5 ms·

The elephant in the room is that these "What is Oscar up to? If only I could glance at their monitor… If only I could see their facial expression… If only I cou

by geor9e 3y ago

The elephant in the room is that these "What is Oscar up to? If only I could glance at their monitor… If only I could see their facial expression… If only I could spitball ideas within earshot of him." problems would also be solved with everyone in office. Don't shoot me tho, I'm just a messenger. I love remote work. But the friction is tough.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
While trying to focus and troubleshoot, the only thing I love more than people asking to share my screen and explaining everything I'm scrolling past, is having to do it while three people breathe over my physical shoulder.
- MenhirMike 3y ago
  Yep, especially because those three people are not sitting at their computers, doing work to advance the investigation themselves. Even when I was still working in an office, coordinating incidents through a Google Hangout and a Google Doc to keep rough notes was the way to go. Want to show something? Share screen. Want to talk in private? Jump into a private hangout. Want to jot down some thoughts/unfinished ideas? Throw them into the document (the Hangout chat was pretty useless because people joining later couldn't scroll back) or into the dedicated Slack channel for the incident. If anything, incidents have become much easier to coordinate thanks to all the tooling that we now have - though that requires an active incident commander (who also makes sure that Deanna, Deepak, and Sylvain are not just waiting, but investigating other possibilities). Fortunately, someone has written an article on how to become a better incident commander :)
- zdragnar 3y ago
  I rather liked using gather.town during a period of time where our team often needed to pull together to swarm on some outage or performance program or bug. We were up against a very tight deadline for a client and there was a massive feature bumping up against some hard realities. I absolutely wouldn't want that to be my daily life, but while we needed it, it worked. More than that, it was better than being in an office- when I wasn't needed or wanted to crack down on something without distraction, it was super easy to get away from the noise. When I saw a bunch of avatars in a meeting room, I could pop in without causing a disturbance to see if it was about anything I could pitch in on. Thankfully, we're long past that point, and it became a lot less useful to the point that our team stopped using it not long after we were out of crunch mode.
el_benhameen 3y ago
I dunno. A lot of the incidents I’ve dealt with have been at ~3 am. No way I’m driving to the office then. So it’s good to be good at doing this remotely, even if it isn’t your first choice. (Full disclosure, it is my first choice. I agree with the sibling poster that having someone stare at me as I debug is not my preferred debugging environment. I need to be able to stare off into space and think “why the hell is this happening?!?!” without judgment.)
wging 3y ago
Not all of them. This problem isn’t an artifact of remote work or even geographically distributed teams. You might just call someone from your desk and comfortable setup, instead of walking up a flight of stairs. Or you might be in a different building, in a different city, or different country halfway across the world. Or it might just be 4 AM for everyone, and there might be no time to go into the office, even if you all normally sit together. All of these are real things I’ve seen and not hypothetical in the least.
ironmagma 3y ago
Honestly even with all of that it will never be enough. And the anxiety of being watched would likely make you more ineffective.
commandar 3y ago
If you need everyone working an incident physically around the same table in order to respond effectively, your organization is not equipped to respond effectively to incidents in general. I'm speaking as someone who worked full time doing nothing but incident management at a F500 for a couple of years before the pandemic. The incident team for literally every single response I ran in that time was effectively remote; most weren't in the same building as me, probably weren't in the same time zone as me, and it wasn't unusual for them to be on a different hemisphere entirely. Physical proximity to one another has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to work an incident. Effective communication is vital, but this isn't uncharted territory. Large organizations have been doing this effectively for a very long time before the entire in office/remote debate ever became a popular controversy.
forgotusername6 3y ago
I was in the middle of what I thought could have been an incident the other day. While debugging, with two others at my desk, I was approached no less than 3 other times by groups of people just wanting to say, introduce themselves etc. I told them that we were facing an issue, trying to work through it, but it didn't matter. Trying to break off conversations was more stressful than the incident itself.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  When I worked in an office, I had a favorite place I would go when I needed to really focus on getting work done. Now I can just switch to a window that doesn't have any communication apps on it and focus as long as I want. I miss lots of other things about offices, but it's much easier to focus elsewhere.
sanderjd 3y ago
Half the time, these incident responses are happening in the middle of the night.
mlrtime 3y ago
What you are talking about is debugging, this is incident command. Completely different, no office environment solves this problem.
Chris2048 3y ago
So, instead of micromanaging your investigation, we micromanage their facial expressions? If Oscar wants your ideas, maybe he should be able to ask for them, or accept a spitball-session. Whatever you conclude from his facial expression, maybe he can verbalise that himself, unambiguously if relevant; instead of frantic speculation based on first impressions.
unethical_ban 3y ago
As someone who has worked on many a network outage, and as someone who values in-person work time to get to know my extended teams and see faces, I will say that live troubleshooting in the same room is not valuable. A good whiteboard software with incident exec summary, chat history, and "useful links" from troubleshooting chatter is needed. Maybe I've benefitted from having my own team colocated during an outage. But it has rarely been useful to have a cross-functional outage team in the same room when doing log research.

by geor9e 3y ago

pavel_lishin 3y ago

While trying to focus and troubleshoot, the only thing I love more than people asking to share my screen and explaining everything I'm scrolling past, is having to do it while three people breathe over my physical shoulder.

MenhirMike 3y ago
Yep, especially because those three people are not sitting at their computers, doing work to advance the investigation themselves. Even when I was still working in an office, coordinating incidents through a Google Hangout and a Google Doc to keep rough notes was the way to go. Want to show something? Share screen. Want to talk in private? Jump into a private hangout. Want to jot down some thoughts/unfinished ideas? Throw them into the document (the Hangout chat was pretty useless because people joining later couldn't scroll back) or into the dedicated Slack channel for the incident. If anything, incidents have become much easier to coordinate thanks to all the tooling that we now have - though that requires an active incident commander (who also makes sure that Deanna, Deepak, and Sylvain are not just waiting, but investigating other possibilities). Fortunately, someone has written an article on how to become a better incident commander :)
zdragnar 3y ago
I rather liked using gather.town during a period of time where our team often needed to pull together to swarm on some outage or performance program or bug. We were up against a very tight deadline for a client and there was a massive feature bumping up against some hard realities. I absolutely wouldn't want that to be my daily life, but while we needed it, it worked. More than that, it was better than being in an office- when I wasn't needed or wanted to crack down on something without distraction, it was super easy to get away from the noise. When I saw a bunch of avatars in a meeting room, I could pop in without causing a disturbance to see if it was about anything I could pitch in on. Thankfully, we're long past that point, and it became a lot less useful to the point that our team stopped using it not long after we were out of crunch mode.

el_benhameen 3y ago

I dunno. A lot of the incidents I’ve dealt with have been at ~3 am. No way I’m driving to the office then. So it’s good to be good at doing this remotely, even if it isn’t your first choice. (Full disclosure, it is my first choice. I agree with the sibling poster that having someone stare at me as I debug is not my preferred debugging environment. I need to be able to stare off into space and think “why the hell is this happening?!?!” without judgment.)

wging 3y ago

Not all of them. This problem isn’t an artifact of remote work or even geographically distributed teams. You might just call someone from your desk and comfortable setup, instead of walking up a flight of stairs. Or you might be in a different building, in a different city, or different country halfway across the world. Or it might just be 4 AM for everyone, and there might be no time to go into the office, even if you all normally sit together. All of these are real things I’ve seen and not hypothetical in the least.

ironmagma 3y ago

Honestly even with all of that it will never be enough. And the anxiety of being watched would likely make you more ineffective.

commandar 3y ago

If you need everyone working an incident physically around the same table in order to respond effectively, your organization is not equipped to respond effectively to incidents in general. I'm speaking as someone who worked full time doing nothing but incident management at a F500 for a couple of years before the pandemic. The incident team for literally every single response I ran in that time was effectively remote; most weren't in the same building as me, probably weren't in the same time zone as me, and it wasn't unusual for them to be on a different hemisphere entirely. Physical proximity to one another has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to work an incident. Effective communication is vital, but this isn't uncharted territory. Large organizations have been doing this effectively for a very long time before the entire in office/remote debate ever became a popular controversy.

forgotusername6 3y ago

I was in the middle of what I thought could have been an incident the other day. While debugging, with two others at my desk, I was approached no less than 3 other times by groups of people just wanting to say, introduce themselves etc. I told them that we were facing an issue, trying to work through it, but it didn't matter. Trying to break off conversations was more stressful than the incident itself.

sanderjd 3y ago
When I worked in an office, I had a favorite place I would go when I needed to really focus on getting work done. Now I can just switch to a window that doesn't have any communication apps on it and focus as long as I want. I miss lots of other things about offices, but it's much easier to focus elsewhere.

sanderjd 3y ago

Half the time, these incident responses are happening in the middle of the night.

mlrtime 3y ago

What you are talking about is debugging, this is incident command. Completely different, no office environment solves this problem.

Chris2048 3y ago

So, instead of micromanaging your investigation, we micromanage their facial expressions? If Oscar wants your ideas, maybe he should be able to ask for them, or accept a spitball-session. Whatever you conclude from his facial expression, maybe he can verbalise that himself, unambiguously if relevant; instead of frantic speculation based on first impressions.

unethical_ban 3y ago

As someone who has worked on many a network outage, and as someone who values in-person work time to get to know my extended teams and see faces, I will say that live troubleshooting in the same room is not valuable. A good whiteboard software with incident exec summary, chat history, and "useful links" from troubleshooting chatter is needed. Maybe I've benefitted from having my own team colocated during an outage. But it has rarely been useful to have a cross-functional outage team in the same room when doing log research.