I'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.
ronbenton · 1h ago
“I see you’ve only had 15 rambles this week”
“Isn’t 15 the minimum?”
“Well, yeah, if you just want to do the bare minimum. But look at Todd over there - he has 37 rambles”
“Well if you wanted people to have 37 rambles why wouldn’t you make that the minimum”
mjevans · 1h ago
Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)
If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.
Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
gopalv · 1m ago
> The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Most of my middle management experiences has been between Office Space and Better off Ted.
One with "Don't care" as an answer and the other says "Care more" as its.
Those are the two extremes of the genre.
SoftTalker · 31m ago
It’s so much like real work I can’t watch it. Same with The Office series.
e3bc54b2 · 1h ago
Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.
When I told them the movie came out before they were born, yet depict their life damn near exactly as they were living it, their enlightenment lit the room anew hah.
Someone please save my soul..
calvinmorrison · 1h ago
Mine certainly is. If my employees don't fill out their timesheets and tps reports how will I do payroll
echelon · 53m ago
Yeah, but Obsidian is a startup. A remote startup.
If you're in a startup of <10 people and someone isn't communicating with the rest of the team, it's not going to work.
I can see how this feels dystopian in a giant corporation, but that's because everyone is there for the paycheck.
In a startup, people are making sacrifices to make the thing work. They could get a higher paying, less stressful job.
Picking a startup and not being engaged is disruptive.
No comments yet
ducktective · 1h ago
> Hey Veo, guess what? New plot for another Black Mirror episode just dropped
kepano · 4m ago
> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.
I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article state "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."
Aurornis · 2h 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)
bee_rider · 1h ago
Maybe Agile was one of these things, but then a bunch of people started doing it literally.
twic · 5m ago
Other way round, i think. The original form had a lot of weird practices which actually worked. The form most common today is just lip service.
TimTheTinker · 1h ago
The original manifesto wasn't[0], but it's certainly likely a lot of cargo-cult "Agile" is.
Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".
When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.
But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.
I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.
These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.
mjevans · 1h ago
Same idea as rubber-duck debugging or just explaining things to someone else. The work of translating the idea forces your mind to marshal and walk the structures from a fresh angle and you can gain insights that were lacking.
Getting more eyeballs on that idea also helps. Both in the different knowledge and expectations / assumptions they have and in proofing how clearly the idea's communicated. Really helps reveal areas where there's ambiguity you hadn't even realized because it's not even a confusion spot you'd consider with your knowledge.
unethical_ban · 32m ago
Off topic, 10 years ago, I hated confluence and wanted my team to be able to continue using DokuWiki.
Now, I've consulted at places that use Microsoft Teams file shares for their "documentation", and I feel like I'm back in 2005. Confluence would be a dream.
Tohsig · 34m ago
I'll add on to this that per-user channels could work well in teams where everyone is comfortable sharing, but could be absolutely paralyzing in other situations.
My personal preference is to have some kind of "Off-Topic" or "Open Discussion" channel that is communal. I'll then make a point of consistently posting half-developed ideas to that channel. Especially the ideas that I know are going to morph as the team discusses them. I find that helps do two things:
- Helps create a culture of collaboration rather than one of "whatever the lead dev says goes".
- Provides Cover For/Reduces Pressure On anyone that is less comfortable putting their thoughts out there for discussion.
As the parent comment said, the fundamental idea in the post isn't bad, but the mechanism may need tweaking for a given team.
ajsnigrutin · 2h ago
Yep 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 · 1h ago
Do you grow the olives as well
majke · 2h ago
Let 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.
ZeroCool2u · 51m ago
We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.
serf · 33m ago
>and they know it's a judgement free zone.
that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.
If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road within the organization; to think otherwise would be pure fantasy.
Similarly : if you go drinking with the boss, you do still have to remember that the drunk puking slob who you're carrying to their hotel room is going to wake up and be your boss tomorrow.
very few humans actually disconnect this stuff from their internalized judgements of people.
oefrha · 12m ago
Yeah, maybe I’m small-minded, but if someone I’m not familiar with, say a new hire asks a question way beneath their presumed experience level I’m absolutely gonna judge, judgement free be damned; and if they’re my report I’m gonna question the hiring (in my mind). There’s no shortage of imposters in the industry, most of them who’re capable of landing jobs above them are probably also smart enough to scoff at pure fantasy like “judgement free zone”.
BoxFour · 8m ago
This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.
People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.
The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.
A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.
The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.
Aurornis · 1h ago
I 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.
TimTheTinker · 12m ago
That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting".
It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal.
You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."
Xeoncross · 1h ago
This is the difference between a good idea and the implementation.
People just act differently in "official" topic channels.
It's like when you buy that super secure door lock and the lowest bid handyman bends it while installing because it's such a pain to align correctly and now it's just as vulnerable as any other lock.
eldenring · 59m ago
yep, also doscoverability is not an issue with Slack. You can find most things with a search, people typically don't go scrolling through a channel to find something.
Aurornis · 52m ago
People start by searching within a channel, especially when terms are vague or frequently used.
latchkey · 57m ago
> from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid
I'd rather avoid the manager's perspective.
Aurornis · 52m ago
The blog post is from a manager’s perspective. It’s a manager explaining what they had their employees do.
latchkey · 29m ago
As a CEO 'manager' myself, I try to let people just be. Getting too granular about person vs. topic and redirecting people to the right room sucks the fun out of everything. Let people mess up and post in the wrong place, who cares?
OP's post was about a great experience 'tremendous value' they had and now you're pooping on it with 'manager' opinions. Read what you wrote from the employee perspective, you're sounding like the self-appointed fun police.
rablackburn · 5h ago
I 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 · 4h ago
This 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 · 2h ago
Ideally not driving, as the walk is at least half the benefit.
kmarc · 3h ago
Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never
* pick up Becky from school
* feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today)
* sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am)
* sorry "train canceled"
* will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment
While all these can be completely valid reasons, it's just funny hearing one of these daily. On a side note, I also kinda like my job and am not interested in slacking.
bagacrap · 3h ago
I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+
Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.
xandrius · 1h ago
Re-reading your own message should definitely be a bell for you to notice either your lack of trust in others and/or your twisted perspective that work is the goal of life.
Unless you are the one paying for that person and they are not performing as by contract, even if someone needs an extra day off to chill, you should be happy they do take it as it creates an environment where you also could take it off if you so wished.
doubled112 · 2h ago
I get migraines that can disappear as fast as they hit me. Can’t see, can’t feel my face and sometimes a limb, can’t focus or form sentences.
I could pretend to be available that day, maybe, but it’s mutually beneficial for me to just take a day off.
The next day I’m usually just fine, and I don’t always give more explanation than “taking a sick day”.
wallstop · 2h ago
Interesting. When I do not feel up to the task of working, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or arbitrary cause, I use one of my provided PTO days and email the team a short "I will not be showing up to work today" message, without explaining the cause.
I similarly don't bat an eye when a coworker takes off for whatever reason. We're allotted PTO. Why jump through hoops to convince ourselves that it's ok to use it?
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I don’t even use a PTO day if I’m just feeling “blah” as long as I’m available via Slack to answer questions and can attend ad-hoc meetings. There are so many times I’ve had to/chosen to work late, I don’t say anything.
I don’t think I’ve taken a “sick day” once since going remote over 5 years ago. But for the last 10 years I’ve been leading initiatives first at startups and then at consulting companies and I mostly have autonomy and the trust to get things done.
closewith · 2h ago
It's because the GP doesn't value you as a person or trust you. In that worldview, you cannot allow any autonomy and all time not spent at work must be tightly regulated. It will also spill in other areas, and you can bet the GP is not well liked by their colleagues.
sgt · 2h ago
If someone you work with and you otherwise trust e.g. with your code, servers, and business, says they are feeling under the weather, why should you not assume they are not telling the truth?
ralferoo · 2h ago
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
I bill by days worked, and I'll still take a day off if I'm feeling terrible in the morning. Even taking the hit on pay is worth it, because I'll probably recover in one day instead dragging it out for 3 days.
But then, maybe I'm too honest. On occasions when I've felt ill later in the day, I've also just signed off early before the team meetings and just left a message like "I worked 6 hours today, but felt really unproductive, so I'm finishing early and I'll only bill a half/quarter day" (depending on how little I got done). Not had any complaints yet.
jzb · 2h ago
Um, why?
The other day I had a killer headache. Just couldn’t shake it. I did everything I needed to that was time sensitive, then went AFK. I don’t see any reason to be suspicious of others if they do similarly—we all have days when we’re just not at our best for some reason.
kmarc · 2h ago
To defend @bagacrap, they said they tend to be a bit suspicious.
And I am, too, when I hear this weekly from the same person (and when I ask back next day, if she recovered, she asks me "from what"?)
I'm all in for more times off for parents, more PTOs, sabbaticala, etc. But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious.
dclowd9901 · 32m ago
Do they perform adequately at their job in general? If so, who cares?
kmarc · 9m ago
I cannot say all of them were performing bad
But yeah, some of them... Definitely.
Someone said in another thread, it's none of my business. Indeed. Especially as an external. I also would never report any of my suspicion. Sometimes,however, I'm blocked by this (waiting on others, etc.) so not entirely unaffected, tho
SoftTalker · 20m ago
Typically if such a thing catches your eye it’s because in fact they aren’t performing adequately.
tetromino_ · 1h ago
> But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious
Suspicious in that it's only twice a month? When my kid first started preschool, we got exposed to all sorts of wonderful novel viruses, and I had respiratory infections of various sorts for probably 50% of the days for the entire autumn and winter. Most of them not rising to the level of high fever and not being able to work, but definitely noticeably cutting my productivity.
(Child spent 16 % of the year sick. Across two parents, that is nearly a month of absence in a year.)
MichaelRo · 49m ago
Suspicious that it's probably a massive hangover rather than "a cold". And I assume it's during the week, otherwise noone but your liver cares what you do on a Friday or Saturday evening.
"A cold" doesn't usually totally incapacitate someone working from the comfort of their home, down a paracetamol, drink hot liquids, take a nap, don't need to be 110% productive but still can manage to get some job done. But "a massive hangover" is something that surely can knock someone out.
tranceylc · 24m ago
Are you sure you aren’t projecting your substance abuse issues onto others? Assuming someone has a hangover in the middle of the week is odd behaviour
turtlebits · 1h ago
Who cares? Only their manager should. And it's not about butts in seats but overall productivity. This attitude is why companies ate pushing for RTO.
closewith · 1h ago
> And I am, too, when I hear this weekly from the same person (and when I ask back next day, if she recovered, she asks me "from what"?)
I'd say you're missing the hint that it is none of your business.
kaashif · 1h ago
If someone was ill, then they're back, asking them if they're feeling better is totally normal conversation.
The suspicion etc may not be, but the question is obviously fine.
closewith · 1h ago
Given you're suspicious about these people and the way you talk about them, they are most likely well aware that you're on a fishing trip feigning interest.
People like you are always more transparent than you realise.
kaashif · 18m ago
Apologies if it wasn't clear, I am a different person to the one you replied to, and am not suspicious - I was commenting on the other person's suspicion and indeed said that it wasn't normal.
exe34 · 3h ago
> I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events.
That's one reason people feel like they have to keep hiding it and it builds up to burnout.
bee_rider · 53m ago
We shouldn’t make extra room for parents, we should just create a society where everybody has enough free time to handle kids. People without kids can enjoy their other outside work stuff.
Everybody says having kids is really rewarding, so the folks who don’t should also get some time to find their own rewards. And, if we’re making extra space for people who have kids, that puts those people at a competitive disadvantage.
I mean, like, we should have maternity leave as a special thing. But everybody should get enough days off to deal with a 10 year old’s baseball games, school plays, doctor appointments, or whatever. And even for maternity leave—maybe just give everybody a sabbatical at some point!
rkomorn · 48m ago
I'm okay with parents getting more perks and time to deal with their kids.
I have zero desire to be a parent but I think people having kids is a pretty important part of keeping humanity/society going, so I'm happy to accommodate (or even reward) it.
bee_rider · 37m ago
IMO it would be better to subsidize this at the government level than the employer level.
We definitely don’t want to create a situation where parents are less desirable to employ, right?
And, most people have kids (even in places countries with highly developed economies and lower fertility rates). So, we shouldn’t think of this as an extra perk (some special case benefit). The treatment of folks who have had kids is the average case. The special case is whatever we for people who don’t have them (we shouldn’t make a special negative case, right?)
rkomorn · 18m ago
Sure, it's better for governments to provide the incentives.
Regarding your second point, I guess you're right. :) I'm just looking at it from my "you couldn't even pay me to have a child" perspective.
Your question about making it a negative case is an interesting can of worms I'll elect not to open.
bee_rider · 12m ago
I don’t think it is a can of worms really; making special negative cases for subsets of the population is a can of poop! There’s nothing so complicated as a worm in there.
tayo42 · 2h ago
So many reasons why you might be sick for one day. Colds start light, peak and fade off, sometimes you just need one day to sleep off the worst of it.
dclowd9901 · 30m ago
I've been sick so often now (thanks kids) that I can feel _immediately_ when something is coming on. Rather than be down and useless at home and work for 2 or 3 more days, I tag out, go to bed and usually knock it out in a night. I feel like that's way better for me and everyone else overall.
zimpenfish · 2h ago
> So many reasons why you might be sick for one day.
I'd bet a fair few "under the weather" days are because people have mental health issues but aren't going to announce that publicly (due to the ongoing stigma.)
closewith · 2h ago
What you're describing is life, not slacking.
It sounds like those people have their priorities and you have yours. Personally, theirs sound much more sustainable than yours.
IshKebab · 2h ago
Yeah... Maybe read the post because this is complete off topic.
andrewrn · 4m ago
I 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.
softwaredoug · 1h ago
There 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 · 1h ago
This 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.
siva7 · 5h 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.
ruszki · 3h ago
I’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.
Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.
MrGilbert · 5h ago
Although 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 · 5h ago
I 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 · 5h ago
I 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 · 1h ago
I’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.
count · 5h ago
We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team.
It helps a LOT.
We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.
stingraycharles · 4h ago
We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.
As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
jobs_throwaway · 3h ago
group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted
parpfish · 3h ago
Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
ghaff · 2h ago
And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.
It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
There are two rules about any job I take these days.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
swiftcoder · 2h ago
> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak
I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?
fiddlerwoaroof · 1h ago
There are a handful of Spatial Audio videoconferencing solutions that work pretty well to allow multiple simultaneous conversations.
throwaway290 · 2h ago
Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks
swiftcoder · 1h ago
I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this
(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).
throwaway290 · 4m ago
sure... I'm just saying mixing on client already exists.
codethief · 5h ago
I have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.
goalieca · 3h ago
> Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings,
.. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".
ryankrage77 · 2h ago
Huh, 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 · 1h ago
I 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.
9dev · 5h 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.
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.
hk__2 · 4h 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.
Aurornis · 1h ago
That will last until the first person shares a link to their rambling channel or the first time a pair of team members discuss something at standup that only appeared in someone’s ramblings channel.
Every time a company has said “you should mute and ignore this channel” but also encourages relevant project discussion in that channel, it becomes something people realize they need to unmute and monitor.
The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring channels are managers and leads, because they can dictate how people need to bring information to them.
9dev · 4h ago
But you still know they are there, and that your colleagues should perceive you as at least casually interested in what the others are up to. Even if muted, these channels inevitably become another liability.
ghaff · 1h ago
Yeah. It's either channels that you actively engage with or you effectively block. For active communication purposes the "you might see it" in-between option isn't really very effective. It happens anyway to some degree. But isn't ideal.
starttoaster · 3h ago
I think everyone knows and silently understands that the people responding/emoji-ing in those channels all day every day are doing so at the cost of work output, and that there are a lot of people working that aren't typing away about the last audiobook they listened to. I think you've created a stressful situation out of something that isn't inherently stressing.
kaffekaka · 2h ago
What is "inherently stressing"? Is it not enough that some people feel stressed by something for it to actually be stressing?
I know that also for me these rambling channels would add to my stress.
9dev · 2h ago
Generating business value is not your only responsibility, though. Most companies expect you to be a team player, to stay in touch, to communicate across departments, and so on.
So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.
firesteelrain · 4h ago
In teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?
delecti · 3h ago
Mattermost can truly mute. Doing so disables the behavior that makes the channel name bold when there are unread messages.
Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".
OJFord · 4h ago
Slack 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 · 4h ago
Hmm ok we don’t use Slack and it would have to be on prem due to company policy
aar9 · 4h ago
Muted channels in Slack do not indicate in any way when there's a new message.
stavros · 4h ago
Slack mutes fine.
__MatrixMan__ · 3h ago
Do you really pursue "inbox zero" on slack? That sounds like a full-time job in itself.
kj4211cash · 3h ago
I do. At Walmart. It drives me slightly insane. Wish I could turn that part of myself off more often.
gertlex · 1h ago
I'm also like this.
Have never been like this with email though (but email is much higher volume/more individual things to click on... and less interesting :D)
RedNifre · 16m ago
We 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.
liveoneggs · 3h ago
I 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.
Aurornis · 1h 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.
ogou · 1h ago
After 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 · 55m ago
There'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 · 39m ago
Those distinctions evaporated in 2020 and never returned.
senko · 5h ago
I 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.
herval · 2h ago
“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit
barnabee · 5h ago
Yeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams
nottorp · 3h ago
That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?
senko · 3h ago
In 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.
layer8 · 3h ago
It 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.
Stratoscope · 3h ago
#random
comrade1234 · 4h ago
I 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.
sublinear · 3h ago
Thank 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 · 1h ago
I 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.
musicnarcoman · 3h ago
I think they meant each person has a public channel of their own.
bravetraveler · 3h ago
Like the Confluence spaces they ignore /s
marginalia_nu · 4h ago
This 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.
esperent · 5h ago
I 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.
skhameneh · 5h ago
This 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.
jon-wood · 5h ago
We’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.
MrGilbert · 5h ago
It 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.
nicoritschel · 26m ago
You should do this in normal channels relevant to the discussion topic to facilitate discussion, not a separate channel per person. What.
jelder · 5h ago
I use something similar, but call them “Rubber-duck channels.”
Long 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.
> 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 · 5h ago
I 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 · 4h ago
I 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.
nasalgoat · 3h ago
I 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 · 3h ago
I 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 · 3h ago
The 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 · 1h ago
I’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.
8n4vidtmkvmk · 3h ago
Can you not just create those channels? I did at my 10 person company and at my 100k company, no body seems to mind
nasalgoat · 3h ago
Yes but they get very lonely all by yourself.
t5teveryweek · 34m ago
Hey 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
Aurornis · 1h 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.
danparsonson · 3h ago
This 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 · 3h ago
Or 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
Separo · 46m ago
Channels 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.
respondo2134 · 50m ago
struggling 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!
codesnik · 5h ago
I'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.
makeitdouble · 4h ago
TBH 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 · 2h ago
At 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.
danieldk · 5h ago
We 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.
layer8 · 3h 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.
ipdashc · 2h ago
> Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO.
Why does it feel like people take this (reasonable) idea too far so often these days (and always on the Internet - I've never seen anyone in real life act like that).
Like, yes, don't treat your job like a family or spend your whole day talking about your personal drama. Be careful or avoid dating coworkers. Etc. But this stuff is, as the author said, the equivalent of water cooler talk.
If I had a salaried job that tracked the fact that I spent 15 minutes (when not on a time crunch, of course) talking about some random interesting blog post or a coworker's trip, I would... probably look into leaving that job. I have never had a job that met that description. (On the contrary, many jobs I had, especially back as an intern/student, let us get away with way too much time spent fooling around or talking, in retrospect.)
Even the stereotypical overworked fast food employee is allowed to chat with their coworkers when there's downtime, it's perfectly normal. I can't imagine pursuing the "work/life balance" ideal to the point one avoids regular old casual conversation with their coworkers.
elric · 3h ago
> There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.
So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?
layer8 · 3h ago
This is formally/legally a work break that you’re not allowed to count as work time. If I have a half-hour conversation about a non-work topic, which I sometimes do, it means I’ll need to work half an hour more. At the office it’s effectively at everyone’s discretion how exactly they count it, but on a chat platform it can in principle be tracked if someone spends substantial time on #offtopic.
handoflixue · 3h ago
Legal definitions vary country to country: I wouldn't be so quick to insist on some universal definition. I'm pretty sure you're wrong about US law there - docking someone's pay for "chatting" sounds extremely difficult to defend.
Besides, multi-tasking exists: sometimes I need to let my brain idle on another topic for 15 minutes, because I'm working through something complex, or just wrapped up a project and have a meeting.
Certainly, nowhere I've ever worked has tried enforcing anything like this. I've had plenty of co-workers who made a point of wandering over to socialize for 5-10 minutes every day, which must have easily added up to an hour a day - but they were also the expert that knew exactly where everyone was and who needed to coordinate with who.
layer8 · 3h ago
I’m not in the US, so that may be right. In my view this is more about how the employee feels about it: I don’t want to get into a dispute whether the half hour a day I spent on the rambling channel counts as work or not. For that it makes a significant difference if people use the channel to discuss their hobbies or whether they discuss work-related ideas. I also don’t want to miss the work-related topics just because I’m not interested in the hobby discussions.
prmoustache · 3h ago
In my country, we are allowed an half an hour break that is not deducible from your work time. It is expected that you need to take breaks in a 8h or 8h24 shift and you are free to decide if you want to take one long one or several shorter ones. Also going into the bathroom is not deducted, even if one day you need 15 minutes to take a proper dump or another day you have stomach issues and need to go more often.
bottom line: YMMV. check your local laws and/or collective agreements.
ThePowerOfFuet · 2h ago
What a terrible situation in which to find oneself.
jobs_throwaway · 3h 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 · 3h ago
What do you mean? Your employment contract says you need to work n hours per week. Private activities obviously don’t count as work.
parpfish · 3h ago
I think building rapport with your team counts as work.
layer8 · 3h ago
Depending 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 · 1h ago
I 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.
bsenftner · 4h ago
I'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.
JustExAWS · 1h ago
I 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…
shortrounddev2 · 4h ago
At 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
We 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)
jamesblonde · 3h ago
This 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 · 3h ago
Every 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.
romanows · 4h ago
I 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.
dpdpdpdpdp · 4h ago
Ramble in the panopticon?
esco27 · 1h ago
There 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.
OJFord · 4h ago
Love 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?
robertclaus · 3h ago
Why not a shared "Ramblings" channel? And at that point, why not re-use something like "Random" that many companies already have?
gavmor · 1h ago
OP is proposing something more like internal blogging.
charlie0 · 4h ago
This 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)
sublinear · 3h ago
No 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.
gwbas1c · 4h ago
I created a "watercooler" channel at my company to keep chitchat out of the main channel. It's a lot easier than juggling multiple channels.
Waterluvian · 4h ago
I 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.
mhh__ · 3h ago
Internal Twitter should be more of a thing.
madduci · 5h ago
At 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 · 5h ago
Too 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.
cheschire · 5h ago
…I use is my own chat (where I am alone)…
bravesoul2 · 5h ago
A 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"
spike021 · 2h ago
my 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 · 2h ago
We 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...
dakiol · 4h ago
In 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 · 4h ago
Good 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 · 2h ago
You can't "steer" people like that. Good fences make good neighbors.
processing · 5h ago
any tips for a team of one and claude code?
siva7 · 5h ago
that's what this site is for.
swader999 · 5h ago
Volunteer in your local community.
blitzar · 5h ago
sometimes I complain about the team to chatgpt or gemini.
apples_oranges · 5h ago
I 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.
echo42null · 4h ago
We 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.
junon · 4h ago
I 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.
hkon · 3h ago
So, 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 · 2h ago
Right. 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.
booleandilemma · 4h ago
A 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 · 2h ago
More performative “I’m cynicaler than thou” comments as if there aren’t enough on HN anyway.
I think what is distinct in this proposal is that there are n 1:n channels
bitwize · 3h 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."
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I 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.
fHr · 2h ago
Nah not another useless channel to maintain, I'm good.
_Algernon_ · 5h ago
This 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 Maybe someone else can figure it out.
baobun · 5h ago
It 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.
bapak · 5h ago
There'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
MrGilbert · 5h ago
Maybe there is some
technical issue for you regarding the automatic switch between light and dark mode. Under normal circumstances, it is perfectly readable.
_Algernon_ · 5h ago
I 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 · 5h ago
Just 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.
shakna · 5h ago
On my lower end smartphone, the font is so fine that there's dropped pixels that is upsetting my eyes.
mavamaarten · 5h ago
It's almost-white light gray on almost black. What are you on about?
chvid · 4h ago
Or just show up at the office once in a while.
ManlyBread · 2h ago
This article is about nothing, how does this kind of stuff hit the front page? Is it because of bots?
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.
“Isn’t 15 the minimum?”
“Well, yeah, if you just want to do the bare minimum. But look at Todd over there - he has 37 rambles”
“Well if you wanted people to have 37 rambles why wouldn’t you make that the minimum”
If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.
Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Most of my middle management experiences has been between Office Space and Better off Ted.
One with "Don't care" as an answer and the other says "Care more" as its.
Those are the two extremes of the genre.
Someone please save my soul..
If you're in a startup of <10 people and someone isn't communicating with the rest of the team, it's not going to work.
I can see how this feels dystopian in a giant corporation, but that's because everyone is there for the paycheck.
In a startup, people are making sacrifices to make the thing work. They could get a higher paying, less stressful job.
Picking a startup and not being engaged is disruptive.
No comments yet
I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article state "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."
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)
[0] https://agilemanifesto.org/
When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.
But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.
I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.
These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.
Getting more eyeballs on that idea also helps. Both in the different knowledge and expectations / assumptions they have and in proofing how clearly the idea's communicated. Really helps reveal areas where there's ambiguity you hadn't even realized because it's not even a confusion spot you'd consider with your knowledge.
Now, I've consulted at places that use Microsoft Teams file shares for their "documentation", and I feel like I'm back in 2005. Confluence would be a dream.
My personal preference is to have some kind of "Off-Topic" or "Open Discussion" channel that is communal. I'll then make a point of consistently posting half-developed ideas to that channel. Especially the ideas that I know are going to morph as the team discusses them. I find that helps do two things:
- Helps create a culture of collaboration rather than one of "whatever the lead dev says goes".
- Provides Cover For/Reduces Pressure On anyone that is less comfortable putting their thoughts out there for discussion.
As the parent comment said, the fundamental idea in the post isn't bad, but the mechanism may need tweaking for a given team.
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.
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.
that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.
If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road within the organization; to think otherwise would be pure fantasy.
Similarly : if you go drinking with the boss, you do still have to remember that the drunk puking slob who you're carrying to their hotel room is going to wake up and be your boss tomorrow.
very few humans actually disconnect this stuff from their internalized judgements of people.
People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.
The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.
A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.
The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.
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.
It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal.
You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."
People just act differently in "official" topic channels.
It's like when you buy that super secure door lock and the lowest bid handyman bends it while installing because it's such a pain to align correctly and now it's just as vulnerable as any other lock.
I'd rather avoid the manager's perspective.
OP's post was about a great experience 'tremendous value' they had and now you're pooping on it with 'manager' opinions. Read what you wrote from the employee perspective, you're sounding like the self-appointed fun police.
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.
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.
* pick up Becky from school
* feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today)
* sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am)
* sorry "train canceled"
* will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment
While all these can be completely valid reasons, it's just funny hearing one of these daily. On a side note, I also kinda like my job and am not interested in slacking.
However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+
Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.
Unless you are the one paying for that person and they are not performing as by contract, even if someone needs an extra day off to chill, you should be happy they do take it as it creates an environment where you also could take it off if you so wished.
I could pretend to be available that day, maybe, but it’s mutually beneficial for me to just take a day off.
The next day I’m usually just fine, and I don’t always give more explanation than “taking a sick day”.
I similarly don't bat an eye when a coworker takes off for whatever reason. We're allotted PTO. Why jump through hoops to convince ourselves that it's ok to use it?
I don’t think I’ve taken a “sick day” once since going remote over 5 years ago. But for the last 10 years I’ve been leading initiatives first at startups and then at consulting companies and I mostly have autonomy and the trust to get things done.
I bill by days worked, and I'll still take a day off if I'm feeling terrible in the morning. Even taking the hit on pay is worth it, because I'll probably recover in one day instead dragging it out for 3 days.
But then, maybe I'm too honest. On occasions when I've felt ill later in the day, I've also just signed off early before the team meetings and just left a message like "I worked 6 hours today, but felt really unproductive, so I'm finishing early and I'll only bill a half/quarter day" (depending on how little I got done). Not had any complaints yet.
The other day I had a killer headache. Just couldn’t shake it. I did everything I needed to that was time sensitive, then went AFK. I don’t see any reason to be suspicious of others if they do similarly—we all have days when we’re just not at our best for some reason.
And I am, too, when I hear this weekly from the same person (and when I ask back next day, if she recovered, she asks me "from what"?)
I'm all in for more times off for parents, more PTOs, sabbaticala, etc. But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious.
But yeah, some of them... Definitely.
Someone said in another thread, it's none of my business. Indeed. Especially as an external. I also would never report any of my suspicion. Sometimes,however, I'm blocked by this (waiting on others, etc.) so not entirely unaffected, tho
Suspicious in that it's only twice a month? When my kid first started preschool, we got exposed to all sorts of wonderful novel viruses, and I had respiratory infections of various sorts for probably 50% of the days for the entire autumn and winter. Most of them not rising to the level of high fever and not being able to work, but definitely noticeably cutting my productivity.
(Child spent 16 % of the year sick. Across two parents, that is nearly a month of absence in a year.)
"A cold" doesn't usually totally incapacitate someone working from the comfort of their home, down a paracetamol, drink hot liquids, take a nap, don't need to be 110% productive but still can manage to get some job done. But "a massive hangover" is something that surely can knock someone out.
I'd say you're missing the hint that it is none of your business.
The suspicion etc may not be, but the question is obviously fine.
People like you are always more transparent than you realise.
That's one reason people feel like they have to keep hiding it and it builds up to burnout.
Everybody says having kids is really rewarding, so the folks who don’t should also get some time to find their own rewards. And, if we’re making extra space for people who have kids, that puts those people at a competitive disadvantage.
I mean, like, we should have maternity leave as a special thing. But everybody should get enough days off to deal with a 10 year old’s baseball games, school plays, doctor appointments, or whatever. And even for maternity leave—maybe just give everybody a sabbatical at some point!
I have zero desire to be a parent but I think people having kids is a pretty important part of keeping humanity/society going, so I'm happy to accommodate (or even reward) it.
We definitely don’t want to create a situation where parents are less desirable to employ, right?
And, most people have kids (even in places countries with highly developed economies and lower fertility rates). So, we shouldn’t think of this as an extra perk (some special case benefit). The treatment of folks who have had kids is the average case. The special case is whatever we for people who don’t have them (we shouldn’t make a special negative case, right?)
Regarding your second point, I guess you're right. :) I'm just looking at it from my "you couldn't even pay me to have a child" perspective.
Your question about making it a negative case is an interesting can of worms I'll elect not to open.
I'd bet a fair few "under the weather" days are because people have mental health issues but aren't going to announce that publicly (due to the ongoing stigma.)
It sounds like those people have their priorities and you have yours. Personally, theirs sound much more sustainable than yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.
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.
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.
As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.
It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?
(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).
.. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".
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.
The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
Every time a company has said “you should mute and ignore this channel” but also encourages relevant project discussion in that channel, it becomes something people realize they need to unmute and monitor.
The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring channels are managers and leads, because they can dictate how people need to bring information to them.
I know that also for me these rambling channels would add to my stress.
So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.
Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".
Have never been like this with email though (but email is much higher volume/more individual things to click on... and less interesting :D)
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.
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.
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.
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.
As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.
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.
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.
A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.
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.
http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...
https://wordpress.com/p2/
[1] https://www.bobek.cz/the-power-of-written-standup/
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.
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.
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
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.
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.
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.
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
It should be an anything-goes place where anything can be vented but also, no responses are required.
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.
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.
> - 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.
Why does it feel like people take this (reasonable) idea too far so often these days (and always on the Internet - I've never seen anyone in real life act like that).
Like, yes, don't treat your job like a family or spend your whole day talking about your personal drama. Be careful or avoid dating coworkers. Etc. But this stuff is, as the author said, the equivalent of water cooler talk.
If I had a salaried job that tracked the fact that I spent 15 minutes (when not on a time crunch, of course) talking about some random interesting blog post or a coworker's trip, I would... probably look into leaving that job. I have never had a job that met that description. (On the contrary, many jobs I had, especially back as an intern/student, let us get away with way too much time spent fooling around or talking, in retrospect.)
Even the stereotypical overworked fast food employee is allowed to chat with their coworkers when there's downtime, it's perfectly normal. I can't imagine pursuing the "work/life balance" ideal to the point one avoids regular old casual conversation with their coworkers.
So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?
Besides, multi-tasking exists: sometimes I need to let my brain idle on another topic for 15 minutes, because I'm working through something complex, or just wrapped up a project and have a meeting.
Certainly, nowhere I've ever worked has tried enforcing anything like this. I've had plenty of co-workers who made a point of wandering over to socialize for 5-10 minutes every day, which must have easily added up to an hour a day - but they were also the expert that knew exactly where everyone was and who needed to coordinate with who.
bottom line: YMMV. check your local laws and/or collective agreements.
All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?
My point is that channels should be set up such that it’s well-defined whether they are work-related or not.
In fact it is just the opposite, salaried employees are paid the same no matter how many hours worked.
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…
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
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)
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.
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?
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.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
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.
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.
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.
Team chat is for the project.
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.
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.
I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frcRMQ2m1B4
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.
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 Maybe someone else can figure it out.
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.
Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.