I don't know what you do but I've solved problems and saved companies millions by overhearing a conversation in the office that would have been a Slack DM remote.

At one customer I was able to identify that 3 separate business units were all competing for the same tender, they were all undercutting each other not realising. There were 3 separate private channels in Slack #customer_tender #tender_response_customer and #project_unicorn_tender not one single person was in more than one of those channels.

Now all this goes away if your company only uses public channels and has regular discourse in them. But unless the company was built remote first, I've never seen this in my 25 years of professional experience.

And all of this is without counting the fact that most enterprises use Teams not Slack, and Teams hides information from everyone.

Don't get me wrong, remote companies can work, and some people do not work well in offices. But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.

This goes away, if they have better management and coordination. They’d be in the same mess even if they were physically conference rooms. Unless you somehow think that people spontaneously drop by meetings they’re not invited to

You'd be amazed what people say in open plan offices thinking they can't be heard.

But you are correct; however again in 25 years, the number of those years working for a company that had perfectly working leadership, management, communication and coordination is very very low.

I should add - now that I've googled you - you and I work in very different areas of 'IT'. The problems I imagine you deal with need a lot of quiet dedicated focus time; while my problems need me to be able to wrangle a dozen cats into something like a coherent strategy that sometimes involves whiteboards, sometimes coffee and sometimes vodka. That's a people problem that requires people solutions, not technology products marketed as people solutions.

But I've been in your shoes too. (ok, not that smart, but I sat next to an ML guy for six months once troubleshooting his Kafka woes). I don't every intend to imply that there is one perfect answer for everyone.

> But without a fundamental shake up of the structure of the companies remote work is very, very hard.

While I agree, I could rephrase your argument as "remote work is very easy provided that you adjust your structures accordingly."

I see you've worked with me before :)

"Zwayhowder, the way you've phrased this sounds very angry, could we just tone it down a little" is comment in slides/reports that I receive often :D

I'm just passionate, I swear.

I've never worked at a place that disabled DMs in Slack. Is that even possible?

I doubt it. It's the culture of using public channels instead of private DMs that needs to change. The UX of Teams makes channels much higher friction than group messages.

> In 25 years of professional experience, I have never seen collaboration done by random encounter.

This sounds so horrible as to be unbelievable to me.

I've worked remote since I was 19 years old, managing remote teams and/or entire companies most of that time. I have advocated for remote work since before it was a thing, so I guess I'm a remote work Hipster.

That said, some of my largest accomplishments started out via a chance in-person encounter. I can't understand how anyone would see unrealized opportunity in any other way? It'd have been realized if so.

Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add up.

I understand this definitely depends on your role but I'm absolutely stunned that someone could have 25 years of experience in an office setting and never have had a serendipitous unscripted moment.

> Just simple and silly things (e.g. a customer at a random lunch stating they had a trivial to solve hardware issue that saved them millions a year) tend to add u

Developers rarely get to lunches with customers even before covid

This. I think of this every time I hear the "spontaneous connection" argument. Decades ago, this was true, but it hasn't been true anywhere I've worked for at least 15 years.

Now, even when people are all in the office, very nearly 100% of the communications are done via chat programs (even to the person next to you) or email. For good reason, really. It minimizes the risk of interrupting someone deep in the flow.

I've talked about this topic with many people and it seldom matches the opinions of many people here in hacker news. I wonder if hacker news is biased towards a specific type of people that is less social / more family oriented / etc? (Of course, the people I meet in real life could be the more biased sample)

I’d challenge your friends to give some examples of these collaborations by random encounter. I suspect there’s a lot less to them than they think.

I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems.

There's often the hidden assumption that "solving technical problems" equals "creating value", but that's not always so. Lack of communication often leads to solving the wrong problems, solving more general/complex problems than needed, overengineering the solution over actual needs etc. To avoid this, it's a good practice to talk about stuff you work on and getting feedback from other people, including questions you yourself did not think of.

I used to prioritize communication and collaboration because I’m better at it than most engineers I work with. A problem emerged where I noticed that come review and promotion time, I was always coming up short due to concerns about lacking technical seriousness. My interview performance was also suffering due to not spending enough time in the codebase.

I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

That's an interesting experience. I agree that this advice is probably more valuable to people who are already quite senior technically. Before that, it might be better to simply focus on sharping your technical skills. Reflecting on my experiences, I remember junior-ish people who chose to focus on communication rather than technical skills - without being able to back their communication with hard skills, they seem to kind of drift toward scrum master / project manager role.

But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.

> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.

All this is of course very organization specific.

> I noticed that very technically focused people tend to underestimate the importance of communication. They dislike daily standups, coordination meetings, don't really value informal exchange. All these things take their time out of what they want to do - deep work on solving technical problems

I’d say you’ be taken the wrong lesson from your observations.

Big formal coordination rituals typically are simply round robin of 1:1 communication. Occasionally 1:3, but never ever 1:n when the speaker isn’t management.

The reason is simple. Tasks are often independent. In that case, there’s no one to coordinate with, beyond updating the person running the status board. Even when there is a take that needs coordination, that coordination is already happening, just not at that place.

Or in other words, people that get the most out of these rituals simultaneously overestimate the average degree of connections in the social network, and underestimate the amount of communication that happens outside of their immediate view. Call it a bias in a local a hub in a network.