9 ms·

The Remote Pop-In (2021)

95 points by mcqueenjordan 4y ago

brokenkebab2 4y ago
>the effort of physically going somewhere is high Ok, I realize there's a context for it. Still can't help, but laugh at how low is a "high" mark for physical effort when in office.
pid_0 4y ago
ianbutler 4y ago
That’s interesting but I’d have to wonder how effective it is for traditionally more introverted teams like engineering. Do they enforce a certain amount of time someone must be in their “office” and thus primed to be interrupted, maybe even only doing lite work? Or is this a case that works really well for only largely extroverted teams, sales, product, marketing etc. My suspicion is a non trivial amount of introverted staff will just never have an “open door” so to speak, but then you miss out on valuable interactions for the broader organization or team even if locally for the person they’re uncomfortable or annoying.
- glacials 4y ago
  Author here. We had no requirements to use this system so people frequently left their “office” to get some concentration time in. Some folks were rarely or never “in”, which was completely fine. (The company even had a standing “all meetings are optional” rule.)
- jlturner 4y ago
  In practice it has felt more collaborative and inclusive. I’m not / don’t work with OP (early stage startup also, < 5 engineers), but our team has been using only Discord for the last few weeks (using only 1 eng room, not 1 room per person like OP).
s0rce 4y ago
I just phone (or teams call) people (not scheduled meetings) to collaborate. This only really worked with people that I worked quite well with but it comes pretty close to just going over to their office and interrupting them. I'd ping them on slack/teams to see if they are free if I didn't know.
goldenkey 4y ago
throwaway787544 4y ago
> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll listen to it and call you back. This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee. It gives us back control of whether we are interrupted (put your phone on silent if you really need to), it is universal and ubiquitous. Obviously, because of phone spam, this doesn't work with normal telephones (unless you add all your coworkers to your contacts). But Slack/MS Teams/Discord/VoIP/etc can solve that for us. Just tell everyone in your office to call you, and leave a message if you're not there and you will get back to them as soon as you can. Put "Call Me" as your away message. Voice calls worked well enough for nearly a century as a remote working method; I think we can learn to do it again.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  Given the described situation (company already using Discord), your suggestion is obviously silly. The solution proposed is simple and uses an existing tool that they are already using.
- GlennS 4y ago
  Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message? I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.
  - throwaway787544 4y ago
    I was hoping people would use it to explain what they wanted to talk about, since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want, and speaking is easier than typing. But I guess I forgot that people on voicemail just say "hey it's X, call me back when you get this". It would be nice if Slack had an away message that was sent back to the user when they message you, rather than a status that nobody ever reads.
rtev 4y ago
Slack Huddles directly address this issue pretty effectively.
- _freek 4y ago
  Too bad screen sharing quality is somehow way worse with huddles.
jlturner 4y ago
This is definitely a killer feature on Discord for remote working. Being able to see who is in a room, join ad hoc, and work along side them has greatly reduced communication friction, and I’ve grown to love using (basically only) Discord over Slack + Calendar + Zoom/Meet to manage team communications.
ahmetnoid 4y ago
In my workplace we use zoom breakout rooms as an alternative. When we have a meeting we move to the main room and have it there. Otherwise each member is in a breakout room.
- mh- 4y ago
  oh, that's kind of clever. So when not otherwise in a zoom, each of you hang out in your own breakout room so others can "drop in"?
  - ahmetnoid 4y ago
    Exactly. If I want to drop in all I need to do is to check the breakout rooms list then move to the room where my colleague is. And once done I can go back to my breakout room. We also use it when pair programming remotely. It's quite effective and it eliminates communication barrier.
    - mh- 4y ago
      Very cool. Thanks for the reply.
raymondgh 4y ago
My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.
- dwrtz 4y ago
  Sorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.
  - GordonS 4y ago
    Interesting, do you think you have a chance at competing against Microsoft's own tools, like Teams? Regardless how crappy Teams is at certain things, the people that decide "we're using Teams" often barely use it themselves.
    - texasbigdata 4y ago
      Look at Microsoft buying sunrise, even though the server based calendar outlook feature was arguably fully fledged. There’s always space:
    - 4y ago
spoonjim 4y ago
Is it just me or are purple using a lot of goofy-ass fonts these days? What the fuck is the lowercase “f” in this post?
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Looks like a programming font, where having the word “function” stand out is good.
aar9 4y ago
> If you're going to the restroom and will be AFK, you can join the restroom channel. You're in, but away. No one is actually wearing a headset on the toilet, it's just a fun way to feel like a real office. Interesting, I would never have expected anyone to feel the need of recreating this particular piece of office life in a remote setting.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Likewise, this is quite possibly the worst suggestion or best troll I’ve seen in months.
  - wsc981 4y ago
    As an employer I’d like to know how much time my employees spend in the restroom each day, so I can only applaud this suggestion.
    - awestroke 4y ago
      Worst employer ever
  - oplaadpunt 4y ago
    I don't think it's that terrible. The little jokes lighten the mood, and make it feel more real and in-person. Online meetings have a tendency towards formalism in my experience
  - ClassyJacket 4y ago
    I don't understand how this is better than simply sending the person a message.
- Test0129 4y ago
  I've realized that extroverts are really, really damaged by the remote work setting. The word "fun" gets thrown around a lot but to me the reason remote is so great is because I don't have to play make-believe with my coworkers. That being said this suggestion is hilarious. I would imagine people are auto-muted in the restroom channel so it seems like the ideal place to sit yourself if you're required in zoom all day. It's totally valid. I often get my best thinking done in the bathroom.
samcheng 4y ago
One related technique that I think works well is to hold "Office Hours" at least once a week. Just schedule a regular meeting, and attend it - then advertise widely that you are available at that time and that anyone is welcome. It's a great way to foster skip-level interactions, give help to someone who needs it, and just chat. It's really fun when a few people come in at once. Sometimes nobody shows up, and that's fine, too. Give it a try!
- anonred 4y ago
  I’ve had lackluster results with hosting weekly office hours. A grand total of 2 engineers showed up, both on my direct team, out of 100+ ICs in my org over the course of 2 months. But your mileage will vary depending on workplace culture I suppose.
  - samcheng 4y ago
    Honestly I think it works best inter-functionally. Many engineers won't volunteer for a meeting, even (maybe especially) if it's just for chit-chat. Maker's schedule and all that. http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
  - arccy 4y ago
    maybe the scope of your direct team is too small, try a combined office hours with several related teams cohosting? at least you have each other to chat to if noone shows up.
- wortelefant 4y ago
  in weeks with more spontaneous requests I use https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/ and put a link in my profile to announce daily meeting slots
- Test0129 4y ago
  I don't want to be the downer here because this is a common view and my company does this as well. I personally do not have fun in these kinds of meetings. Even if they were held in person. My goal at the end of the day is to finish my work quickly and efficiently and try to get out a little early while meeting my obligations. Typically these chats eat up an hour or more and I end up working longer to make up for it. They are extremely useful for helping newer engineers and answering questions but the "fun" chats tend to be just time consuming noise. It's entirely possible I have a different/maligned view of my relationship with my job but I just don't like giving any more than I have to for something that consumes 40-60 hours a week of my life.
spoonjim 4y ago
The thing that remote “pop in” doesn’t do is let me assess how interruptible someone is. When I pop in on someone in an office, I do it when I’m not interrupting their deep work — it’s extremely easy to tell when this is. Remotely, it’s much harder.
- PebblesRox 4y ago
  Looks like in this setup, people only join their office room when they're open to being interrupted: "When you are online and able to be disturbed, you join your office, alone."
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Yes but this places a task on someone, to decide when they're open to be interrupted or not. This places that work on them, and makes them do this work whether or not someone wants to interrupt them. In the office scenario, I as the interruptor take on the burden of finding out when someone is open to being interrupted (and it's not that hard). For example I can just say "I'll ask him the next time I see him" and wait until I see him go to the coffee machine or the bathroom. Or, if it's more urgent, I can take a peek in his office and see if he seems to be engrossed in thought or more relaxed.
    - glacials 4y ago
      Author here. As a companion to this, we had informal optional daily water cooler esque meetings that we used to fill the “I’ll ask them next time I see them” use case.
a1371 4y ago
I am always pretty concerned about a "hot mic" situation. Not because I might say something outrageous, but because perhaps I want to sing the lyric stuck in my head, or problem solve by taking to myself out loud. Managing to disconnect is already somewhat hard when you jump in and out of meetings on multiple platforms. All it takes is forgetting a button and you're broadcasting yourself by accident. As a user, that's my initial pause when seeing these kinds of things.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I once had a fight with my partner on a hot mic zoom call because everyone else was late by a half hour (let’s schedule a meeting after lunch, ope lunch is late) and zoom had a terrible UI. I checked many times to see if i was muted and always was… but not really.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Only use a mic/camera you control, tape over the rest. I use a wireless headset with a obvious red mute light to prevent mistakes like this. Don't trust the software to do it for you.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  The famous zoom fart that highlights you.
- Arainach 4y ago
  Discord supports push-to-talk, which I highly recommend. I wish all voice/video chat technologies would prioritize that support. It avoids all accidental mic problems.
2easy 4y ago
I don't get it. Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection? In my opinion everyone who's advocating "meetings" - formal or not - is just unable to express thoughts in writing. You have to learn to communicate asynchronously and become a better writer rather than trying to recreate the dysfunctional environment that you are familiar with.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Introverts view them as horrors. Extroverts love this stuff. I view meetings as next to worthless as nothing is retained as nobody writes anything down (and I am not willing to pay attention enough to do it as a rank and file dev who won't be blamed for it).
  - 2easy 4y ago
    I agree. Meetings are exclusive, usually poorly documented time wasters.
- jen729w 4y ago
  I disagree with the modern blanket assumption that meetings are bad. Meetings do not have to be bad. Now most meetings are bad, I’ll give you that. But a well-run meeting, with purpose, which doesn’t faff on and respects the participants’ time, is still a very effective way to get something done. It is a fallacy that every meeting can be replaced with email. I hate email more than I hate even a mediocre meeting.
  - 2easy 4y ago
    Yeah, especially random-pop-ins-by-anyone-with-no-agenda as a culture
- qq66 4y ago
  There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously. For everything else, synchronous meetings will continue to be essential (and even those projects like Linux which seem to be fully asynchronous usually have one contributor who dominates the project and thus the communication overhead/latency problem isn't as taxing)
KGF 4y ago
solatic 4y ago
We started using Discord the same way at my last company when the pandemic hit and everyone had to go remote-only overnight. It was immensely valuable for fostering a sense of presence and we were pretty proud to call it our "virtual office". Slack Huddles and Zoom can't hold a candle to it. Zoom doesn't foster a sense of "who's online now?" discovery (since it's used a lot as a tool for intercompany communication, and it's none of your vendors' business whether you're online now or not) and Slack Huddles doesn't default to having your speakers on, you need to decide to join the huddle, which is too much friction. $75/month (for a level 2 upgraded Discord chatroom, for upgraded audio), for a 50-100 person startup, was an incredibly good value. It wasn't quite the same as an in-person pop-in, you can't grab your coworker's keyboard to show them something when you share screens, but it's 80+% of the same thing. Which is why it's really sad that Discord doesn't scale for enterprise usage. No enterprise SSO, no way to search through or organize an ever-growing list of voice channels with an ever-growing number of people in them, no way to force the employees you invite to use their real names as their usernames so user management becomes difficult. We would have easily made the decision to throw Discord $10+/user/month if they would have decided to address the enterprise market. Shame.
quickthrower2 4y ago
It is simple. Just start a video call. With the following etiquette: Anyone can call anyone during office hours for any reason they would classically pop in. Anyone receiving such a call is entitled to ignore it. This has an additional advantage over the physical office: by declining the call you don’t get cognitively interrupted. With the popin the person starts talking about accounts API and the context switch has been forced on you. Unless you dispense with politeness in the physical office, but that is a lot harder to do. Maybe impossible without some team building role play training.
babyshake 4y ago
Is this possible to achieve with Slack (the voice channel as "office" that others can join), or does it only work with Discord?
gorgoiler 4y ago
Video conferencing forces me to look at a person’s face. I never really do that in real life. My best chats usually happen while walking in the nearby park, where we are both facing forward almost the entire time. There’s also a physical warmth you get when being near someone. Being physically close to a fellow primate who is part of your clan and who you trust not to kill you must trigger something that video calls do not. I have no training at all in any of this and this could be complete pseudish nonsense. I would be interested to read more informed opinions about this sort of thing.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  The article doesn't say video is the main purpose (or even necessary). I agree with you, having a common 'thing' to focus on together is great. I absolutely HATE video calls as well, but I can sit in a discord call for hours if there is something to focus on. Playing a game with someone, or people watching a video together, etc.
dbetteridge 4y ago
I think to solve this properly you first need to fix Bluetooth audio. I would have no problem having an open channel on discord for example for the team to pop in and out but doing so forces my Bluetooth headphones into 'microphone' profile and dramatically lowers the audio quality. Give me an option that allows me to have my music playing on full quality or an audiobook etc, then id happily leave a call open and muted.
- drozycki 4y ago
  Configure a separate microphone device system wide or in app, then your headphones should stay in audio output mode. I’m hoping that Bluetooth 5.2 and BLE audio fix this issue. It’s hard to find info on how the updated headset profile works in terms of bandwidth and latency of input and output.
m-ee 4y ago
I worked somewhere that used this software that had this exact feature. This was pre pandemic and they had two offices and a few remote employees. You could barge in and open up a video chat instantly if you really wanted but that was considered poor form. The more common thing was the "knock" button that would play a tone and ask if you were available for the pop in, which would start instantly when you accepted. It worked surprisingly well, although I did some consulting for them years later and they had moved to slack/google meets. https://www.sococo.com/ https://www.sococo.com/
JensRantil 4y ago
My former tram used to have a Google Meet URL which we tried to reuse in our meetings. We announced the URL in our Slack channel as a bookmark and in the description. Particularly, we had our morning standup using the URL and when we stayed around working together on something. Other people in the company would just be able to pop in and talk to use. It was super nice! I did see two issues with this, though: - Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on. - I felt it used some cognitive overhead being in a video call.
- crummy 4y ago
  > Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on. I was shocked when I found out this was the case in 2020. Surely this would be a solved thing! So annoying especially for this exact use case.
  - JensRantil 4y ago
    Yeah, I think it's a security feature not get run over by a car when talking - but I agree it would be nice to be able to turn off.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Best pop-in culture to my mind comes through simple old fashioned IRC with a few utility bots. The pop-in paradigm seems principally a matter of synchronisation/rendezvous. Someone is "available" because they are "holding you in mind" but still receptive to engage or not engage without consequence. Fancy high-bandwidth tools, including smartphones and web-video don't solve it because they create a commitment of presence. In response/defence people erect barriers, away messages, out-of-office notes etc, working hours get out of sync and asynchronous exchanges fall apart. IRC seems to find the best balance that approximates between a digital water-cooler where you can turn up and see who is up for a chat, and a notice board where you can leave a message "I called in, chat with me when you have time".
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  IRC may do this better than some other platforms depending on how you use it but I don’t think it’s ideal. In particular, most times when I’ve used IRC the social norm is to use a bouncer to stay connected persistently. Even in the absence of that, the fact that you can be joined to multiple channels simultaneously means you have some of the same issues as Slack of having to keep up with the goings-on in several channels. I think the Discord setup mentioned in the OP feels like a “place” because when you’re joined to one room, you’re crucially not in any of the others. You can do this with IRC but it’s not very natural. Honestly, I think the place where that interaction style would feel most natural is in a MUD.
lathiat 4y ago
Spaceballs… “Hey, I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall!”
infinitezest 4y ago
We just use Slack DMs to propose a huddle when appropriate. If I cant talk immediately, I can propose a time frame ("give me 5 or so"). This article seems super over-engineered to me.
maliker 4y ago
A phone call works great for a remote “pop-in”. Has worked for 100 years.
twobitshifter 4y ago
Does discord not just have away messages?
glacials 4y ago
Author here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments. 1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discord was an easy and incremental jump to take. Take whatever path makes sense for your culture. 2. “Why not make this asynchronous?” Asynchrony should indeed be the default mode of communication, but synchrony has its uses; between nonverbal communication and round-trip-time it is simply obnoxiously higher bandwidth. It trades away efficiency (person-hours) for speed (hours). The fewer people involved the better the exchange rate, which is why this article focuses on 1:1 interactions. I wrote about this later in my article “Why Be Synchronous?” [1] but tldr; synchrony should be deployed similarly to tech debt. [1]: https://twos.dev/async.html https://twos.dev/async.html
late2part 4y ago
I totally disagree with the premise of this blog post. At my last 3 jobs - it was common to slack or IRC "Got time for a zoom?" and on yes, type '/slack meeting talk.' remote pop-ins happen all the time.
oliverbennett 4y ago
By far the closest online equivalent to pop-ins I've had has been... inside video games. The first 10 hours of playing DayZ, a survival FPS with in-game spatial audio, was a revelation to me. Mostly relating to how, why and when people to talk to each other. I'm convinced you can't separate the work (talking or doing) from the workspace (real or virtual). I've been building a 3D visual collaboration platform that has some fairly obvious value in how you externalise/connect/recollect thoughts, but I'm really keen to explore if it can become a workplace where pop-ins and serendipitous social collisions come easily. For that to happen it needs to become something you can spend large chunk of your workday inside of, which is no easy task.

95 points by mcqueenjordan 4y ago

>the effort of physically going somewhere is high Ok, I realize there's a context for it. Still can't help, but laugh at how low is a "high" mark for physical effort when in office.

pid_0 4y ago

ianbutler 4y ago

That’s interesting but I’d have to wonder how effective it is for traditionally more introverted teams like engineering. Do they enforce a certain amount of time someone must be in their “office” and thus primed to be interrupted, maybe even only doing lite work? Or is this a case that works really well for only largely extroverted teams, sales, product, marketing etc. My suspicion is a non trivial amount of introverted staff will just never have an “open door” so to speak, but then you miss out on valuable interactions for the broader organization or team even if locally for the person they’re uncomfortable or annoying.

glacials 4y ago
Author here. We had no requirements to use this system so people frequently left their “office” to get some concentration time in. Some folks were rarely or never “in”, which was completely fine. (The company even had a standing “all meetings are optional” rule.)
jlturner 4y ago
In practice it has felt more collaborative and inclusive. I’m not / don’t work with OP (early stage startup also, < 5 engineers), but our team has been using only Discord for the last few weeks (using only 1 eng room, not 1 room per person like OP).

s0rce 4y ago

I just phone (or teams call) people (not scheduled meetings) to collaborate. This only really worked with people that I worked quite well with but it comes pretty close to just going over to their office and interrupting them. I'd ping them on slack/teams to see if they are free if I didn't know.

goldenkey 4y ago

throwaway787544 4y ago

> There's really no remote equivalent to the pop-in. There is one equivalent, and everyone is going to hate me suggesting it: call me. Pick up the phone and call me. Yeah, Gen Zers, I said it. Use your telephone to send me an alert that says you want to speak to me with your voice. If I have time to chat, I'll answer. If not, leave me a store-and-forward recorded offline message, aka voicemail. If I have time I'll listen to it and call you back. This is inferior to the pop-in for the interrupter, but superior for the interruptee. It gives us back control of whether we are interrupted (put your phone on silent if you really need to), it is universal and ubiquitous. Obviously, because of phone spam, this doesn't work with normal telephones (unless you add all your coworkers to your contacts). But Slack/MS Teams/Discord/VoIP/etc can solve that for us. Just tell everyone in your office to call you, and leave a message if you're not there and you will get back to them as soon as you can. Put "Call Me" as your away message. Voice calls worked well enough for nearly a century as a remote working method; I think we can learn to do it again.

svnpenn 4y ago
Given the described situation (company already using Discord), your suggestion is obviously silly. The solution proposed is simple and uses an existing tool that they are already using.
GlennS 4y ago
Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message? I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.
- throwaway787544 4y ago
  I was hoping people would use it to explain what they wanted to talk about, since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want, and speaking is easier than typing. But I guess I forgot that people on voicemail just say "hey it's X, call me back when you get this". It would be nice if Slack had an away message that was sent back to the user when they message you, rather than a status that nobody ever reads.

rtev 4y ago

Slack Huddles directly address this issue pretty effectively.

_freek 4y ago
Too bad screen sharing quality is somehow way worse with huddles.

jlturner 4y ago

This is definitely a killer feature on Discord for remote working. Being able to see who is in a room, join ad hoc, and work along side them has greatly reduced communication friction, and I’ve grown to love using (basically only) Discord over Slack + Calendar + Zoom/Meet to manage team communications.

ahmetnoid 4y ago

In my workplace we use zoom breakout rooms as an alternative. When we have a meeting we move to the main room and have it there. Otherwise each member is in a breakout room.

mh- 4y ago
oh, that's kind of clever. So when not otherwise in a zoom, each of you hang out in your own breakout room so others can "drop in"?
- ahmetnoid 4y ago
  Exactly. If I want to drop in all I need to do is to check the breakout rooms list then move to the room where my colleague is. And once done I can go back to my breakout room. We also use it when pair programming remotely. It's quite effective and it eliminates communication barrier.
  - mh- 4y ago
    Very cool. Thanks for the reply.

raymondgh 4y ago

My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.

dwrtz 4y ago
Sorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.
- GordonS 4y ago
  Interesting, do you think you have a chance at competing against Microsoft's own tools, like Teams? Regardless how crappy Teams is at certain things, the people that decide "we're using Teams" often barely use it themselves.
  - texasbigdata 4y ago
    Look at Microsoft buying sunrise, even though the server based calendar outlook feature was arguably fully fledged. There’s always space:
  - 4y ago

spoonjim 4y ago

Is it just me or are purple using a lot of goofy-ass fonts these days? What the fuck is the lowercase “f” in this post?

ricardobeat 4y ago
Looks like a programming font, where having the word “function” stand out is good.

aar9 4y ago

> If you're going to the restroom and will be AFK, you can join the restroom channel. You're in, but away. No one is actually wearing a headset on the toilet, it's just a fun way to feel like a real office. Interesting, I would never have expected anyone to feel the need of recreating this particular piece of office life in a remote setting.

colechristensen 4y ago
Likewise, this is quite possibly the worst suggestion or best troll I’ve seen in months.
- wsc981 4y ago
  As an employer I’d like to know how much time my employees spend in the restroom each day, so I can only applaud this suggestion.
  - awestroke 4y ago
    Worst employer ever
- oplaadpunt 4y ago
  I don't think it's that terrible. The little jokes lighten the mood, and make it feel more real and in-person. Online meetings have a tendency towards formalism in my experience
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  I don't understand how this is better than simply sending the person a message.
Test0129 4y ago
I've realized that extroverts are really, really damaged by the remote work setting. The word "fun" gets thrown around a lot but to me the reason remote is so great is because I don't have to play make-believe with my coworkers. That being said this suggestion is hilarious. I would imagine people are auto-muted in the restroom channel so it seems like the ideal place to sit yourself if you're required in zoom all day. It's totally valid. I often get my best thinking done in the bathroom.

samcheng 4y ago

One related technique that I think works well is to hold "Office Hours" at least once a week. Just schedule a regular meeting, and attend it - then advertise widely that you are available at that time and that anyone is welcome. It's a great way to foster skip-level interactions, give help to someone who needs it, and just chat. It's really fun when a few people come in at once. Sometimes nobody shows up, and that's fine, too. Give it a try!

anonred 4y ago
I’ve had lackluster results with hosting weekly office hours. A grand total of 2 engineers showed up, both on my direct team, out of 100+ ICs in my org over the course of 2 months. But your mileage will vary depending on workplace culture I suppose.
- samcheng 4y ago
  Honestly I think it works best inter-functionally. Many engineers won't volunteer for a meeting, even (maybe especially) if it's just for chit-chat. Maker's schedule and all that. http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- arccy 4y ago
  maybe the scope of your direct team is too small, try a combined office hours with several related teams cohosting? at least you have each other to chat to if noone shows up.
wortelefant 4y ago
in weeks with more spontaneous requests I use https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/ and put a link in my profile to announce daily meeting slots
Test0129 4y ago
I don't want to be the downer here because this is a common view and my company does this as well. I personally do not have fun in these kinds of meetings. Even if they were held in person. My goal at the end of the day is to finish my work quickly and efficiently and try to get out a little early while meeting my obligations. Typically these chats eat up an hour or more and I end up working longer to make up for it. They are extremely useful for helping newer engineers and answering questions but the "fun" chats tend to be just time consuming noise. It's entirely possible I have a different/maligned view of my relationship with my job but I just don't like giving any more than I have to for something that consumes 40-60 hours a week of my life.

spoonjim 4y ago

The thing that remote “pop in” doesn’t do is let me assess how interruptible someone is. When I pop in on someone in an office, I do it when I’m not interrupting their deep work — it’s extremely easy to tell when this is. Remotely, it’s much harder.

PebblesRox 4y ago
Looks like in this setup, people only join their office room when they're open to being interrupted: "When you are online and able to be disturbed, you join your office, alone."
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Yes but this places a task on someone, to decide when they're open to be interrupted or not. This places that work on them, and makes them do this work whether or not someone wants to interrupt them. In the office scenario, I as the interruptor take on the burden of finding out when someone is open to being interrupted (and it's not that hard). For example I can just say "I'll ask him the next time I see him" and wait until I see him go to the coffee machine or the bathroom. Or, if it's more urgent, I can take a peek in his office and see if he seems to be engrossed in thought or more relaxed.
  - glacials 4y ago
    Author here. As a companion to this, we had informal optional daily water cooler esque meetings that we used to fill the “I’ll ask them next time I see them” use case.

a1371 4y ago

I am always pretty concerned about a "hot mic" situation. Not because I might say something outrageous, but because perhaps I want to sing the lyric stuck in my head, or problem solve by taking to myself out loud. Managing to disconnect is already somewhat hard when you jump in and out of meetings on multiple platforms. All it takes is forgetting a button and you're broadcasting yourself by accident. As a user, that's my initial pause when seeing these kinds of things.

colechristensen 4y ago
I once had a fight with my partner on a hot mic zoom call because everyone else was late by a half hour (let’s schedule a meeting after lunch, ope lunch is late) and zoom had a terrible UI. I checked many times to see if i was muted and always was… but not really.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Only use a mic/camera you control, tape over the rest. I use a wireless headset with a obvious red mute light to prevent mistakes like this. Don't trust the software to do it for you.
the_gipsy 4y ago
The famous zoom fart that highlights you.
Arainach 4y ago
Discord supports push-to-talk, which I highly recommend. I wish all voice/video chat technologies would prioritize that support. It avoids all accidental mic problems.

2easy 4y ago

I don't get it. Why people are trying to recreate the horrors of the office? Is it because of luck of human connection? In my opinion everyone who's advocating "meetings" - formal or not - is just unable to express thoughts in writing. You have to learn to communicate asynchronously and become a better writer rather than trying to recreate the dysfunctional environment that you are familiar with.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Introverts view them as horrors. Extroverts love this stuff. I view meetings as next to worthless as nothing is retained as nobody writes anything down (and I am not willing to pay attention enough to do it as a rank and file dev who won't be blamed for it).
- 2easy 4y ago
  I agree. Meetings are exclusive, usually poorly documented time wasters.
jen729w 4y ago
I disagree with the modern blanket assumption that meetings are bad. Meetings do not have to be bad. Now most meetings are bad, I’ll give you that. But a well-run meeting, with purpose, which doesn’t faff on and respects the participants’ time, is still a very effective way to get something done. It is a fallacy that every meeting can be replaced with email. I hate email more than I hate even a mediocre meeting.
- 2easy 4y ago
  Yeah, especially random-pop-ins-by-anyone-with-no-agenda as a culture
qq66 4y ago
There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously. For everything else, synchronous meetings will continue to be essential (and even those projects like Linux which seem to be fully asynchronous usually have one contributor who dominates the project and thus the communication overhead/latency problem isn't as taxing)

KGF 4y ago

solatic 4y ago

We started using Discord the same way at my last company when the pandemic hit and everyone had to go remote-only overnight. It was immensely valuable for fostering a sense of presence and we were pretty proud to call it our "virtual office". Slack Huddles and Zoom can't hold a candle to it. Zoom doesn't foster a sense of "who's online now?" discovery (since it's used a lot as a tool for intercompany communication, and it's none of your vendors' business whether you're online now or not) and Slack Huddles doesn't default to having your speakers on, you need to decide to join the huddle, which is too much friction. $75/month (for a level 2 upgraded Discord chatroom, for upgraded audio), for a 50-100 person startup, was an incredibly good value. It wasn't quite the same as an in-person pop-in, you can't grab your coworker's keyboard to show them something when you share screens, but it's 80+% of the same thing. Which is why it's really sad that Discord doesn't scale for enterprise usage. No enterprise SSO, no way to search through or organize an ever-growing list of voice channels with an ever-growing number of people in them, no way to force the employees you invite to use their real names as their usernames so user management becomes difficult. We would have easily made the decision to throw Discord $10+/user/month if they would have decided to address the enterprise market. Shame.

quickthrower2 4y ago

It is simple. Just start a video call. With the following etiquette: Anyone can call anyone during office hours for any reason they would classically pop in. Anyone receiving such a call is entitled to ignore it. This has an additional advantage over the physical office: by declining the call you don’t get cognitively interrupted. With the popin the person starts talking about accounts API and the context switch has been forced on you. Unless you dispense with politeness in the physical office, but that is a lot harder to do. Maybe impossible without some team building role play training.

babyshake 4y ago

Is this possible to achieve with Slack (the voice channel as "office" that others can join), or does it only work with Discord?

gorgoiler 4y ago

Video conferencing forces me to look at a person’s face. I never really do that in real life. My best chats usually happen while walking in the nearby park, where we are both facing forward almost the entire time. There’s also a physical warmth you get when being near someone. Being physically close to a fellow primate who is part of your clan and who you trust not to kill you must trigger something that video calls do not. I have no training at all in any of this and this could be complete pseudish nonsense. I would be interested to read more informed opinions about this sort of thing.

wingerlang 4y ago
The article doesn't say video is the main purpose (or even necessary). I agree with you, having a common 'thing' to focus on together is great. I absolutely HATE video calls as well, but I can sit in a discord call for hours if there is something to focus on. Playing a game with someone, or people watching a video together, etc.

dbetteridge 4y ago

I think to solve this properly you first need to fix Bluetooth audio. I would have no problem having an open channel on discord for example for the team to pop in and out but doing so forces my Bluetooth headphones into 'microphone' profile and dramatically lowers the audio quality. Give me an option that allows me to have my music playing on full quality or an audiobook etc, then id happily leave a call open and muted.

drozycki 4y ago
Configure a separate microphone device system wide or in app, then your headphones should stay in audio output mode. I’m hoping that Bluetooth 5.2 and BLE audio fix this issue. It’s hard to find info on how the updated headset profile works in terms of bandwidth and latency of input and output.

m-ee 4y ago

I worked somewhere that used this software that had this exact feature. This was pre pandemic and they had two offices and a few remote employees. You could barge in and open up a video chat instantly if you really wanted but that was considered poor form. The more common thing was the "knock" button that would play a tone and ask if you were available for the pop in, which would start instantly when you accepted. It worked surprisingly well, although I did some consulting for them years later and they had moved to slack/google meets. https://www.sococo.com/ https://www.sococo.com/

JensRantil 4y ago

My former tram used to have a Google Meet URL which we tried to reuse in our meetings. We announced the URL in our Slack channel as a bookmark and in the description. Particularly, we had our morning standup using the URL and when we stayed around working together on something. Other people in the company would just be able to pop in and talk to use. It was super nice! I did see two issues with this, though: - Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on. - I felt it used some cognitive overhead being in a video call.

crummy 4y ago
> Bluetooth headphones have worse audio when mic is on. I was shocked when I found out this was the case in 2020. Surely this would be a solved thing! So annoying especially for this exact use case.
- JensRantil 4y ago
  Yeah, I think it's a security feature not get run over by a car when talking - but I agree it would be nice to be able to turn off.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Best pop-in culture to my mind comes through simple old fashioned IRC with a few utility bots. The pop-in paradigm seems principally a matter of synchronisation/rendezvous. Someone is "available" because they are "holding you in mind" but still receptive to engage or not engage without consequence. Fancy high-bandwidth tools, including smartphones and web-video don't solve it because they create a commitment of presence. In response/defence people erect barriers, away messages, out-of-office notes etc, working hours get out of sync and asynchronous exchanges fall apart. IRC seems to find the best balance that approximates between a digital water-cooler where you can turn up and see who is up for a chat, and a notice board where you can leave a message "I called in, chat with me when you have time".

ryukafalz 4y ago
IRC may do this better than some other platforms depending on how you use it but I don’t think it’s ideal. In particular, most times when I’ve used IRC the social norm is to use a bouncer to stay connected persistently. Even in the absence of that, the fact that you can be joined to multiple channels simultaneously means you have some of the same issues as Slack of having to keep up with the goings-on in several channels. I think the Discord setup mentioned in the OP feels like a “place” because when you’re joined to one room, you’re crucially not in any of the others. You can do this with IRC but it’s not very natural. Honestly, I think the place where that interaction style would feel most natural is in a MUD.

lathiat 4y ago

Spaceballs… “Hey, I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall!”

infinitezest 4y ago

We just use Slack DMs to propose a huddle when appropriate. If I cant talk immediately, I can propose a time frame ("give me 5 or so"). This article seems super over-engineered to me.

maliker 4y ago

A phone call works great for a remote “pop-in”. Has worked for 100 years.

twobitshifter 4y ago

Does discord not just have away messages?

glacials 4y ago

Author here, happy to see some discussion around this. I see two major classes of comments. 1. “Why not accomplish this with X?” We arrived at this solution organically, which was important for adoption: a Discord server meant for gaming hour turned into hangout rooms turned into offices. It may not be the best option, but best means nil if you can’t convince people to use it. For us and our existing culture, Discord was an easy and incremental jump to take. Take whatever path makes sense for your culture. 2. “Why not make this asynchronous?” Asynchrony should indeed be the default mode of communication, but synchrony has its uses; between nonverbal communication and round-trip-time it is simply obnoxiously higher bandwidth. It trades away efficiency (person-hours) for speed (hours). The fewer people involved the better the exchange rate, which is why this article focuses on 1:1 interactions. I wrote about this later in my article “Why Be Synchronous?” [1] but tldr; synchrony should be deployed similarly to tech debt. [1]: https://twos.dev/async.html https://twos.dev/async.html

late2part 4y ago

I totally disagree with the premise of this blog post. At my last 3 jobs - it was common to slack or IRC "Got time for a zoom?" and on yes, type '/slack meeting talk.' remote pop-ins happen all the time.

oliverbennett 4y ago

By far the closest online equivalent to pop-ins I've had has been... inside video games. The first 10 hours of playing DayZ, a survival FPS with in-game spatial audio, was a revelation to me. Mostly relating to how, why and when people to talk to each other. I'm convinced you can't separate the work (talking or doing) from the workspace (real or virtual). I've been building a 3D visual collaboration platform that has some fairly obvious value in how you externalise/connect/recollect thoughts, but I'm really keen to explore if it can become a workplace where pop-ins and serendipitous social collisions come easily. For that to happen it needs to become something you can spend large chunk of your workday inside of, which is no easy task.