Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "steer the entire ship".

Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.

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andy99 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.

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genghisjahn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My first programming job, I had a private office to myself. It was amazing. I close the door, I’m left alone. I leave it open, people stop and talk and I walk and talk to them if their door is open. Was incredible. Never had anything like it since.

	▲	wrs 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yep, this was the Microsoft Way for a long time. It is the best. I just visited their huge new campus and it's a bunch of open "pods" and "focus rooms". Blech. They did retain the MS tradition of an incredibly confusing floor plan. We used to say the last interview question is "can you find your way back to the lobby?" The best office layout I've had was Infinite Loop at Apple. Private offices with lots of little open discussion spaces -- exactly the opposite of today's open offices with lots of little private discussion spaces! Perhaps shows how the job of the people signing the checks for the office differs from the job of the people working in the office...
	▲	embedding-shape 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That does sound kind of ideal, easy to signal when available, easy to turn off the rest of the world when needed, hopefully I'd get to experience that too someday :) Maybe we need companies to go back to this model? And also have long hallways, where people can bump into each other and (optionally) chime in on each other’s problems. We could call it Chime Labs.

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uxhacker 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because often it happens so randomly. Sometimes it takes two people to be on a natural break at the same time, hungry at the same time, or just how two people got on at a meeting.