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If you're remote, ramble
- nixpulvis 1y agoI like having an #offtopic and #thoughts channel for not worrying about burying important info in. If something meaningful happens it'll get captured, otherwise it serves to connect and relate.
- bobek 1y agoMildly related are written standups [1] when treated as journal/logbook. [1] https://www.bobek.cz/the-power-of-written-standup/ https://www.bobek.cz/the-power-of-written-standup/
- _Algernon_ 1y agoThis is unreadable. Increase the contrast, please... Edit: I may be falsely blaming the contrast, but something about the design is causing me eye strain. Im not sure what. Here is a screenshot how the site looks to me: https://imgur.com/a/LNVCMRc https://imgur.com/a/LNVCMRc Maybe someone else can figure it out.
- MrGilbert 1y agoMaybe there is some technical issue for you regarding the automatic switch between light and dark mode. Under normal circumstances, it is perfectly readable.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoI tried both light and dark. Ended up switching to reader mode. Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.
- MrGilbert 1y agoJust saw your imgur. That is broken, yeah. The text should have a far more darker color. As another commenter pointed out, maybe there is an issue with the Javascript on this page.
- bapak 1y agoThere's nothing wrong with the contrast, it's more than 10:1. For reference 4.5:1 is AA and 7:1 is AAA in WCAG
- mavamaarten 1y agoIt's almost-white light gray on almost black. What are you on about?
- baobun 1y agoIt was unreadable for me too initially. Quick guesstimate: The page has a (JS-dependent) light-mode/dark-mode switch. It defaults to "light". Meanwhile a browser configured to default to dark theming will only partly apply the themed parts (the pages own function being stuck in light), resulting in an objectively unreadable black-on-dark-gray. Even enabling JS, the button in the upper right corner still has to be clicked to make it readable.
- shakna 1y agoOn my lower end smartphone, the font is so fine that there's dropped pixels that is upsetting my eyes.
- bravesoul2 1y agoA social channel seperate from work stuff is good. It lets you post the messages that otherwise be "oh won't post that as it'll bother 20 people who meed to decide if it's urgent"
- romanovcode 1y agoSo... basically use a private-messaging feature?
- querez 1y agoI think what is distinct in this proposal is that there are n 1:n channels
- 9dev 1y agoThe cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement. I appreciate any effort to increase social cohesion in remote teams, but intermingling it with one of the main stressors of my work environment—keeping up with team communication—isn’t the right way IMHO.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hk__2 1y ago> The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement. The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
- firesteelrain 1y agoIn teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?
- OJFord 1y agoSlack will turn them a muted colour, and they'll only get an unread indication if you're explicitly pinged by default, but I think you can turn even that off too.
- firesteelrain 1y agoHmm ok we don’t use Slack and it would have to be on prem due to company policy
- aar9 1y agoMuted channels in Slack do not indicate in any way when there's a new message.
- rablackburn 1y agoI did read the post, but allow me to also recommend rambling when you’re remote. As in, take time in your day to wander and roam. (I would go for a ~1hr hike in the mornings as my “commute”) It gives you a sense of distinction from being home or “at work”. The routine cardio, and musings you have while walking make it well worth it.
- gwbas1c 1y agoThis is also known as "driving your kids to school." When my schedule allows, I walk my dog with my daughter and pause at her bus stop and meet her friends. Years ago it was a 45 minute walk, round trip, to daycare.
- closewith 1y agoIdeally not driving, as the walk is at least half the benefit.
- laweijfmvo 1y agonot to be confused with “dropping the kids off at the pool,” right?
- tnel77 1y agoNo. That happens once you get to work and you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
- DiggyJohnson 1y agoHow do you mean?
- swivelmaster 1y agoYou must not be a coffee drinker!
- pbnjay 1y ago
- skhameneh 1y agoThis is what things like "water cooler chat" looks like for remote-first. This is the fundamental difference between what a healthy remote-first company starts to look like versus the soulless version historically in-person companies try to sell. To the author, thank you for sharing your version of the dynamics.
- MrGilbert 1y agoIt also shows that remote work requires work to work out. You simply cannot bump into your colleagues, so socializing needs to be planned. On a small scale, a regular coffee talk might work. But I love the idea of this being more of a "pull". Like, everyone can consume it at their own pace.
- jon-wood 1y agoWe’ve got a similar but different approach at work of having assorted channels that are around non-work topics. DIY, cooking, music, etc. It’s not quite the same as a water cooler, and we augment this with regular get togethers, but it does help give everyone a glimpse into people’s wider lives.
- globular-toast 1y agoOur ramble channel is literally called "Water Cooler". After reading this post I will ramble in there more often, I think.
- siva7 1y ago> We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.
- MrGilbert 1y agoAlthough it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place. I'd also argue that "scheduled meetings" doesn’t translate to "water cooler talk" automatically. So even if you'd have regular scheduled meetings, you might still crave for some socializing.
- siva7 1y agoI would hope so that scheduled meetings would not translate to water cooler talk. I want to talk about the agenda and not some smalltalk. People tried crazy things during covid to replicate the water cooler talk through remote tools. If we can have some laughs together about the agenda, that's what i like. People are different i guess.
- MrGilbert 1y agoI usually ask people if they are open to a coffee talk. Just 15 minutes each month. Some people talk about their personal life, others talk about what's on their mind with regards to this and that work project. It‘s interesting how different people are. I‘m fine with any of those topics - I value the interaction more than the content.
- scarface_74 1y agoI’m not anti social by any means. Part of my job has been flying out to talk to customers, the business dinners, helping sells to close deals (I’m more of the post sales architect), etc. There is a bar downstairs where I live in a tourist area where I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there, maybe get a drink or sip on diet soda and just talk to whoever comes down and with the bartender. We had a regional in person get together a day before I went on vacation and the get together was supposed to be an overnight trip. I flew in the morning and flew out back home late that night just so I could attend the social events the day before the meeting. All that and I hate remote “social” events and don’t attend. I loved our team’s quarterly get togethers where we would fly out out to one of our company’s headquarters once a quarter someone in the US. All of us are older (35+) and have lives outside of work. We come to work to make money, not to socialize.
- udev4096 1y ago[flagged]
- processing 1y agoany tips for a team of one and claude code?
- madduci 1y agoAt work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use isnky own chat (where inam alone), where in post links that mostly interest me. Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
- navane 1y agoToo many typos isnky -> is my Inam -> I am In -> I? Funnily, the first two autocorrected when I typed then in and I genuinely didn't know what isnky was supposed to mean. On topic though, if no one else can read it it's like writing in your own local notes files.
- madduci 1y agoAt work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use is my own chat, with my own Name, where i post links that mostly can catch my interests and use for future reference. Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
- senko 1y agoI fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code). While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.
- barnabee 1y agoYeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams
- nottorp 1y agoThat's what #general on slack is for, mostly?
- Stratoscope 1y ago#random
- layer8 1y agoIt depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.
- senko 1y agoIn my experience some orgs use it as all-hands (with #random for chitchat), others as water-cooler. As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.
- herval 1y ago“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit
- kepano 1y agoIn practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling. We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.
- apples_oranges 1y agoI think perhaps counter intuitively this harms the team spirit. Those things still get voiced in chat threads and more importantly in 1:1 calls/chats, allowing individuals to bond more intimately over non strictly project related things. Team chat is for the project.
- k4rnaj1k 1y ago[dead]
- esperent 1y agoI already have fatigue from too many chats and channels. Please don't make me track and check another ten. A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.
- jelder 1y agoI use something similar, but call them “Rubber-duck channels.” http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effective-remote-teams.html http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...
- makeitdouble 1y ago> Each ramblings channel should be named after the team member, and only that person can post top-level messages. Others can reply in threads, but not start new ones. I'm trying hard to understand why it has to be a personal channel. Water coolers aren't personal, that's the whole point. In particular you're still adjusting what you write to be OK for anyone in your team read, so the distinction with the other "casual" channels sounds thin. OTOH if your team doesn't have a casual place to say random stuff, it would be a nice improvement to get one.
- aljimbra 1y agoI am conscious of double posting, and bumping other people's messages off of the page too soon. If I'm posting too much I get annoyed at myself on behalf of other people. So that would be a big plus of these channels to me.
- makeitdouble 1y agoI see your point. It might not help in all situations, but I see some people threading their posts to avoid that effect and somewhat keep a context to their thoughts if someone wants to jump in.
- npteljes 1y agoCommon channels can also work nice, but sometimes there is a vocal few who absolutely dominates them, and then the other people won't participate at all. The idea in TFA is to everyone have their own channel, where others cannot start a topic, so they don't stifle those who communicate less.
- novia 1y agoThe reason it's analogous to water-cooler talk for each person to have their own channel is because when you go to get some water, and see other coworkers milling about, you're going to know which coworker you're interested in talking to, who often has interesting insights, who might have something interesting going on in their personal life that you'd like to hear more about. So, in the absence of a common meeting space, you can go check out the channels of people you're interested in, and scroll through to see if they've got anything interesting going on in their life.
- DonHopkins 1y agoSteve Martin is a Ramblin' Guy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frcRMQ2m1B4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frcRMQ2m1B4
- codesnik 1y agoI've tried to create or revive a watercooler channel in every remote company I've worked in last 10 years. For some reason it usually doesn't work. Some people don't needed it, some people just call each other and vent out privately. I miss watercooler talk.
- microtonal 1y agoWe had watercooler meetings some at remote companies I worked at, but yeah they usually don't really work. One problem is that the stream always attenuates to one person (which is good in normal meetings to not pick up too much random background noise), but it completely kills spontaneity. Also, there are always people with horrendous mic quality or background noise. As a result 1:1s tend to work much better technically for socializing, but it of course doesn't bring the group vibe. The idea in the article sounds really nice! Unfortunately does not really scale to larger companies than maybe 5-10 people.
- makeitdouble 1y agoTBH one of the best part of watercooler talk was the limited range (only the people who're there) and no trace of the exchange (all verbal) We also tried scheduled casual talks with the whole team, but didn't have more success than you. I think the closest we get was the small talk before meetings start, but as we're starting to get auto-transcript for all our meetings that also became very bland.
- prmoustache 1y agoAt my work place we have a meeting on friday afternoon. It was initially a meeting dedicated to quick knowledge transfer or helping out a member of a team who needs help on a particular topic but is also used to chit chat a bit before wishing everyone a nice weekend. We don't do transcript nor recording of these.
- paradox460 1y agoVenting privately is usually a symptom of bad management. Employees feel that they can't discuss any grievance publicly, for whatever reason, and so choose more careful means of communication
- marginalia_nu 1y agoThis type of writing down ideas and half-thoughts is useful even if you work alone. Thoughts are very fleeting, the instant you put them to paper (or bits) they materialize and it becomes much easier to evolve them. When doing deep work in some problem domain, often I find the brain starts to drop these highly ephemeral fragments of ideas (that are sometimes downright ingenious). Caveat is they often only come once, and then they're gone if you don't grab them. I often keep an envelope or scrap paper next to my desk where I write down any idea I have, whether it's "I should fix this" or "what if I did that", really no matter how small I try to put it to paper. What usually ends up happening is I somehow end up with a fairly concrete todo list of easy improvements.
- ljosifov 1y agoI stuff those in my logBook nowadays - a single ascii text file. Started as you say with notes on random scraps of paper. To relieve my mind of carrying that burden, when I have something more pressing to do. But yeah these half-thoughts, intuits etc have showed useful over time? Some made it into TODO, and latter even into the DONE entries. Even if mostly their final destination is DONTDO. :-)
- romanows 1y agoI think it is significant that this rambling channel supplements the yearly in-person meeting. Presumably, that's where one tends to form deeper social connections and get a feel for what different people find interesting to talk about? That is, if the team is varied enough so that there is little overlap in hobby interests or daily life.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI feel that part of what I’m paid for is to structure those ramblings into clear communications to be shared at the right time in the right meeting or channel.
- junon 1y agoI have a whole private discord server with multiple channels just for this, for my personal projects. Yes yes, walled garden and all, I know. But it's incredibly useful even though I'm the only one in there. I'd imagine this is highly team dependent. I'd personally love if my company adopted this. I think only one other team member would actually participate though. We're far too busy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dpdpdpdpdp 1y agoRamble in the panopticon?
- dakiol 1y agoIn my experience, these kind of channels end up being filled with complaints about the company/processes/managers/c-levels… (ofc, managers are not invited to these private channels) Like, if the ceo said something very stupid in the last All Hands, well, you use the ramble channel to talk about it. Sometimes this works (you feel like you’re not the only one that thinks X), but it could easily go south.
- echo42null 1y agoGood point. You do need to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about anything, But it shouldn’t just become an endless complaint loop about the company. I’ve seen this dynamic too: once people start venting, the channel can spiral. I sometimes wonder how to steer that energy into something constructive. Maybe it helps to let people express uncertainty or frustration before decisions are final, and to respond with context before things snowball. It’s tricky, because most coworkers only overlap on the job itself, they might not share much else in common. so their “bonding” can easily turn into shared complaining. Curious if anyone has found ways to keep that from going south without shutting people down completely.
- sublinear 1y agoYou can't "steer" people like that. Good fences make good neighbors.
- bsenftner 1y agoI've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.
- shortrounddev2 1y agoAt the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool
- rubslopes 1y agoIt's http://gather.town http://gather.town
- JustExAWS 1y agoI would hate this. More than the commute, the reason I hated in office work are the constant interruptions. Now when I need to do “deep work”, I turn off Slack, email etc and block off my calendar. We are all busy, when we want to talk about something or get sanity checks, we schedule time on each others calendar. I go to work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. I’m not anti social and I can carry on small talk with the best of them. But there is a strict separation between church (home) and state (work). Well I did meet my now wife at work in 2009…
- 1y ago
- echo42null 1y agoWe used to have something very similar with our office coffee machine – spontaneous 1‑2 minute chats while grabbing a coffee. Sometimes it was just, “Sorry, can’t talk, swamped right now,” and the other person would rush off – but even that told you something. These micro‑interactions gave valuable context: which teams were under pressure, where things might be stuck, and sometimes where a quick helping hand was needed. When we went remote, we tried to recreate this with a single global “coffee chat” channel. It worked for a while, but quickly became noisy. I really like your idea of having one ramblings channel per person instead. It feels like a cleaner way to keep that background awareness and human connection alive without overwhelming everyone. We’re going to try this next.
- booleandilemma 1y agoA post encouraging more performative behavior at work, as if there wasn't enough already. By the way, my scrum update is yesterday I was mostly in meetings.
- jodrellblank 1y agoMore performative “I’m cynicaler than thou” comments as if there aren’t enough on HN anyway.
- booleandilemma 1y agoMy comment isn't performative, I really mean it :)
- jodrellblank 1y ago"My scrum update is: I spent all day in meetings" can be both true and performative. We don't care what your meetings were about, so you're performing the "meetings are a waste of my time" geek trope. For comparison you wouldn't say "I spent all day at a desk" you'd say "I fixed a race condition" or "I designed the Foo service". You might say "I spent all day driving" and not "I drove 50 miles on I40 and waited 20 minutes at junctions", because the details of driving are unimportant. But presumably the people asking for your update do care about the work being discussed in meetings and want to know things about them. There's a choice there, and the choice to wrap meetings into "I spent all day in meetings" is to communicate that meetings are as much of a timewaste as driving is, and not as respectable as real work. Which is a tired geek trope. Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about? What was decided? What couldn't be decided? How it influenced the team? How you spread what the team were doing to the other meeting participants? How you shielded the team from bullshit during the meetings? How the projects are looking after the meetings? because you're performing weaponised incompetence "I hate meetings so I'm going to be a stroppy teenager and if you're going to force me into meetings, I'm going to make it painful for you to get information from me about them. Harumph". and hoping HN will upvote it because "Does Anyone Else think meetings are bad? right guys??" You know what "spent all day in meetings" communicates on HN or in tech circles, that's why you chose to say that, and why you chose to phrase it that curtly.
- chvid 1y agoOr just show up at the office once in a while.
- gwbas1c 1y agoI created a "watercooler" channel at my company to keep chitchat out of the main channel. It's a lot easier than juggling multiple channels.
- OJFord 1y agoLove this idea for 2-10 person orgs, but it really doesn't scale. I suppose you could do something similar with local sub-org/2-pizza team, but bit of a different vibe, and then if there is a #topic channel would your thought on topic go in #topic or #ramble-name?
- charlie0 1y agoThis doesn't work top well with teammates who don't like to write to communicate, which is a surprising amount of people around me. (I'm the only one who writes tech docs)
- gddgb 1y ago[dead]
- comrade1234 1y agoI have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that would just ruin this. The entire channel would be just be walls of his text. It's hard enough just to understand his wall of text emails that have a big report embedded somewhere in it.
- musicnarcoman 1y agoI think they meant each person has a public channel of their own.
- bravetraveler 1y agoLike the Confluence spaces they ignore /s
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sublinear 1y agoThank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic. I think that's precisely why the ramblings should be a separate channel apart from all the emails and more serious communication, but I have some thoughts why this still might not work. I used to be guilty of leaving walls of text in our "random" channel, and we weren't even remote back then. My reasons weren't entirely irrational. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't taken seriously because of the way the business was run and it was the only chance I had to speak "out of turn". These workplaces that encourage a lack of boundaries are usually small startups that hire inexperienced people. Ultimately whatever anyone said was used to manipulate them or for the rotten parts of middle management to "steal" ideas. I'm not a fan of this concept either and I think it's easily abused by all.
- anal_reactor 1y agoI used to work for a small company, and I'd sometimes write short essays about things in general. It was rarely even related to programming, but people seemed to love that. Then I switched to corporate and I quickly understood to shut up because whenever I say something, someone might get upset over it for whatever reason and then it's going to be a problem.
- layer8 1y ago> Common topics include: > - ideas related to current projects > - musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback > - “what if” suggestions > - photos from recent trips or hobbies > - rubber ducking a problem Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO. Some might be interested in the former but not the latter, and also might be interested in them at different times (of the day/week). There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.
- jobs_throwaway 1y ago> work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?
- layer8 1y agoWhat do you mean? Your employment contract says you need to work n hours per week. Private activities obviously don’t count as work.
- parpfish 1y agoI think building rapport with your team counts as work.
- layer8 1y agoDepending on how much time you spend “building rapport”, HR might disagree. My point is that channels should be set up such that it’s well-defined whether they are work-related or not.
- scarface_74 1y agoI have never once had a contract that said I’m expected to work n hours a week. In fact it is just the opposite, salaried employees are paid the same no matter how many hours worked.
- 1y ago
- bitwize 1y ago"Well, Mike, let's talk performance: your code is good, you get along well with your teammates, but you just haven't been rambling enough in the rambling channel. So unfortunately I'm going to have to put you on a PIP. If we don't see an improvement to at least 3 ramblings per week, further action may be taken, up to and including termination. Sorry it has to be this way, but we've got KPIs to hit."
- nasalgoat 1y agoI worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break. I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
- larrydag 1y agoI agree. Group channels on relevant topics is very helpful. Especially on technical details relevant to getting work done. Yet here goes my rant. Nothing can replace a good in-person interaction. Perhaps I'm the old guy in the room. When teams are trying to build something there is nothing like water-cooler talk and banter about the work that helps relate shared challenges. Granted this is going to very specific to organizational needs. I don't work in software development so perhaps my needs are different than most on Hackernews. I've managed teams in person and remotely. I've found that managing in person is a much more productive way to work.
- nasalgoat 1y agoThe channels I'm talking about weren't about work, they were about hobbies - biking, cars, cats. I found that interaction quite fun and actually much better than in-person chats because I could choose to interact at my pace and comfort level.
- JustExAWS 1y agoI’m also an old guy at 51. I have been in cloud consulting for the last five+ years and I’m perfectly capable of leading large projects remotely. I can do it in person. But I find diagramming with collaborative tools, shared Google docs, etc to be much better than in person drawing on a whiteboard. There are remote collaborative tools for everything. With the tools available now, you can record all of the meetings and don’t have to take notes, have transcripts automatically generated and summarized with AI. I can then take all of the transcripts and other artifacts, throw them in Google’s NotebookLM and ask questions and get answers about the project (with citations). I do the same for transcripts of meetings I am not in - mostly pre-sales. Yes these are all approved tools.
- jamesblonde 1y agoThis is so anglo-saxon to be individual channels for ramblings. We have group wide channel. It's supposed to be social - no pressure to post. Lurkers welcome. Just share. Naturally, some are more talkative than others. The idea is to foster a group/social culture - not have atomized diaries about individuals.
- parpfish 1y agoEvery place I’ve been to has a dedicated “random” or “off topic” channel and it’s where all the good team building happens. There are usually a few more narrow channels for specific topics (video games, music, pets, food, etc) which can help if there are big personalities that dominate a channel. It can be intimidating to join in when you’re new though. You got to lurk for a while to read the room a bit and learn the culture.
- mhh__ 1y agoInternal Twitter should be more of a thing.
- liveoneggs 1y agoI strongly agree with the title but the prescribed details are not to my taste. Pick a channel grouping that makes sense (by-team/by-project/by-manager) and Just Start Typing. Busy channels are alive and will create their own culture organically. Freely mix in work talk with pictures of cool stuff you found while walking the dog. "threads" makes this extremely manageable.
- byryan 1y agoYea I agree it seems like (for my own team anyways), one group channel would work a lot better than a per person channel for everyone. I think some people may feel more likely to post, especially work related topics, in a group channel rather than starting solo threads in their own "ramblings" channel. One channel is also easier and "less work" to look through than n number of channels. This is very subjective though I guess, so I could be wrong.
- Aurornis 1y ago> "threads" makes this extremely manageable. Strongly agree. This is what threads in the project channel are for. Creating excessive channels for everything gets out of hand quickly. It’s a habit you see from people who worked at small companies before threads were available on discussion platforms.
- danparsonson 1y agoThis sounds like Twitter for Enterprises - how about setting up a local instance of Bluesky or Mastodon or one of those? People can then follow whomever they want to and the rest of us can continue not being interested in that sort of thing.
- aprilnya 1y agoOr if you use M365 then Viva Engage/Yammer can be great! PS. between the two Mastodon will be better, you can fully disable all federation and even have SSO! + setting up a private Bluesky is quite a bit harder
- robertclaus 1y agoWhy not a shared "Ramblings" channel? And at that point, why not re-use something like "Random" that many companies already have?
- gavmor 1y agoOP is proposing something more like internal blogging.
- hkon 1y agoSo, if you're remote, why not just talk to your real friends on discord or whatever? I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.
- lttlrck 1y agoRight. Not everybody wants, needs or has these interactions even in-person. This stuff needs to happen organically to be meaningful. Templates don't work. It's like starting a chess club that everyone has to join.
- sublinear 1y agoNo thanks. One of the best parts of going remote is letting your work truly speak for itself to a much broader audience. This would have been impossible in person. High performers usually have their own thing going on outside of work and don't need the workplace for socializing. This boosted a lot of careers, and otherwise made life way less toxic. Unless you're fresh out of college I can't see anyone wanting this again.
- nip 1y agoWe do something similar that we call « Office a la Zoom »: Two times a week, the weekly standup is extended by an hour, from 15min to 1h15. People are welcome to jump in and out of that open zoom that acts as a water cooler corner: any topic goes, from work to personal hobbies, etc We’re fully remote (US / EMEA / APAC)
- spike021 1y agomy team just has a couple off-topic channels we use from time to time to chat about random things. i'd say that's pretty sufficient. ymmv of course.
- srcoder 1y agoWe do the same, just topic specificaties channels like kids, random or pets... Works very well and you only need to join if you want to...
- fHr 1y agoNah not another useless channel to maintain, I'm good.
- ManlyBread 1y agoThis article is about nothing, how does this kind of stuff hit the front page? Is it because of bots?
- majke 1y agoLet me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else onboarded had similar questions. Some subjects were about pure onboarding friction, some were about workflows most folks didn't know existed, some were about theoretical concepts. So I moved the questions to a public (within company) channel, and called it "Marek's Bitching" - because this is what it was. Pretty much me complaining and moaning and asking annoying questions. I invited more London folks (Zygis), and before I knew half of the company joined it. It had tremendous value. It captured all the things that didn't have real place in the other places in the company, from technical novelties, through discussions that were escaping structure - we suspected intel firmware bugs, but that was outside of any specific team at the time. Then the channel was renamed to something more palatable - "Marek's technical corner" and it had a clear place in the technical company culture for more than a decade. So yes, it's important to have a place to ramble, and it's important to have "your own channel" where folks have less friction and stigma to ask stupid questions and complain. Personal channels might be overkill, but a per-team or per-location "rambling/bitching" channel is a good idea.
- Aurornis 1y agoI understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about. So while the Q&A format is good to have available, I’d discourage creating separate channels around a person. I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there. I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel. That’s the place where all of the relevant people will be relevant and watching and it’s the first place they’ll search in the future.
- ryankrage77 1y agoHuh, just realised my team did this organically without realising it. People were often hesitant to ask questions they perceived as 'dumb' in the group chat, and definitely unwilling to post anything seen as complaining/moaning about problems. We created a second chat without any managers in it, with a description clarifying it was a dumping ground for questions and comments that didn't fit in other chats. It sees a small but steady flow of use, mostly questions that people probably should know, but can't remember the answer/process of the top of their head, and the occasional slightly less-than-professional complaint or criticism about a service/tool/process. My favourite part is that I can actually discuss things in there - in the main chat, once the question is answered/problem is solved, if we keep chatting about it it's seen as clutter/distraction. I think it's beneficial to have an outlet for these things.
- chaz6 1y agoI always ask the "dumb" questions, even when I already know the answer, because there are always people too intimidated to speak up, and it sometimes facilitates a deeper discussion.
- kqr 1y agoIt also gives you cover to ask questions that reveal politically inconvenient truths: you can pretend you had no idea that answer would pop out of it. (Of course, in an organisation that contains many politically inconvenient truths, you can easily end up doing that too much and people will catch on to it and dislike what you're doing. Another drawback is you have to be willing to look stupid and trust that the stupid first impression goes away with time.)
- fantasizr 1y agoI always respected leaders who did this, preprogramming the dumb questions in a presentation for the benefit of the timid ones
- hoherd 1y agoIt took me too long in my career to feel comfortable asking the dumb questions. I would have had a much easier time if I had just asked them. I eventually learned to ask dumb questions when I made a friend who was never afraid to ask then, and it was amazing how quickly he learned.
- codingdave 1y agoI'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post. Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me. In my experience, "rambling" channels build up organically... as you have a thought, you share it with someone relevant, not just drop it into a channel and see who reads it. Over time, small group chats evolve naturally, and assuming everyone has communications skills, topics that become relevant to the whole team are then shared with the whole team. I agree that such discussions are healthy, maybe even required, for a functional remote team. But let people organize themselves - don't prescribe specific methods that teams must follow. The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoYep this. Just make a "random" channel, where most people keep notifications off, and use it for everything random, from lunch invitations to "i'm selling olive oil", etc.
- zaphirplane 1y agoDo you grow the olives as well
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoNot me, a coworkers parents live in the coastal areas of our country and they grow olives and make homemade oliveoil (traditional processes), so yeah, when they make a batch, it's worth buying :)
- Aurornis 1y ago> I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post This seems to happen a lot: Someone writes some highly exaggerated career advice that has good intent at the core but turns into overly weird suggestions by the end. They might be trying to be memorable or to make an impact by exaggerating the advice. Then some people, often juniors, take it literally and start practicing it. They think they’re doing some secret that will make them the best employee. Their coworkers and managers are more confused than impressed and think it’s just a personality quirk. As a manager I found it helpful to skim Reddit and other sites for semi-viral advice blogs like this. With enough juniors in a company there’s a chance one of them will suddenly start doing the thing written in a shared post like this. Knowing why they’re doing it is a good way to help defuse the behavior (assuming they don’t really benefit but rather do it because they perceive it will look good)
- scarface_74 1y agoI hate this idea. If I have an idea I think we should implement when I was a mod level developer [1] and had to get buy in for it, I would think it through and ask for a coworkers opinion, take their suggestions, and then keep reaching out to who I thought would be my toughest critics until I got their buy in. Once I was convinced that I had enough buy in, I would then officially propose it in a team setting. It’s called “pre-wiring a meeting”. Now it’s more of getting peer reviews and sanity checks than anything else before I go down a road. We also have Slack channel where we ask for peer reviews now of architectural decisions (working in cloud consulting). [1] My title has been “Senior Developer” for decades at various companies. But in reality, based on “scope”, “impact”, etc not “I codez real good” I was really what would be considered a mid level developer until a decade ago.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoLong back, I used to set up P2 for teams, inspired by WordPress’s theme-based personal/team updates. The current theme seem to have changed over time but the early versions where tweet-ish kinda flow of events which people/team wrote. https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/
- Aurornis 1y ago> Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. This is a great place to use threads. If someone wants to ramble, you say “Starting a thread to think through <topic>” in the project channel and then you put your follow-up chats in the thread. This way it only occupies a single line and notification (for those who have it enabled) but keeps it in the right place. Creating excessive numbers of channels is a common small company mistake that they’ll come to regret later. Every growing company I’ve worked for has gone through a “let’s create channels for everything” phase followed later by a “we’re all so burnt out from being in 80 different channels” phase. Creating a separate channel for every person of a project will scatter the discussions and add excessive cognitive load for juggling channels.
- softwaredoug 1y agoThere is a kind of leader that's threatened when they don't control communication. In these cases, random thought bombs on slack feel like chaos. Like people are going in random directions not rowing together. I don't think this is true of course -- people are just sharing inspiration and ideas. But in some places / cultures just rambling on slack can be dangerous and put a target on your back. You can be labeled as "distracting" by these leaders that feel threatened / worried about the perception the team is not executing on their marching orders. Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment. So these leaders have an especially hard time in a remote environment. But they do soon learn that even Slack DMs can be searched and they love this tool to root out "troublemakers". Of course, if you can, leave such a place. But not everyone has this luxury.
- theideaofcoffee 1y agoThis is true because it has happened to me. I was at a place where there was a very ingrained hierarchy in the culture where people were afraid to ask questions in public (slack), to discuss problems and solutions, because the "leaders" were so thin-skinned, doing anything outside of being ticket-solving machines was seen as wholly objectionable. I got tired of the abject fear that some of those idiots were stoking so I took it upon myself to set the example for the more junior people and started rambling and asking questions and doing the things that the "leaders" obviously didn't like. You can imagine how that went as I got a bit more bold week after week... I've never been more relieved, and proud, to be canned.
- Seattle3503 1y agoMost people, myself included, cannot thrive in a culture of fear and control. I think what you did is the best way to handle it. Do the right thing and surrender to the outcome. Like you, I was happier that way.
- throwaway743 1y agoHappened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats. Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.
- ogou 1y agoAfter watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better. Even now there are people I will screenshot any DMs that have even a hint of conflict. I doubt I will ever participate in any work chats in a social way again.
- mjevans 1y agoThere's a distinction between random (probably not for work, 'water cooler chat') and 'obviously divisive' topics like politics. Particularly in the US, those are the sort of things you avoid.
- ogou 1y agoThose distinctions evaporated in 2020 and never returned.
- ryandrake 1y agoMust depend on the company/office. My team (200+ people) has a "offtopic/socialize" chat channel set up for this kind of rando chit chat, and it has never, not once in many years, even had a hint of divisiveness or politics. Yes, you do need to be working with grownups who can behave and leave that shit at home.
- esco27 1y agoThere are certain things in life that are meant to be unstructured and spontaneous. The moment you try to sandbox them they tend to devolve into noise which then calls for more structure or "rules", it's a slippery slope. If you're remote, you can always start a huddle and talk while you work, or if talking is not your thing, a good old DM can work. If you're worried about noise or things getting lost, you can always move the work related things into their own channel as they come up. Just 2 cents.
- respondo2134 1y agostruggling to create the organic interactions you had in-person? Here's a reomte process you can mandate and measure to ensure everyone is casually interacting in the correct, company-approved way!
- Separo 1y agoChannels should also include a #roast-the-product channel which encourages harsh, direct but valid criticism of the product (NOT people / feature authors etc). It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.
- t5teveryweek 1y agoHey at least it's not T5T (top 5 thing)that you're forced to do every other week because your founder read one nvidia blog post
- nicoritschel 1y agoYou should do this in normal channels relevant to the discussion topic to facilitate discussion, not a separate channel per person. What.
- RedNifre 1y agoWe did something like that on a private Minecraft server 15 years ago, where everybody was required to have an identi.ca account for this server (status.net, like mastodon today). All messages appeared posted to the walls of a large library building in the middle of the world and people could post to their accounts from the ingame chat. It worked really well for about half the people, the other half ignored it completely. I wouldn't mind if today's office chats like Teams or Slack added a microblogging feature where you could subscribe to interesting colleagues.
- fennec-posix 1y agoyeah my coworkers deal with this in our "banter" channel, my raw thoughts.
- andrewrn 1y agoI really cannot imagine working remote full-time, it sounds so depressing. We already don't go to church or bars or movies or clubs anymore. Work is one of the few remaining places to interact with other humans. I'd be interested in trying this if I was remote, but I still just prefer in-person work. I worked an in-person job recently at an oil company where we had no regular meetings (I was doing absolute grunt drafting work), and it was the most depressing experience of my life. This would be better than in-person w/o water cooler chats.
- Etheryte 1y agoI mean, no one is stopping you from going to church or bars or movies or clubs. All of those things are still there if that's what you fancy.
- ryandrake 1y agoYea, different strokes for different folks. Since going remote, I now have the choice about if, where, and when to interact with other people, and who those people should be. If I want to go two weeks without seeing another person (IRL, not counting video conference), I can do it. If I want to go out and socialize, I have 4 formerly-commuting hours back every day that I can use to do so.
- andrewrn 1y agoDid I claim that someone was stopping me from doing those things? My point was that traditional gathering formats that are conducive to community-forming are diminishing. It's not a matter of an individual choosing not to participate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
- mystifyingpoi 1y agoPeople are different. I worked around 1.5 years on fully remote gig and it was the best time of my life ever. Wake up at 6, start working, finish at 2 pm. In the middle do all the house chores that I could squeeze in (cleaning, shopping, eating, even chopped few cubic meters of wood in span of weeks) while keeping my output the same as other teammates (it wasn't particularly hard, either). Each day I was out at 2 pm, ready to decide on MY terms, who to meet, what to do, what to attend.
- standardUser 1y agoIf you want your remote teams to have increased cohesion you need to fly them all to the same location (at company expense, only during weekdays) multiple times per year and give them the opportunity to actually get to know each other. Anything else usually just feels awkward and pathetic. But since online game shows or "breakaway rooms" cost the company a whole lot less money, that's what we're stuck with.
- twinkjock 1y agoThis whole post is unnecessary if you have threaded replies and threaded conversations.
- throw10920 1y agoI put my work ramblings in daily journal notes in Markdown files in a git repository. Unfortunately, I don't spend the time to then ensure that they're accessible to my co-workers - and given the amount of value that I would get if they did that, I should do it myself. Also, I'm very glad that I don't work in a place with Slack/chat culture. I really like the idea of making your ramblings available, but the thought of forcing everything into chat is repulsive. Just use a wiki page or files in a Git repo (as long as they're sufficiently easy to access) and that's good enough.
- ethan_smith 1y agoTry using a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo with GitHub Pages to automatically publish your Markdown ramblings - minimal setup, preserves your workflow, and gives teammates a simple URL to bookmark.
- throw10920 1y agoOh, that's a great idea - thank you.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rayrey 1y agoMachine Stops comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
- jedberg 1y agoWe use #random for this.
- gardnr 1y agoThey had these at BigCorp I worked at. Anyone can make a channel like #x-gardner and then people can join that channel if they choose. The way that you find them organically is by searching the chat app for some random thing that you are interested in and then finding a few people discussing it in an X channel. It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.
- j45 1y agoWhere rambling might not have a positive connotation, imagining them as "musing" channels seemed to resonate. Having a way to share what's on your mind that might not get shared is usually what can happen in person during the early days of a startup. It can also allow the initial startup group to have a better connected sense of what's going on in each person's world compared to what they take the time to type.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoWe had this, but they were called journal channels. It worked great cause I always have something to say but it's not worth putting in a shared channel.
- surge 1y agoThis is just rubberducking into a private channel. It's really not that new. I actually do this, but into a personal google doc.
- nunez 1y agoThis used to be the #random channel on Slack iirc
- babyshake 1y agoOne of these is not like the others: ideas related to current projects musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback “what if” suggestions photos from recent trips or hobbies rubber ducking a problem it seems like the goal is to split #random into #work-random and #not-work-random. but #ramblings seems like a weird naming convention. Why is an idea related to a current project a "rambling"?
- kepano 1y agoSimply, it is an unpolished thought. It gives coworkers a lens into what you're thinking and gives space for ideas that are not fully baked.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoFor one of my small-biz clients, I could use what the author outlines - restrictions and all (if I'm an outlier, is fine). Besides fixing my customer's stuff, I learn and improve their systems. There's a small corral of offsite indy IT talent; I'm the onsite, everything else guy. I could use a simple space to quickly post v1 thoughts in an unpolished format. They'd be available for our other IT to review and comment on. Since I want this, all the client will pay for is for me to implement it. Nothing else. Also, the owner likes data to stay in house. Together it rules out subscription and cloud products. I'll see what my FOSS options are.
- your_friend 1y agoWhy not one common channel?
- steele 1y agoReads like pro-tips for middle management avoiding losing knowledge captured in DMs from layoffs
- jama211 1y agoI would prefer this so much to enforced daily meetings. This is much more natural and interesting.
- stego-tech 1y agoSeconding OP with my own experiences: The best companies I’ve worked for freely encouraged workers to leverage chat or forums for non-work stuff. Rooms for AV enthusiasts, for sharing music, for discussing photography, corporate gripes, new ideas, personal projects, meeting colleagues on holiday, you name it. You can absolutely have the spontaneity of physical collaboration through solely online and remote means. The internet itself is proof positive of this, companies just need to encourage that behavior more (and only minimally police it to avoid HR incidents or lawsuits).
- projexorcism 1y agoThere's no such thing as a dumb question. Only dumb people.
- projexorcism 1y agoThere's no such thing as a dumb question. There are only dumb people.
- temptemptemp111 1y ago[dead]
- matsemann 1y ago> All the ramblings channels should be in a Ramblings section at the bottom of the channel list. They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them. I hate that Slack and other apps have nothing in between "mute" and "tell me immediately if I have anything unread". Many channels I want to know if there are new messages and read, just not by the second. If it could batch them up and only show them as unread after lunch, perhaps.
- mattbee 1y agoThis speaks to me! I've worked on 3 different projects / workplaces in the last year where I've been the only talker on a Slack with 10s of people on it. Sometimes I'll write 5-6 detailed messages in a day, talking about particular problems or updates on things I'm working on, and almost nothing from anyone else. These are in subject-specific channels (#network-engineering or #programmers or the like) where colleagues are subscribed. But the real business of each company seemed to happen in private group chats or video meetings, with no long-term records. I'm like to state a problem before I've solved it, for the rubber ducking. Very occasionally someone would reply to help, and occasionally I reply with a :facepalm: if I realise I've just been hasty or sloppy. But even if nobody replies, I am very happy to have a public log of my work, the problems I've solved (or not), and the people I might tag for particular input. If someone DMs me for help with something that is possibly of interest to >1 person, I tend to re-state the issue (without identifying who asked me), then answer in public, and thank them for asking. If I have a question for a colleague, I will tend to ask it in a channel, as it becomes something searchable. I ask work questions on Stack Overflow for the same reason, and often self-answer because the place is dead as a community, but the search works well. After a few years I find my own answers as a complete surprise. But I have colleagues who've not said a line in public basically forever. I've not been a manager for years, always an IC lately. I've not had any objections, but it seems like nobody wants to join me to make "work in public" the default. Apparently I'm happy to be the exhibitionist little freak?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- spauldo 1y agoThe first thing this puts me in mind of is mcom.bad-attitude, the internal Netscape newsgroup for this sort of thing. jwz wrote about how well that worked out on his blog.
- dherikb 1y agoThis reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked. Like anyone else, when I joined the company, I had various questions: how to access certain systems, how to handle permissions, how to debug specific services, etc. I compiled all these questions and answers as notes in a Git repository that my teammates could access. I wrote the notes using QOwnNotes, utilizing its Git integration. So, when someone had a question for which I already had the answer, I could simply share my notes, or create/update a node and share it. The names of the notes were straightforward and easy to follow, such as: - aws.md - azure.md - kubernetes.md - staging.md - production.md - useful-commands.md (jq, sed, base64, etc) My teammates used this resource frequently. As I was preparing to leave the company, I suggested them to fork my notes repository. I later heard that they continued to use it for many months afterward.
- PeterStuer 1y agoIn my experience, every business social/communication channel will be gamed for (stealth or blatant) personal promotion. At first not everyone will catch on to this. Those will be the first to be called into HR or get remarks on their anual review.
- gregoriol 1y ago"with no expectation that anyone else will read them" => this is depressing, why would anyone ramble (or do anything actually) with this in mind?
- gimboland 1y agoWhy do people write in a journal? Why do people pray? Why do people do rubber-duck debugging?
- quantile12 1y agoNo - focus on communication that adds value to your company and your career. Don't get sucked into distractions. Spend your time aligning yourself with projects, ideas, people etc that will boost your career Is isn't 2018 any more. Don't ramble about off topic casual stuff somewhere where it's all kept on record and easily viewable by your boss (and if your boss isn't invited to the channels, what do you think they'll think when they find out all their employees have lots of 'rambling' channels?). What if HR gets wind of this during the next planned RIF? Your job is to add value to the company Take your project ideas etc directly to your boss. Don't let other people steal them Join a non-work Slack group for this kind of socialising
- djmips 1y agoRambling also makes you visible which is not a bad thing when you're remote.
- mnafees 1y agoI’ve been working remotely for YC startups for the past 3.5+ years, and I completely agree. I went from being the quietest person in the room to someone who often ends up rambling on most calls. Remote work has not only given me the space to speak my mind - and sometimes even find answers to my own questions - but also the opportunity to learn so much from my colleagues.
- abc123abc123 1y agoWhy would I? It is boring and adds no value. Much better to work instead. If I need something, I ask. If people need something from me, they ask. I think the biggest increas in productivity for me was when we banned chatting and moved all communication to email. The amount of distractions was reduced significantly!
- thedudeabides5 1y agoyup
- grvdrm 1y agoThis post talks about remote but I will generalize beyond remote. Effective sharing is amazing and a superpower. Doesn't have to be chat either. Years ago (between 2006-2012) I worked for a company that implemented Salesforce. We were all in the office but spread across floors, US offices, and some offices elsewhere in the world. Someone structured Salesforce in such a way that every client question/answer was clearly documented and properly linked. So, over time, I found and learned so much searching through that knowledgebase. Had some garbage questions/answers just like anything (including chats). What's key though is MOST client-facing folks bought into sharing/linking/documenting to Salesforce. Rather than sitting in individual inboxes. So, if you're able to create that same sort of magic through a chat channel, do it. If you don't see an org that understands that sort of behavior, might not be worth your time. It takes effort!
- mjaniczek 1y agoRelated: Rubber duck channels. https://wolfgangschuster.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ducks/ https://wolfgangschuster.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ducks/ I've now seen this across two companies, and it's great to have #rd-martinjaniczek where I can just talk about what I'm doing as I'm doing it, post error messages and later how I solved them (or let somebody else jump in and tell me how they solved it etc.), it helps Slack searchability and combats the remote loneliness, it's pretty great. And reading other folks' RD channels, you realize how frickin' funny some people are.