 7y agoSeems like a Mumble server accomplishes the same thing. You can get general channels with an open mic or push-to-talk, and you can also do open mic or push-to-talk with individuals. Mumble is free and open source and runs on a toaster-quality cloud instance with CD quality audio and no latency. Kudos for someone doing the IRC->Slack but for voice chat/Mumble.
- Animats 7y agoBoth AT&T and Sprint (which acquired Nextel) still offer push to talk services. But they're not big sellers any more. What happened with that?
- peterloron 7y agoThis sounds horrifying. Why make it even easier for people to disrupt you?
- Flemlord 7y agoWe've been using Pragli for a few weeks. The team loves it! We used Sococo and Tandem in the past and this is the first presence app that is really being used. Great job guys!
- dsaffy 7y agoThanks! :)
- puneetchawla 7y agoSynchronous communication is killing productivity for remote users. Another completely different model is async communication using videos. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/devtendo/id1488872267?ls=1&mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/devtendo/id1488872267?ls=1&mt=...
- 6510 7y agoGave me a funny idea (its terrible I know) point a web cam at each remote worker (you) then give the boss a traditional remote control with all 20 "TV" channels. If the boss is looking an indicator light goes on and you get to have a one way conversation with the boss in listen only mode. (extra points for steampunk design TV/RC)
- pts_ 7y agoCulture is the biggest impediment to progress. Radio predates IRC by a 100 years. It's like most people DID NOT LEARN TO READ.
- Aloha 7y agoOn the face of it, it looks like Voice IM, with that I'm trying to figure out who needs this product or why its better than other options? I don't understand where this fits in the hierarchy of human bandwidth (From Lowest to Highest): Text Message IRC/IM/Teams/et al E-Mail Phone Call/Conference Call Video Conference Face to Face meetings
- pastage 7y agoFrom experience it's between irc and having an office mate. I've only done it with an always on videolink which is different from this. The problem I see is that this seems to mean you need to learn radio dicipline which is hard, compared to having a video link constantly broadcasting.
- agoodthrowaway 7y agoNot new. This existed a long time ago. It was called Nextel. Was hugely popular with contractors and in construction trades.
- jasonkester 7y agoBack in the 90s I once worked at an office that had a phone system with no ringer. You’d dial the extension and just start talking. Or you could “ring” them by saying something like “hey Jeff!” As a new guy in that office, never having met “Jeff” before, this was really difficult for my introverted self to get used to. I was glad when I finished the trip and flew back to the home office where phones worked like phones. This seems a bit like that, but with at least the ability to set some boundaries around who could start talking to you. If my current team adopted this I bet I’d spend my whole day in “focusing, don’t interrupt me” mode.
- steve1977 7y agoMeh... synchronous communication is almost always worse than async communication in terms of efficiency, for example as the burden of thinking time of both sides has to get carried by both sides of the communication.
- kstenerud 7y agoMaybe it's just me, but I prefer to not have voice conversations unless absolutely necessary. A service like this would be stressful, because I'd probably be the only one to stick to his guns and keep do not disturb mode on at all times.
- cyrusmg 7y agoIs it just me or is the pragli.com website doing some heavy computations to everyone ? I connected via Firefox on Linux and my CPU temperature skyrocketed to 81C almost immediately. Note: Not this blog page, the main landing page itself.
- divisonby0 7y agoCan confirm, eats up all 8 cores. Seems to be a script from firebasestorage.googleapis.com
- nnq 7y ago> quick, synchronous audio/video communication between teammates ..."kill it with fire" or other equivalent meme is the proper response to this, no matter how wonderfully it is executed. Really, what everyone needs is more asynchronous communication and less attention draining and less interruptions! This can only help very small teams of extroverts with very-very-similar personalities work, it brings HELL for everyone else! And creates a homogenous bubble by locking people with different personalities out of the loop because they can't stand being in it. We should put more time into bringing to the future ASYNCHRONOUS communication tools that WORK FINE, like email, comments in project-management-systems (eg. in Trello, Asana etc.)... we need more and better of these! (And without compromising them by adding push-notification and crap that makes them synchronous and attention grabbing.)
- kfoley 7y agoI think there's a place for synchronous communication as long as it's followed up by sufficient asynchronous communication such that people aren't left out. Sometimes it's a lot faster/easier to be able to get on a 5-10 minute call to discuss something and be able to look at it together instead of sending messages back and forth for a week trying to get a point across / understand someone else's point.
- state_less 7y agoNot sure if this startup is only doing 1-to-1 or it's 1-to-n, but if they start allowing 1-to-n, they'll likely run into problems. A walkie-talkie system will likely fail for larger group sizes (e.g. >8) or more due to cross talk that will build up on a common channel. In the marine environment where ‘walkie-talkies’ are still in use, folks have worked around the problem by monitoring the common channel, 16, for interruption and then negotiate a switch to a less common channel to complete the conversation. In the long run, maritime folks will likely switch to TCP/IP to address, route and communicate more efficiently rather than the walkie-talkie system. This sort of thing crops up in the office when a scrum master says to take it 'offline' in a standup, or when an open office gets big enough to have a din of conversations all going on at once.
- lukethomas 7y agoTotally agree - I wrote a rebuttal to the concept of "virtual office" tools for distributed teams a few minutes ago: https://www.friday.app/remote-work-virtual-office https://www.friday.app/remote-work-virtual-office
- jaclaz 7y agoRelated (2 days ago) about pragli.com QA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22111178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22111178
- jrd79 7y agoMy business partner and I have been working remotely with each other for the last 5 years, after a previous 7 years in a shared office. To make it work, we bought dedicated iPads and put them on stands next to our computer monitors on our desks. We start a FaceTime call at the beginning of each day and literally leave it running all day. We mute when not actively talking, so we can listen to music (and not listen to the other's keyboard noises). It is amazing. We always can see if the other one is present and/or busy on a phone call. If I want to talk, I just unmute myself and start talking. It is surprisingly similar to being in the same room as someone, without having to agree on the playlist. Obviously, this particular setup doesn't scale to larger teams, and it does rely heavily on the very high quality and reliability of the audio and video of FaceTime. But I'd recommend it highly for those in the same situation. Made the cross-country move possible without destroying the business. The dedicated device is key, so that it is always visible and doesn't take CPU or screen real estate on your actual computer. And I can't emphasize enough the importance of the high quality audio in FaceTime. We tried Squiggle back in the day and the audio/video were just not good enough (and the freeze frames were unflattering and distracting in a way that silent video is not, strangely). It would be nice to unmute both sides at once, but FaceTime is obviously not going to add that feature. We thought about trying to make a product out of our insights/experiences but concluded that it would be a bit like re-implementing MS Word to fix the find dialog (if anyone remembers that issue back in the day).
- _jal 7y agoAside from scaling problems, there are comfort/trust issues. I can only imagine doing this with certain people. Which is really odd, considering I work in an office. Somehow the artificiality, the fact that it isn't a human puttering around near me, but a plane of glass doing magic makes a difference for me. But then I don't litter my home with surveillance speakers, either.
- jrd79 7y agoI felt "watched" for the first week, then it is just normal, like working in an office. The difference disappears.
- 7y ago
- marcinzm 7y agoThis seems like something I'd hate. I can at this point triage slack messages without interrupting my flow. Notifications can be trivially ignored or put on hold for 30 seconds or a minute. That's enough time for me to "save" my current mental context and text requires little brain power to triage so I don't lose my saved state for a non-urgent message. Voice is different, suddenly going from quiet to someone talking in my ear will grab my attention. I have to instantly drop my mental context and understand what they're saying. And it involves all the social parts of my brain which again kills my analytical context.
- hawski 7y agoIt's not the same, but I'm using Zello (IP walkie-talkie basically) with my wife and it is very convenient. For example when we are in a shop or have to quickly sync on something, especially if you have children. I imagine it could be quite helpful for remote work, but it depends on many factors, work time is one of them.
- sigviper 7y agoCongratulations, you just invented Skype for Business ;)
- RocketSyntax 7y agoReminds me of the book The Joy of UX
- lurien 7y agoSurprised no one's mentioned Relay PTT devices. https://relaypro.com https://relaypro.com Looks like a lot of businesses are using them to replace radios now.