7 ms·

If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re availab

If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re available). If they’re constantly not available, maybe there are other reasons they can’t come that should be followed up on. I just don’t believe that most of your team is not busy and then all of the remote workers are never available at the same time. Working remotely is a culture. It is very easy to turn your ad-hoc in-person meetings into ad-hoc “here’s a link to an online meeting”. Get your work to buy you an iPad Pro and an Apple Pen and you even get the whiteboard experience. I have worked in many places where teams are located in different states or offices (but still work in the office). Is it okay to not engage a 1/3 of your team because they work at a different office? What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?

nightpool 3y ago
It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up. > What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them? I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
- stormking 3y ago
  In reality you're just disrupting everyones work and bully them into putting your problem first.
  - nightpool 3y ago
    No. In reality, I'm more able to find times that work for other people where I'm not disrupting them, by using context clues and non-verbal information to determine what the best time to talk to them is. And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional. There are a few rare scenarios where code reviews are higher priority (high chance of merge conflicts, hotfixes) but code reviews themselves should be asynchronous. But that situation should be rare and clearly signalled as higher priority.
      - nightpool 3y ago
        > If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
        3y ago
eddythompson80 3y ago
because 9 out of 10 times I'd ping someone saying "Hey X, got a minute we want to discuss Y and Z" then I'd get a response 40 minutes later of "sorry I was focusing on W. What's up? How can I help?". Then I look around and 2 of the 4 people are not at their desks anymore and it's all just a shitshow. If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  So let me break something down for you real quick. Higher up you say the following: > You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting. The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish. Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    It's a lot easier to look around, see that 1 out of 6 has headphones on, think "they must be busy", let's wait for them to put their headphones down or the next major office interruption or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in vs everything you've mentioned.
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      You can do the same thing in a remote environment. Schedule a meeting in the morning of the next day as people are logging onto work. Or schedule stuff for after lunch before people get back into focus mode. All of this stuff can be done with proper scheduling rather than just grabbing people as they go and assuming that it's not interrupting their work.

nightpool 3y ago

It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up. > What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them? I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.

stormking 3y ago
In reality you're just disrupting everyones work and bully them into putting your problem first.
- nightpool 3y ago
  No. In reality, I'm more able to find times that work for other people where I'm not disrupting them, by using context clues and non-verbal information to determine what the best time to talk to them is. And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional. There are a few rare scenarios where code reviews are higher priority (high chance of merge conflicts, hotfixes) but code reviews themselves should be asynchronous. But that situation should be rare and clearly signalled as higher priority.
    - nightpool 3y ago
      > If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.
      - 3y ago

eddythompson80 3y ago

because 9 out of 10 times I'd ping someone saying "Hey X, got a minute we want to discuss Y and Z" then I'd get a response 40 minutes later of "sorry I was focusing on W. What's up? How can I help?". Then I look around and 2 of the 4 people are not at their desks anymore and it's all just a shitshow. If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails

fzeroracer 3y ago
So let me break something down for you real quick. Higher up you say the following: > You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting. The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish. Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  It's a lot easier to look around, see that 1 out of 6 has headphones on, think "they must be busy", let's wait for them to put their headphones down or the next major office interruption or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in vs everything you've mentioned.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    You can do the same thing in a remote environment. Schedule a meeting in the morning of the next day as people are logging onto work. Or schedule stuff for after lunch before people get back into focus mode. All of this stuff can be done with proper scheduling rather than just grabbing people as they go and assuming that it's not interrupting their work.