Remix clone Hacker News

About a year ago I moved to a new, largish company and, for the first time in my career, got to see how a company can be bad at remote work.

It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.

This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.

Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!

▲

BeetleB a day ago | parent | next [-]

> rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.

What is better? I hate Teams, but Slack really wasn't much better.

▲

alabastervlog a day ago | parent [-]

Teams' core problem is that the actual Teams-section is more like a bulletin board than a chat system, almost like it was targeting that weird impulse companies had for a few years to build "company facebooks" or whatever.

The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.

It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.

	▲	BeetleB a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No arguments about the crappiness of Teams. My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-) I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important." What I want from Teams and similar SW: A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window). A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever). In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread. Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.
	▲	Izkata a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Wait, what? We're moving to Teams soon... This looks like channels do exist, is it new (there's no date on the page) or do they not work as you'd expect? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-new-chat-and-...

▲

scarface_74 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And being in an office doesn’t help if no one on your team is in the same office. If you work in a large company that has multiple offices, you are still going to have the sane problem because eventually the person you need is not going to be in your office.

Even the small companies I’ve worked at (100-700 people) had multiple offices where you had to coordinate time to meet with the people you needed.

I’ve also worked remotely for the second largest employer in the US. Amazon has internal “interest” channels for each service team (the team responsible for an AWS service). Anyone could ask a question and usually one of the developers of the service would help.