3 ms·
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,
by 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 agoMaybe 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 agoallow 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 agoA 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.