Sending a message can be a big hurdle when you’re new to a job. A junior person likely has a very deified view of senior team members and believes that their time is sacrosanct. Encouraging junior people to “just ping me” is like telling an arachnophobe “it’s just a spider”.

If you work with someone in an office, natural opportunities arise to grab some time, whether it’s when they’re bumbling around the office, grabbing something to eat or walking from a meeting.

A remote company can create an environment to address these problems, with structured time for conversations but it is very difficult to get right.

I am a fan of both remote work and in office work. Remote work is cheap and has little margin for error; in office is expensive as it is paying for guard rails that make it (relatively) difficult to get wrong.

I don't find it difficult--I regularly book time to do pair programming over Tuple with everyone who's up for it on the team. That's in addition to taking opportunities to chat on Slack about anything they're working on, e.g. PR reviews.

What I've seen work is for the team to have a private channel, and whoever isn't in the middle of something can answer, and the whole team will see that answer sooner or later.

Colocation gives you a) passive source of information (e. g. just by observing people, see them being frustrated or cursing) and b) lower barrier to get talked to. Both can be disruptive for your own work, but facilitate more communication. You yourself can be more proactive, but that doesn't solve the problem on the whole team / organization level.

Well when I have some free moments I like to walk around and stop by grad students offices and see what they're up to / make suggestions. I'm not gonna do the same thing on slack...

The thing that I see happening is that someone remote is stuck in a spiral of XY problems and there isn't as much serendipity to talk about it with someone -- nobody is there to see that you're exhibiting signs of frustration while also knowing the problem you're working on is simple

I honestly don’t know the answer, I guess this is exactly what this whole debate comes down to. In theory all the tools are there, in practice people see very mixed results.