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.