No, large meetings are where the loudest voices dominate. Hallway conversations are where you can approach someone 1-on-1 without being interrupted or spoken over, and often express a contrarian view without fear of being shouted down.

I don't fully agree, as a more quiet person I don't feel excluded... Sometimes listening in to a conversation is enough, and in my experience people tend to group together such that everyone ends up chiming in their opinion...

>access to the physical levers of having their ideas heard (location, same office space)

Well, yeah. If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that having their time and attention isn't important to you.

As Aaron Burr in "Hamilton" so put it, you have to be in the room where it happens.

> If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that having their time and attention isn't important to you.

As an introvert, I flip that around. If I have to engage in social games to improve things, I am instead just not going to bother and will confine my ideas to my conversations with co-workers laughing at inefficiencies and failures.

Telling people about your idea is not a social game.

Getting people to listen to your idea if they're not seeking it out is 100% a social game. Getting in the room is a social game. If you value the opinions of your introverts, ask them.

>If you value the opinions of your introverts, ask them.

This may be an uncharitable reading of what you said, but you're implying that introverts are special fragile people who can't be bothered to share their brilliant ideas.

If someone comes up with an idea, and they think it's a good idea, it's their responsibility to advocate for it. They're already that idea's #1 fan. They're uniquely motivated to get it out in the world. How can they get others to take them seriously when they can't even take the initiative to share it themselves?

Sure, maybe some people are true solitary geniuses. But that's a waste of genius if they can't effectively communicate their thoughts with other humans.

Speaking as an introvert, that's certainly not my intent. But if the only way to share ideas is to do things that make me miserable, and the people who need to listen my ideas made it that way, they're clearly not interested. In most cases I have better things to do than fight uphill or shout into a void. It's probably a lot of stress for no benefit.

Ed: incidentally, suggestion boxes (mentioned nearby in the thread) are also probably not helpful. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, I assume those are ignored and don't bother.

This reminds me that most of the things people call "introversion" on the internet are actually signs of high neuroticism.

There's a whole range of soliciting information that goes from "Beat the information out of them" to "Ask a person individually" to "Ask people as group" to "Allow information to be given" to "Discourage people from telling you things" to "Yell at people who talk to you without you asking them first".

Depending on your approach, you'll get differing amounts of information from different people. A more charitable reading of the post you replied to might be: You shouldn't be content getting information only from those who like to talk and volunteer information.

Some people, it seems, mistake "introversion" for "lack of social skills". The former is a personality trait (I'm more of an introvert myself). The latter can be trained.

So in a world full of introverts no ideas would ever be shared?

This has not been my experience. Introverts or Extroverts has nothing to do with whether someone will champion an idea. That’s a doer / talker distinction.

You have to be effective in managing people. Maybe some people like to socialize an idea in their in group before they find someone to champion it. Maybe others like to write up their thoughts and share the doc on chat. Maybe others like to whiteboard it out after talking to someone at the bar.

But all of them actively push change.

Right, at least for some people. Still, a lot of environments don't really support all those options for pushing change. If you're running an organization, you're hamstringing yourself if the ways to push ideas that introverts find natural are dead ends in practice.

That's like dismissing programming as "computer game". It's not a "game" if it's how the real work gets done.

Programming is one component of how the “real work” gets done, yes. There is plenty of very real work that happens before and after the developer writes code.

That being said, developers are in a very unique position because they are the ones who actually build the product. If you can’t sell your devs on an idea, it ain’t getting built.

The actual saying what your idea is? No.

The process of getting to saying what your idea is? Frequently, especially if it is very informal or reliant on social cred to get into the room.

Which makes you an armchair analyst.

If someone’s attention in the hallway is required for business success, it means the process and culture of the company are both broken. Ad hoc conversation are not how you run a scalable business.

given that most, if not all, large companies have dysfunctional culture, your conclusion does not hold water.

Well that's one of the consequences of not having a water cooler ;-)

So what is the alternative? Reams of halfway updated internal wiki pages and heavyweight google docs?

I mean the agile manifesto is all about human interaction. People over process. Face to face conversation over piles of stale documents.

Are we done with agile? Is it time to embrace the waterfall?

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

We are absolutely done with Agile. It’s always been a failure.

Alternatives to hallway conversations in increasing depth:

* slack message

* email

* README.md

* RFC

* Business plan

Plus there’s always zoom or the phone if you really want to shoot the shit.

You can’t shoot the shit over zoom. Ever tried? It is super awkward.

Slack is good for easy questions where you already know how to convert your thoughts into words. If you don’t because your thoughts are currently encoded visually… slack (or any online medium) doesn’t work. In the real world I would almost always abandon the slack conversation and go visit the person / people.

Email is crap for communication, at least for my working style.

The rest are okay when you’ve got a lot of clarity already but not so hot when you are very early in the ideation phases.

All of your substitutes are significantly lower bandwidth, much more latent mediums.

You can’t replace face time with online. You just can’t.

I’d take zoom over a hallway conversation any day. I’m at home and comfortable with Zoom. I’ve had to dress up and commute to have that hallway conversation. In an office you’ll also be pressured for your reserved room or you’re literally in a hallway next to the bathrooms while you’re talking. Not good environments for communication.

All the arguments I hear for remote work revolve around the comfort of the individual developer. That’s great but companies are more than just individual developers. They are teams working together to build things that individuals couldn’t build alone.

I’ve long held that the secret to FAANG company success wasn’t their technical prowess or even their products. Is that they have superior software development processes. Their secret sauce is their process. Companies with shitty offices, crappy untrusting management, and heavyweight processes get beat by those with processes similar to FB or Google.

You’ll note that all the companies in FAANG invest a shit ton into their office experiences… well except Amazon.

Give it a year and life will look much as it did back in 2019.

Companies need individual developers because without them no one would write the code. We’ve seen a million articles about the developer shortage. It’s not about what the company wants, it’s about what the developer wants.

For instance, I would never work in an office again and because there is a developer shortage, that requirement hasn’t impacted my market rate, which is on par for the valley.

Having worked at one of the FAANGs I would definitely not say they have a superior development process. Waaaaay too much middle management baggage and drag. They are successful due to first mover advantages, network effects, regulatory capture and in some cases a literal monopoly.

> They are successful due to first mover advantages

Zero of the FAANG companies had a first mover advantage.

* Facebook replaced MySpace within the course of like a year. Today TikTok and other things threaten them.

* Apple... well... it was for a long time a huge underdog.

* Amazon... born in the dot com era. At the time lots of people thought the company was gonna implode any day. It took like a decade before they even remotely generated something other than a loss.

* Netflix... was DVD's, competed against brick & mortor and companies like Kozmo. Today it competes with media companies offering their own streaming service.

* Google... plenty of search engines came before google.

Not sure how any of these companies became successful because of regulatory capture, network effects or even literal monopolies. None of these companies could be successful in the long haul if their products sucked. Building non-sucky products involves a hell of a lot more than just developers sitting at home writing code 24/7. Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.

Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage. As does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps…

Network effects are all over the place, mainly FB and Google.

> Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.

For the most part, large companies “innovate” via acquisition.

> Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage. As does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps…

The Hiptop/Sidekick and Palm Pilots were already popular long before the iPhone came out. They just weren't nearly as good and the companies couldn't overcome the carriers' poor business plans.

Apple were first movers with capacitive touch screens.

Sounds like you are not capable of distilling or synthesising your ideas.

If you can’t take a step back and make a paragraph, and instead attempt to just bombard others with your thought-stream and let them sort it out, then maybe YOU are the problem - face-to-face or not.

You admitted previously that there's companies with remote cultures that are tremendously successful. By definition of their very existence, they have replaced "face time with online" - which you claim can't happen.

> If you can't bothered to be in the same place as the people you want to communicate to, you're signaling that having their time and attention isn't important to you.

Untrue. My DMs are open.

Ironically this place doesn't have DMs.

...then what do you want?

If introverts aren't voicing their ideas, what are we supposed to do, read minds?

What I believe parent is saying is that introverts would prefer a different venue for idea sharing than one where "whoever shouts loudest and fastest is heard." Which is very different from not speaking at all.

For example, something where folks ask "please post your papers and ideas to this shared document repository where they can each then be read by the team at whatever pace is required."

A collection of folks read the documents, write about which ideas they like, then make a decision based on the contents raised in said papers, all over text mediums.

Something like that is an alternative to a world where whoever speaks loudly fastest, and to the right people, has their idea taken seriously.

Whence this assumption that when people are allowed meet in person, written communication is banned? You can do all these things and still allow people to have efficient live in person conversations.

Loudly conversing in the hallway is a terrible medium for exchanging information. Written documents are not only clearer, they scale in distribution and can be referenced later.

Hallway conversations are temporal noise, at best.

It's annoying that these "hallway conversations" became the thing to highlight as the main advantage of in-office work. It's not my experience that the random encounters next to the watercooler or the bathroom are often that useful.

But, say you have some half-baked idea and want to talk it out with a coworker next to you. You both roll over to the whiteboard in your pod and start scribbling, both of you exchanging high-bandwidth information via utterances, gestures, and facial expressions with millisecond roundtrips. Third teammate overhears and rolls over, contributing further. This scenario IME used to happen a lot, created a lot of value, and is hard to replicate with a scheduled meeting or documents because the communication roundtrips and bandwidths are atrocious.

I like whiteboarding too. I’ve worked fully remote a lot and have found the other benefits far out weigh the cost of losing it as a tool (temporarily while tech catches up?).

Half the time I don’t need to ask for help because in the comfort and focus of my home office I can figure out much more difficult problems then I could when a sales dude was closing a deal next to my desk, or having half the devs at my table coughing and sick.

Speaking of tech catching up, please try this out: https://sharetheboard.com -- closest thing to remote white boarding I've seen, especially after the digital annotations come online

I've got to disagree with that. If you have the vague beginnings of an idea, it's a heavy burden to type them up into a document that can be distributed widely. Many ideas just won't get a chance to develop into anything if that's the only path for it. It's much smoother to float a few thoughts that might or might not lead to something to one or two people you have some trust for and know are knowledgeable about that domain. That's a quick and low-effort way to determine if a thought has any merit and deserves being developed further, or is a non-starter. I think it's friendlier as well to people who are more reluctant to spread an idea that might not be very good to a large group.

I disagree that written documents are clearer than conversation. I've always experienced that the vast majority of engineers, including introverts, gain a clearer understanding of key concepts from an interactive conversation than from a document. In my experience almost all complex documents I've read and written required a follow-up meeting to explain and discuss.

Documents are useful when the volume of details is too much to remember in a conversation, and to communicate with wider audiences, but for communicating key points in a small group, conversation is vastly more efficient.

We’re talking about hallway conversations as a source for innovation. Not all real-time communication in general. Yes, you can always hop on a zoom and chat through a problem.

Face to face conversation has a much higher signal strength than written documents, to be frank. For example, think about how many unhelpful screeds get posted on forums that in conversation would get cut short because of immediate feedback in the form of verbal or non-verbal conversation. Have you ever noticed that some one had more they wanted to say and encouraged them to speak their mind? I don't think that sort of back and forth happens as naturally in pure text environments. Plus if you are just not grokking something it is much easier to keep asking questions in person until the two of you figure out what the stumbling block was, you know?

Completely agreed. I've been bootstrapping a new project with a colleague I've known for years. We worked together in the same office for a long time, know how each other work exceptionally well. We started this project up during the quarantine, while living a few time zones apart. It was going quite slowly, until we could finally meet up (vaccines!). We worked through issues we had been going back and forth over for weeks in less than two hours, and had time to head to a bar for an early happy hour.

In person can truly make a difference. You're all subject to the same distractions, can keep each other on task, and pound through collective decisions in a way even a video chat can never facilitate well.

Face to face conversation doesn’t scale. It’s also still possible with zoom…

A hallway conversation is a random happenstance between a couple of people. Any decisions made are going to have to be communicated more broadly as a next step anyway, which will require written communication.

Here is another way to think about it; if we were having this conversation in face to face, how long do you think it would take? I suspect after maybe fifteen minutes we would probably have felt out where the actual differences in our opinions lay and why and if for some reason we needed to codify this understanding I trust that either of us would be able to put it in written form and have it capture the nuance of that conversation. I think it would take a little longer in zoom and I would have a lower confidence that we had properly understood each others perspective. Face to face communication has a whole lot of information in the form of body language, intonation, expressions, etc that I don't think can be reasonably approximated in text format, even with reactions like in Discord (which are very helpful!) it still feels fraught.

I feel like I totally understand your position, I just respectfully disagree. I’d say I’ve spent ~two minutes max in this thread, from the comfort of my house, doing about 6 other things to clear my mind between code bursts.

It’s pretty hard to read and comment on HN when you’re in the office. Especially an open office where everyone can see your screen.

It doesn't have to scale. Sometimes it just makes it easier for a few stakeholders to get through something more easily and quickly.

Pivot to a written-first culture. It's the natural endpoint of remote orgs.

In my experience a written-first culture is horribly inefficient for exactly the kind of impromptu interactions that happen in colocated spaces.

doesn’t that hurt folks who aren’t great at writing?

Writing is a skill that can be learned. You don't need to write deathless prose, just be clear.

So is speaking.

See I feel that it robs my of all my energy that I get for ideas from working with people. Not just that, but after grad school I actually have anxiety writing.

I feel all these "solutions" just tell the other type of 'verts' to suck it up and adapt to the other style.

Submission boxes, pitch dens, hackathons, or even just a place to dump written proposals etc. Some kind of structure so that contribution does not require winning a social battle first.

Introverts are supposed to be better at quieter, more deeply introspective one on one conversations. That's a different class of serendipitous face to face interactions, but one which may be just as valuable, or even more so.

Think Lex Friedman in a one-on-one vs. Joe Rogan with 2 guests at the same time.

I didn't see the loud mouths being any less annoying or obnoxious over the last 2 years.

I'd say the opposite. It allows introverts to negotiate alternative venues to share ideas.