Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.
I’ve had no problems chatting and calling with people whom I have actual business with. And here I’ve had the most success with planned meetings and agendas.
My job is not to invent the next big thing.
I'm not sure how much of that is applicable to normal jobs where your employer owns your work.
Knowing this, from a company perspective, remote can work if individuals have a way to create relationships. In my experience, some people bond over work but most bond by spending time with each other doing friendly activities which are not work related.
An in-person party or a holiday is the best option but some online gaming is a decent substitute in these authoritarian times. Some people swear by virtual coffees rotations that randomly match people but I had a couple of good ones and dozens of cringy/weird. None of them ended up being positive for creating relationships, at best it was useful for knowing who is who.
So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.
It seems normal mow to move job every 3 years so that’s not a concern
Sure the interview process should surface these problems, but applicants can make a "bad hire" as easily as companies, especially as both are showing their best front, and this is more likely if you are enticed by a fatter paycheck.
Yes - but so does not moving jobs. I have several friends who played the big company game, got to a senior level and then got ditched. Their problem? Well - they got shafted and emptied out at peak expense time; mortgage, kids, divorces etc, they got emptied when they were still 15 years short of thier retirement target, and their CV's are mono-corporate.
This made finding work very challenging.
In olden days you could say confidently that if you got to director level in a big company in the UK you were set. There was a job for life at a very nice salary if you wanted it.
In any case, you have to weigh the pros and cons, but jumping ship just for the lure of a fatter paycheck is not necessarily going to make you happier or do your long-term career any favours.
My advice (fwiw) is move for growth. Can you identify something that will change your CV for the good about the new gig. If so then the extra money is essentially paying for your next job - you will be able to find something even better (hopefully p>0.??) after, if this one doesn't work out.
> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager
Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.
> or team-mates
Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.
> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.
Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.
I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.
> You can't carry over the reputation and clout
Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.
In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.
I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.
I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".
The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.
I suspect most developers don’t really have a meaningful hand in shaping what they work on.
Some of the world's most used and innovative software was crafted by smart people all over the world whose small talk was mediated almost entirely over email, BBS, IRC etc.
This continues to be the case, it's just the mediums have changed slightly, while they're still mostly text-based, there's also the multimedia-based methods thanks to things like ubiquitous video, voice and conference calling.
At what speed though? You're obviously correct that such small talk can and does happen over asynchronous communication protocols. But I would imagine it's far slower than doodling on a napkin with a colleague during break. Businesses are going to desire something faster. So far, nothing has beaten a simple phone call in my (admittedly limited) remote work experience.
I think you overestimate how much relevant these napkin innovation situations are. Talking with some coworker and drawing something over a napkin doesn't mean the idea will be revolutionary at all. Or even useful. It is most of the times, a romantic image that make people feel like the smart innovator they would like to be.
This assumes the company will be around in 10 years and that I am still working there.
Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration?
My experiences with it seem to be at variance with this observation.
Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram.
The cut and paste does not work properly. This one has thousands of 'user-voice' votes and has been broken for over a year. edit: over 1000 people, broken for at least 3 years: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
Slack has completely changed the underlying video and voice platform and, for my teams, it has always worked perfectly.
I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.
I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.
I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.
For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.
I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.
I've tried configuring banner/feed options, but my teams is just a constant stream of notifications shit that I cant seem to tune properly.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.