Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it.
We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help.
I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but I'm certain that merely blaming "remote work" isn't it.
Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.
I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms.
Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generation to have them didn't fully understand how "public" they were. Maybe there are more people in the more recent generations that have a more visceral understanding of online "publicness" as they have grown up with (and perhaps have been burned by) those concepts from the very beginning. Maybe they have a better understanding of the permanence of online utterances and therefore have a more conservative approach to interacting on what feels like the permanent public ledger.
Maybe it's because the concept of pseudonyms has devolved since the early days. Corporate social media has an interest in doxing its users to advertise to and control them but pre-corporate social media was filled with anonymous usernames. Posting in a large group under your permanent forever name is much scarier than posting under an anonymous, temporary identity. One of the things I advocate people do is post online anonymously, instead of with their real name. It alleviates a lot of the fear of speaking your truth, which we need more of!
There is something there. The ability to try on identities in a safe environment before you discover which one you really identify with. It's much harder to do this with your real name. Your past comes with a lot of baggage and people who know you don't want you to change because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
There's an issue of scale to it all, and interconnectivity. Back in '98 you could reasonably post something in one forum/BBS/IRC channel and it would only be viewed there. There was no way to look up who was on what website or room and where they regularly hung out. And even if there was, it's unlikely that more than ten people would ever see what you posted. There weren't enough people to care, and there wasn't any extrinsic incentive to look up what people did outside of your tiny island. Eventually the island would sink, and all traces of it except maybe an archived snapshot of the home page would remain.
Smartphones changed that with Youtube and Facebook. Youtube incentivized you to use a Google account, and Facebook wouldn't let you use it anonymously without an account. Because you could use one account to log into multiple places people could track you across websites. People could make archives, screenshots, and transcriptions of anything you had done with those linked accounts. With this change there was no safe corner to hide if you said something stupid. And because so many people were foolish enough to tie their real identities to these online accounts with their real names or pictures of themselves, it gave a way for particularly unruly people to track these individuals even offline. There was now a real danger if you said something stupid, because instead of just getting your post deleted or starting a derailment in the thread people could harass you at your home, get you fired, and even send the police to terrorize you in the middle of the night via SWAT raids. It's no longer just one person calling you out. It's now hundreds, maybe even thousands, all armed with information.
And this is why I say it's stupid to require phone numbers and real names to sign up for insignificant things like being able to view someone bake a duck shaped cake live over the internet.
I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over the last N months and summarize the content and surface any "red flags", which in a corporate setting would be incredibly broad.
We have slack integrated with glean and anyone in the company can do this, not just managers.
It also has access to our internal wikis, GitHub, and other internal tools.
> There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms.
I think this is merely the shift from doing this as a hobby, to doing this for work. Random coding problems mixed with banter I posted or answered on IRC back in the day? Purely hobby stuff, things I done after school instead of doing my homework. No stakes beyond the community itself, I could disengage at any moment, nobody would care - there was no commitment of any kind involved.
Today? Even if we switched back from Slack/Teams/whatnot to IRC, the fact remains, the other people are my co-workers, and we're talking about work, and it's all made of commitments and I can't disengage, or else I starve.
That changes the dynamic quite a bit.
I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest communication.
Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.
I got a major reprimand because I answered too many questions posted in the public channel. All in my area of expertise, mostly after hours.
At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I should "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.
Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does. It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. The previous CEO would sometime even answer themself. Not anymore.
Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.
But now the layer of management above you can justify organizing meetings to "get aligned" and "communicate". Structurally, i see how it happens
This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big.
Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.
If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.
Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.
Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.
Indeed, it's called Goodhart's law. As soon as metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric.
The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation. I like to post ideas, brainstorm, engage if I have a minute to respond to someone with a thought - kinda like being in an office - whereas many others seem to use it to blast out information after a lot of polish and they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies.
Use tools for what they are good for and create a culture that makes each tool work best for your organization.
> The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation.
They would be right: HR will get access to everything you ever posted in a company chat if they have a reason to check. Some people don’t care, some… do.
Fair point. It’s a record, but should not be treated as formally. Just because you are having a conversation doesn’t mean you have to breach HR guidelines.
My comment was related more to the _overhead_ required before posting. Either way best not post anything that would be an HR issue in any format. (Also your private chats will be available in discovery as well if found out)
Maybe I’m not the best to opine on this as I’ve been wildly successful at building community at companies but I’ve also been burned by this. I suppose I’m privileged enough that I’d like to work somewhere that I can still collaborate with low friction remotely - and if the company doesn’t like it then I’m not a good fit.
It's written communication on company infrastructure, tied to your real identity and org chart, and subject to retention policy.
Yes it absolutely is formal communication. Microsoft makes this painfully clear with how they market teams.
> they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies.
I agree, but this may mostly be pointing out they are not very good/qualified at whatever they are doing tbh.
There's always been a silent majority in every platform, IRC/HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Insta/TikTok. Doesn't matter what platform it is, most people are lurkers, silent consumers, they don't post.
There's nothing new here, there's no problem to solve. Doesn't matter if you're anonymous or publicly identifiable. 90% of people don't contribute, they just consume. 9% contribute occasionally. And 1% are regular contributors.
The 1% or 90-9-1 rule is pretty well known.
> I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels.
People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.
Oh lord no. I’m not sure that’s true at all! I mean in the early cool era of the internet there was a concept of a “netizen” and a window of brief joy, but the internet has always had domineering trolls, bullies, spaces where clumsy newbies were brutally flamed etc.
The main difference is that more spaces were quasi-professional and non-pseudonymous, in that one largely got one’s internet access and identity (IP address, email address, invitation) from the institution of higher learning one attended or worked for. So there were direct, two or three degrees separation consequences (my boss knows someone at your institution) in those spaces. I suppose this is what you are referring to.
(In my early era of commercial internet work I can remember a colleague shutting down an accidentally abusive scraping bot by working out who was likely to be the boss of the person running it and phoning them up)
But away from those spaces were many places that were just as bad as they are now.
The internet has always (in my time of using it, which is all of my adult life as someone who is over half a century old) demonstrated that a good culture is a question of starting conditions and quick maintenance actions.
A non-trivial amount of the worst behaviour I have personally witnessed on the internet happened before the year 2000.
One difference, IMO, is that in technical forums / chat rooms, flaming was generally (modulo Torvalds, but honestly I give him a pass - the guy has to keep the level of quality excruciatingly high at all times, and that must be tiring) more reserved, and was along the lines of “RTFM.”
That’s not to say there’s more vitriol today; it’s swung the opposite direction, where newbies expect to have answers handed to them, or worse, they’ll post AI slop and then be genuinely surprised when someone asks them to explain it, or to show their work.
I don’t think that people should be belittled, but I also think it’s unrealistic to expect that experienced people should patiently teach every newcomer the same things over and over, without them having put in the minimum effort of reading docs.
I’m reminded of something I saw once on Twitter from a hiring manager who said that the best signal they had was whether a candidate had a homelab. This was met with criticism from many, who bizarrely accused him of being classist, since “not everyone has time to do that for fun.”
How far back are we talking? 90s? 80s? 70s?
For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling.
Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as writing games on 8bit micros.
Depends on a size of community and where.
Early 2000s, public channel on a LAN with ~3k people in a post soviet country – say something stupid to a wrong person and you'll find yourself with a broken nose, because the guy/gal is a friend of the admin.
Obviously macro communities exist that differ in etiquette.
I was just responding to the generalisation made by the GP.
Well, yes. We definitely fucked with the systems, and to a lesser extent the people. But 80s internet didn’t have shit like swatting. Or what Mr. Beast makes people go through for entertainment.
And everyone was in on it. We were all trolling, and being trolled, and perfectly well aware of what trolling was. But now people deliberately target and exploit the vulnerable on the internet.
I feel like the only thing you needed before was a fairly thick skin, but now you need a lawyer and a smorgasboard of security.
Mr Beast isn’t the internet. He’s a TV show host. And there’s been exploitative TV shows for decades. This isn’t a format Mr Beast invented.
As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).
The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.
The "water-cooler" chats are in the same place/app as the more important conversations. I don't like getting pinged constantly for people just chatting, but I wouldn't want to mute it in case someone actually has something urgent to say. It's weird to have that all in one place with one set of notification settings on all of it.
notification sounds destroy my ability to concentrate so per-channel notification settings were a game changer.
I typically have busy but important channels muted with a carve out for @mentions, watercooler channels are just muted but I check on them a few times a day.
> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.
I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams.
I wonder if it's because the failure mode was, as you said, to "drop by." Now the failure mode is... just failure.
I can't speak for everyone, but I'd say that I've noticed that younger devs simply do not chat.
My team rooms are pretty dead. I'll send stuff there but by and large the team simply doesn't use chat functions.
Perhaps the youngins are more cognisant that it's all monitored. Knowing your employer can read everything and it _will_ be used against you has a chilling effect and I'm pretty sure that's part of it.
We had such incredibly heinous group chats on our Slack that if an admin perused through the logs we'd be instantly fired and the company shut down right then and there lol. The paranoia drove everyone nuts which made it more fun.
More realistically only the ones that admin doesn't like, HR doesn't like, or the CEO doesn't like would be fired while the rest would be retained.
Arbitrary discretion in the exercise of power is the bedrock of our society.
Every healthy person I know does that. It’s as if human communication required to have secrets before people would relax about opening up.
They, for every team I’ve ever managed, have an off company owned systems chat on shit like slack or discord where they are roasting the fuck out of you.
I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones”
They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored
Sure, but this ends up poisoning any sort of culture and creating all sorts of in-group nonsense which is almost impossible to undo.
It’d be like using Blind as your company chat - nobody goes on there to say how great their experience has been, and the tone infects everything else.
But maybe I’m just not very fun at parties…
This should be avoided at all costs by creating a culture that is receptive to people’s concerns and doesn’t do stupid things without explanation - but I get how difficult that is in reality and most orgs end up messing this up.
Maybe I'm a bit unfair to you but to me your comment basically reads as wishing employees would be good little cogs in your machinery rather than people. Like making friends is natural human behavior. Forming friend groups is natural human behavior. It's not nice to disrupt this except that of course everyone has to be able to work together when needed.
Making friends is great. Talking about work with friends is good and healthy.
Moving all of your work related chats off-platform so you can “say whatever you want” about work and eventually making it into a defacto team chat is what I’m talking about here. This isn’t chatting with friends, this is creating team divisions and huge gaps in context for the rest of your team. This approach is being a poor colleague in my opinion.
You can do both things - they’re not mutually exclusive.
You can’t do both things. Humans want to engage in certain kinds of conversation that companies try to prevent happening.
Sometimes you just want to vent and call your boss a fuckhead and it only takes one time in a persons life to see HR punishing/firing/admonishing someone for conduct on company communication channels that would have been perfectly fine in any other setting, for that person to never trust in the “company culture”
There is no environment where messy human beings fit into the perfect set of rules and behavior that companies demand
Partially thats about teams and how most corps use it, which is built primarily around information siloing and management visibility.
Is the team even effectively communicating though?
IME building up communication skills (including when and what to communicate) comes with experience.
It doesn't help that reporting people to HR is a way to career advancement.
I’ve never worked _anywhere_ where reporting someone to HR was anything but negative impacting for your prospects at the company. And I’ve worked at lots of places in many dimensions (company size, industry, age, etc)
This usually applies to Big Bank.
Is that a dynamic they have? I haven’t worked at Big Bank but I’ve worked in finance a few times and at those places and other industries I’ve worked in reporting anything to HR wouldn’t necessarily get direct consequences but you would permanently be on their radar and have to work to rule after that
I’ve worked at a big bank and other large financial service organizations.
The karmic cost / benefit is all worked out then.
I worked at a big bank and it definitely did not.
I think it’s more a shift in the culture amongst most people now than an argument of remote/in office.
Notification fatigue is a thing and people are just used to ignoring notifications and messages nowadays which ends up with slow responses and poor communication all around.
It's much easier to get a feel for how urgent things may be when you can yell down the hall.
I'm currently in feeling things out phase with my current team, and people seem really laid back about responding to messages - but it also seems like we're getting stuff done. Hard to figure.
> how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it.
IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text.
I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way.
The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company)
Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort.
I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.
Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.
> Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well?
Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers.
Working remote is a skill that must be learned. Many people have barely done it at all before their first WFH job. It doesn't come as naturally. It's not a symmetric comparison.
> Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age.
I'm not sure what your experiences were like in school, but during my early years, there were drastic differences between how much different classmates thrived or struggled in highly social environments. Just because everyone is forced to interact in a certain way doesn't mean that it works well for everyone equally.
> It doesn't come as naturally.
I'd argue that it doesn't come as naturally to a lot of people to work in largely dense social environments either. To your own point, this is something that people are actively conditioned for, not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and I'd argue that even despite that it still leads to a pretty wide variety of outcomes for people at an individual level not in small part because of how suitable an environment like that is for each of them.
To me, this seems like a pretty fundamental disagreement in how much uniformity should be imposed on a population based on how well that proposed norm fits with the members of the population. I imagine that to people who disagree with me, the idea that many people might work better in seclusion than in a larger shared environment probably seems radical, but I've yet to see a justification for it as the rule rather than the exception that doesn't end up coming from an assumption that people who don't prefer this are a small minority that aren't worth changing things for. I don't have any clue what the actual number of people who don't fit the assumed norm are, but I don't find it nearly as easy to accept that the threshold at which point it's worth reconsidering how we do things is comfortably higher based on any of the arguments I've seen presented. Maybe this is due to my perception of what a fair threshold would be being lower than average, but most of the disagreements I've encountered seem to already stem from an assumption that the number of people who prefer to work in an office-like environment is high enough to be the basis of how things get run in the first place, and then extrapolate the threshold from that fact.
> Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well.
I think the realization was more that some people are simply there, either at the office or at home. Of course the experiment worked fine. Those people were already not doing much. Not doing much in a different location makes no difference.
Fixing bugs via teams chat is not what author means with "breathe the same air as the folks you work with". Better example would be picking up subtle social clues like Frank looks quiet today and has a frown on his face...let's take him aside for a coffee chat and figure out what's wrong
As much as I hate RTO, chat/video really does have lower social clue information density
> I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much
I believe the change is largely demographic, and I'm NOT referring to gender/nationality/age/race. Rather to the personality of people working in tech today. Long ago tech people were almost exclusively sourced from the weird kids who couldn't/didn't read the room and other things of that nature, they just said stuff, asked stupid questions because they wanted to know. Most people don't do that, so if tech is now made of more "commonly adjusted" people, then there will be less dexterity in navigating a less social and more (actual) productivity focused medium (remote/async comms).
> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.
This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings.
Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard.
I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.
IDK, some of the remote teams that I've worked on were only able to meet in person once per year, if that. They were very communicative on the tools that we had though.
No one is saying it’s impossible to build fully remote teams from scratch, it’s just very hard and requires strong leadership. Most companies have crappy management so they can’t pull it off.
I don’t even think it’s about leadership. Isn’t it weird for somehow to care about people who they only know through the phone or zoom calls? Some people won’t find that weird but I think a significant number of people would, or just can’t do that at all.
Debian works like that but the startups can't manage… interesting.
Open-Source Project that doesn't have Project Managers and MBA telling you to work faster is a lot different then working at Startup that does.
Yeah. Random example: I have better "ambient awareness" remotely because with slack I am in every hallway simultaneously, and can skim the conversations and set up highlight words
I wonder how much of that comes down to culture. Since going remote I have come to wonder if a direct-message-first chat culture is harmful to collaboration.
DM-first is an extremely frustrating culture. That kind of operation tells me that that folks are too risk averse and political to discuss things openly. Typically this is led by panicky managers that are worried about involving too many people or having to explain things to folks they don’t want to deal with, and it escalates from there and gums up ALL the things. It makes Slack basically useless.
The same people DMing however will also extol the virtues of posting in public and lament why there is not more conversation happening in the open.
IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
It is. You need to be aware of it and have people that can set examples about chatting in public rooms or who can recognize when to stop a dm chat and move to be public
> Since going remote I have come to wonder if a direct-message-first chat culture is harmful to collaboration.
There's no question! It absolutely is.
I hate direct messages. They were normally considered rude in IRC.
- [deleted]
It's a strange pattern I observe often, whenever an idea gets promoted from organic-natural-human-ritual to official-new-visible-main-idea, it becomes bloated and off point.
Agile. Case in point.
Did you read the article? :)
Uh.... Caught me red handed.
Ok, gonna go read it.
(Hmm. The author says "Follow Scrum, Lean / Kanban, or eXtreme Programming to the letter, and let your team focus on the product."
I disagree - quite vehmently. I guess that's obvious, given that I'm calling out the various capital-A agile methodoliges, and the parasitical industry around them, as harmful/bloated/mostly pointless. But how did you figure out I hadn't read the blog post from that? Now I have, I just think he's wrong).
The author pretty clearly states that Agile works well and we should stick to it without deviating too much with our own processes. Your point was related to the parent post but contradicting the article and didn’t acknowledge the contradiction or why your opinion about Agile might be more correct than the author - that’s basically it.
The industry around it makes total sense - often bloated and misusing terms, but the process itself can work well as a starting point. I get the impression many engineers never attempt it because of bad experiences named Agile sometimes. Understandable of course.
Makes sense, fair enough.
> as a starting point
Even you disagree with the author :) But yeah, a team with the power to change its own processes, rather than have Agile imposed on it, isn't a team that's cargo-culting an Agile Brand).
(Last couple of months I've been introduced to "retrospective story points"; we're supposed to fill in how many points the ticket actually took after we've done it. I haven't yet found the words to express how pointless I think this is).
> as a starting point
That's the thing... Agile processes do position themselves as a starting point, and suggest that once the team understands it by living it (but not sooner!) they might adapt it and customize it.
From The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition by James Shore et al. (the most recent eXtreme Programming book, if you will):
> As a result, although it’s tempting to customize your Agile method from the beginning, it’s best to start with a by-the-book approach. The practices that are the least familiar are the ones that are most tempting to cut, but they’re the ones you need most, if you’re really going to be Agile. They’re the ones that involve the biggest change in philosophy.
> Mastering the art of Agile development requires real-world experience using a specific, well-defined Agile method. Start with a by-the-book approach. Put it into practice—the whole thing—and spend several months refining your usage and understanding why it works. Then customize. Choose one of the rough edges, make an educated guess about what happens, and repeat.
From The Scrum Book by Jeff Sutherland et al.:
> It’s important to understand the rules, and it’s even useful to follow them most of the time. But reading the rulebook of chess won’t make you a great chess player. After learning the rules, the player then learns about common strategies for the game; the player may also learn basic techniques at this level. Next is learning how to combine strategies you learn from others while maybe adding some of your own. Ultimately, one can transcend any formalism and proceed from the cues one receives from one’s center, from one’s instinct. [...]
> Some day, long from now, you may even outgrow these patterns as you evolve them and define your own. There are no points for doing Scrum, and these patterns are the gate through which a highly driven team passes on the road to the top echelons of performance.
But have you tried any of that, in a team that has had "follow Agile to the letter" imposed upon it? I'm trying to distinguish between the Manifesto and the Industry here.
I've worked with teams across UK, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland over the years. The best remote collaboration I've seen wasn't about the tools, it was about the culture. Some teams just default to writing things down and sharing context. Others expect you to already know. The tool doesn't fix that.
A lot of people formed their view of remote work during Covid, but that wasn’t real remote work. Companies had no idea what they were doing, everyone scrambled, nothing in the culture or processes actually changed.
And it wasn’t just working from home, it was lockdown. Total isolation. Of course people missed human contact and blamed it on remote work.
Even the "productivity" data people cite is skewed, because most of it compares lockdown productivity to normal-life office productivity, which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
I think it's largely that as this became more of a business, the "yappers" who want to talk things out got more leverage as PMs, etc. It sounds like a caricature, but they honestly seem to get super antsy only typing and sitting in one spot.
I've never seen it put this way but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Text requires correctness to some extent; bullshitters will just yap away for hours and nobody can point to one piece of text and say "Here, this is where you are objectively wrong, and/or misrepresenting things".
The unfortunate reality of remote work is there's a lot of zoom meetings where yappers in high places will BS away -- a lot more "important" zoom meetings than "important chats", especially in public.
You seem to discount that the yappers are good and convincing writers as well
It is exactly that and it’s clear the author is one of these “yappers”. I like that term. These people are also absolutely obnoxious irl and completely fail to read the room. I once had a PM like this who went into a near mental health crisis that the team of engineers were not “engaging” enough with her (in her head) witty “engineer” banter.
Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day. There’s a subset of people who have weaseled their way into tech coming from the world of hyper-anxious very public social media engagement that simply make life miserable for everyone else.
Electronic chat is really not the same as face-to-face communication. Neither are video calls.
Yes, it’s not the same at all.
In electronic chat I can ask someone to explain their question and wait for it in writing. In person, I often have to listen to them stumble over the concept because they didn’t think about what they wanted to ask before asking it.
In a video call I can clearly see the other person’s screen and zoom in on what I’m trying to look at. In person I have to lean over their desk and squint at the right angle.
For me, electronic chat is better most of the time.
Everyone is different. I vastly prefer email over chat, but also wouldn't want to live without the occasional face-to-face.
"Everyone is different" is my point. Face to face once in a while is nice, though I don't care so much about having it very often with my colleagues in a professional setting.
Of course it's not the same, that's the point. I personally prefer the async, chat based mediums I've used since I was a child. Some of my coworkers have disabilities that make conversational typing difficult and prefer video calls as a result.
Consider the effort to accommodate those preferences though. Accommodating a video call preference is easy. Same for chat. Accommodating a preference for face-to-face requires spending an hour (2x average US commute) traveling to meet you. That's quite a significant ask of the other person.
I started doing remote back in 2002, working with companies in the UK and US, something that was largely unheard of in my country. While our mode of communication was web messengers (AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc and the aggregators), I used IRC a lot to get tech help, and participate in online dicussions.
You're comparing a subset of passionate users that was supplementing in-person collaboration with the general population and no in-person. It's not going to be as good as the self selected users.
One of the author’s primary reasonings for why remote work sucks is apparently that they find it difficult to treat other people like human beings without close proximity to them.
That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.
It's a big problem especially if you haven't met the people you're working with. It's easy so think one dimensionally about a person, I catch myself doing it all the time and I can't say I'm wise enough to always stop it dead in its tracks.
I have coworkers from past jobs who I've never met in person but still stay in touch with because we became friends when we worked together. That's not to say it's not an issue for you or for the author, but at least from the way they phrased it in the article, it's not at all apparent to me whether they're actually intending their complaints about remote work to be personal opinions or if they think they apply to everyone.
I can’t say I have ever experienced this problem after conversing with someone more than a handful of times.
Sure it applies to things like random people on social media and such, but after a mutual exchange or two you should be over it.
Maybe it applies more if you’re on the spectrum? (and the spectrum being wider than most people imagine)
Anecdotally, I don’t think that’s true. A lot of the good friends I have made purely through the internet are on the spectrum.
I think it’s pretty mature of the author to recognize that this is the way they (and most humans) work, rather than acting like they always have the ability to treat others with their absolute full capacity for respect.
I don’t think that’s how most humans work, but yes it is good for the author to recognize and seek to rectify it.
Yeah, I joined the Mozilla community in ~2003, and that was all IRC, and distributed all over the world, and it worked very, very well.
Note that these days, the Mozilla community has moved to Matrix, which also works very well for these things.
now we do the work of 7 projects in half a team paid 50% less and can't get to help anyone as we all drown in 7 tickets we should do in parallel with agents writing docu on the side and assist and some of the easier code on the side because management drank the koolaid of going full into AI and "the Team now can do 300% more right". I miss the old times where making 100k and still could have few minutes to help each other and now we're in this hypercapitalistic garbage AI age were we have to just output, output, output and fuck quality and else they lay you off and get the next guy from wherever.
Everything is FAST now, I 'member 10-15 years ago if someone came to you for help you actually had the time to pull up a (possibly virtual) chair and spend 3h helping them. If you do that now you'll get canned in 4 months.
Obviously the help also came with you bonding and chit chatting about other stuff, I miss it.
100% this
- [deleted]
Right, because there's nothing special about remote vs in-office. It's just communication and collaboration.
Living beings do it all kinda ways. Bees waggle their butts, crickets rub their legs, geese honk, snakes hiss, some fish detect electrical signals. And to collaborate, the bees' dance indicates a flight path, birds singing indicates interest in mating, the snake's hiss and the geese's honk tells you to watch out. You use the tools you have and develop collaboration with them. There's clearly no right way, there's just ways.
But tomorrow morning, would you wanna learn to honk at people, or rub your legs, or waggle your butt, to order a latte at Starbucks? It'd be awkward, weird, painful, and unnecessary. So if you were asked to, you'd probably not try very hard to adapt to it. And if everybody you knew were in the same boat, all being forced to change with no real guidance, kinda not trying that hard to make it work? It would suck for everybody.
People just don't like changing what they're used to. They probably don't even mean to fight it. But we do like culture we're already familiar with. Change is hard, not changing is easy. We like easy. So people who grew up with remote work (on IRC, mailing lists, etc) find it easy, even more productive. But a company that's thrown into it without a healthy established culture are going to be swimming upstream indefinitely.
Yeah text based beats video a lot of the time.