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“The Sandia scientist leading that effort happened to share an office with Matt.” There are some serenpidity advantages to being colocated :)

vinay_ys 5y ago
I had a similar reaction to that sentence. A very good reminder that WFH can be disadvantageous to this type of creative cross-polination.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Which is why we should go back to satellite offices and rub shoulders explicitly with people that aren’t on our team.
  - diydsp 5y ago
    and/or co-working spaces where we can cross-pollinate ideas with people on the fringes of our own experience... or even people with various socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics... there must be a sweet spot between "old school IBM suits" and "coding from soup kitchens"
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  It's not equivalent, but people create a similar dynamic online. IRC is a great example. Today there's several slacks/discords I idle in that are just friends sharing what's going on throughout their day. Both contexts have advantages and disadvantages imo.
- KMag 5y ago
  We just returned to office recently, and a team I hadn't worked with in about 6 years just moved to the next row over. Their second day in their new location, and I overheard them talking about a rare segfault (thousands of processes, hits them about once a month) that had been perplexing them for months. I had a bit of intuition and a good guess, and in a few hours had an ugly proof-of-concept fix they were testing. It took another week for a colleague to clean up, productionize, and properly test a robust solution. It got me thinking about ways to artificially introduce opportunities for such serendipity in a remote work environment, but I haven't come up with anything good yet.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Maybe a channel that's for weird problems? They'd still have to explicitly post the weird problem, of course, so it's not nearly as good. But we get some good serendipity in my work Slack when people just post mysterious-to-them experiences that they're still working on.
  - TickleSteve 5y ago
    allow channels to be "overheard", i.e you get notifications about messages you're not currently subscribed to. The problem with channels is that they create silos... having a more general chat area is where these kind of things happen.
  - euroderf 5y ago
    A remote office has a LARGE wall TV relaying images and sound from another remote office. Set the volume so that normal tech talk is just at the threshold of hearing.
rgovostes 5y ago
> [At] Bell Labs I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; [Claude] Shannon was there ... I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. -- Richard Hamming

vinay_ys 5y ago

I had a similar reaction to that sentence. A very good reminder that WFH can be disadvantageous to this type of creative cross-polination.

birdyrooster 5y ago
Which is why we should go back to satellite offices and rub shoulders explicitly with people that aren’t on our team.
- diydsp 5y ago
  and/or co-working spaces where we can cross-pollinate ideas with people on the fringes of our own experience... or even people with various socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics... there must be a sweet spot between "old school IBM suits" and "coding from soup kitchens"
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
It's not equivalent, but people create a similar dynamic online. IRC is a great example. Today there's several slacks/discords I idle in that are just friends sharing what's going on throughout their day. Both contexts have advantages and disadvantages imo.
KMag 5y ago
We just returned to office recently, and a team I hadn't worked with in about 6 years just moved to the next row over. Their second day in their new location, and I overheard them talking about a rare segfault (thousands of processes, hits them about once a month) that had been perplexing them for months. I had a bit of intuition and a good guess, and in a few hours had an ugly proof-of-concept fix they were testing. It took another week for a colleague to clean up, productionize, and properly test a robust solution. It got me thinking about ways to artificially introduce opportunities for such serendipity in a remote work environment, but I haven't come up with anything good yet.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Maybe a channel that's for weird problems? They'd still have to explicitly post the weird problem, of course, so it's not nearly as good. But we get some good serendipity in my work Slack when people just post mysterious-to-them experiences that they're still working on.
- TickleSteve 5y ago
  allow channels to be "overheard", i.e you get notifications about messages you're not currently subscribed to. The problem with channels is that they create silos... having a more general chat area is where these kind of things happen.
- euroderf 5y ago
  A remote office has a LARGE wall TV relaying images and sound from another remote office. Set the volume so that normal tech talk is just at the threshold of hearing.

rgovostes 5y ago

> [At] Bell Labs I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; [Claude] Shannon was there ... I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us did it at the same place and at the same time - it was in the atmosphere. -- Richard Hamming