this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I know I'll be downvoted, but I'll answer your question.
"Need" is a strong word. Sure, it's not needed. But that's not what the business tends to care about. They care about productivity.
I work in software. In my previous job I was a one man show. For my day to day development, I didn't need to interact with other people much. When I shifted to remote working it was a huge boost because I got protected time to work where I wasn't distracted by other people in the office, either socially or incidentally. This case it worked very well.
After the pandemic I switched jobs into one with a hybrid schedule. Luckily for me my job is a 15 minute bike commute.
However, the suite of tools I'm now developing and working on require me to constantly interact with other people in the office. I also spend a lot of time mentoring jr devs.
This is, quite frankly, just better when we're all in the office. The jr devs know, explicitly, that they can bother me whenever they need it. In the office this happens probably an average of 8 times a day. When either of us is remote, it's probably once a day.
Now with the other senior devs, we hate meetings. However, all the time, spontaneously, we'll end up chatting in our little section about the development of the system, someone will overhear (maybe even from an adjacent group) and chime in with useful knowledge. Next thing you know we have 4 or 5 devs whiteboarding and discussing things. Most of the fine tuning of our systems get hashed out in these impromptu meetings. This never happens when we're remote.
Also the barrier to just turning around and asking someone something is so much lower. Often 30 seconds. Because at home I have to send them a message, maybe message back and forth a bit before determining that it would be easier on zoom, then we have to jump on zoom which takes a small amount of time. Now this is not some huge thing, but it is a barrier that makes it just hard enough that he happens way less frequently.
Working in the office is just better for productivity in this type of situation, which i imagine is true for most jobs that involve lots of collaboration. Almost all of my coworkers agree. We also all agree that remote is better because commuting sucks. It honestly even boggles my mind to hear other software devs argue that they are more productive at home. Believable if we are talking about my original situation, or if you're just mindlessly closing tickets. But for collaborative development of large systems? No way.
So essentially you're saying that communication falls apart and you don't have the correct tools for remote work.
That's fine, it's a new issue to solve, no one has it perfectly done yet.
I completely sympathise with this, I have experienced it when I was a stonemason for 10 years (I say stonemason, I am a qualified banker mason but I have been programming machines to do the work for me). And I overhear and interject my experience with the new lads often. But now I'm at university 3 days a week and everything has fallen apart.
So we use discord, where we can all talk and ask advice about how to do X but not need to be in person. And in my experience it works exactly the same, I can read everyone's input and offer my own.
I worked remotely starting in 2002, as I relocated from the NYC area shortly after 9/11 to get out of the region. My doc said "breathing issues in the tri-state area? World Trade Center Syndrome. Can you just move?" and I was done. I was on an H1B anyway, so I had no established ties. I was the youngest of a small group of remote coders, and they reallocated my time so that I worked on the same work as an existing remote team. Work was work.
In 2002, our 'correct tools' was a pair of headphones and skype: we ran skype all day. It was on, it was connected in a conf call, but all mics were muted among the 7 of us who were in the work group. Have a question, you'd either type it out or just unmute, ask the group - yeah, nothing more granular - and discuss it, and then go back on mute.
(I actually had a TV running in the office for background noise, as I couldn't do the silence; and even the w98se sound system mixed it well enough to hide the background slush of the call)
It worked well. The existing remotes had a good culture and allowed for a water cooler around a coffee time and lunch time so you could stay and be social, and everyone adapted to the equivalent of someone gophering periodically and chatting over the partition. The company had a strong policy against open pit environments, and they actually worried there'd be too many on the call, but the team was great.
We were working on AT&T Fucking Unix. Tell me again how you didn't have the tools when Skype and a 2002 USA broadband connection was the only thing we added to our workflow and we coded a secure OS for secure workloads. When I abandoned my visa/PR efforts and moved back home, I did it over a couple days off and had a rudimentary office ready to go in my home country immediately after.
The problem is that I don't know of any tool or set of tools that fixes this. We have an extensive chat system that is open all the time with rooms for each group, we have zoom, we use all kinds of collaboration software. Everyone knows these are available, and uses them, but the hurdle inherent to it seems to be just enough to really put a damper on seeking help.
I think the best solution would be to have a zoom room where everyone is in it all the time. Which sounds even more miserable.
I don't think it's a system issue, it's more of a people issue, a lot of people are still using things like teams and slack as if they're email which bottlenecks everyone, but with the correct training and mindset switch it can be very efficient.
Switch to what exactly?
Mindset switch to not thinking of that communication as email. At least at my work place it took a while for people to not be overly formal and just go straight to the point, which slows things down. It's meant to be an instant communication channel after all
I saw some tips about this, they said to have a group chat and never use DMs so people can see and chime in.
Can confirm - the group chat sucked, especially for us (2002 skype) when it was voice chat, so we often kept non-crucial stuff to the tail end of work hour too, so there was 45 min out of an hour for work before a burst of chatter. That's supposed to have jibed with some kind of workflow pattern, and it worked .... well enough.
That, and you need some watercooler time. The current job has it only once a week, but we all come to meetings early and chat for 10 min while everyone else files in. Get some human time in.