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It's annoying that these "hallway conversations" became the thing to highlight as the main advantage of in-office work. It's not my experience that the random
by foobarian 5y ago
It's annoying that these "hallway conversations" became the thing to highlight as the main advantage of in-office work. It's not my experience that the random encounters next to the watercooler or the bathroom are often that useful.
But, say you have some half-baked idea and want to talk it out with a coworker next to you. You both roll over to the whiteboard in your pod and start scribbling, both of you exchanging high-bandwidth information via utterances, gestures, and facial expressions with millisecond roundtrips. Third teammate overhears and rolls over, contributing further. This scenario IME used to happen a lot, created a lot of value, and is hard to replicate with a scheduled meeting or documents because the communication roundtrips and bandwidths are atrocious.
- luffapi 5y agoI like whiteboarding too. I’ve worked fully remote a lot and have found the other benefits far out weigh the cost of losing it as a tool (temporarily while tech catches up?). Half the time I don’t need to ask for help because in the comfort and focus of my home office I can figure out much more difficult problems then I could when a sales dude was closing a deal next to my desk, or having half the devs at my table coughing and sick.
- marcind 5y agoSpeaking of tech catching up, please try this out: https://sharetheboard.com https://sharetheboard.com -- closest thing to remote white boarding I've seen, especially after the digital annotations come online