We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.
By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating yourself even more. While it can be distracting to jump on a call while you actually meant to focus on some coding, it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review (yay! asynchronous!).
I agree with your take on working remote and how it can hinder spontaneous "group creativity", though I'd argue that the loss of the smoke break did a lot more damage to this than remote work. With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time.
It's always some project manager or business process or whatever person who wants to talk about something they don't quite understand on behalf of someone from the business. I regret never doing the statistics on it, but if I had to guess I'd say that 9/10 times they could have simply forwarded the email from the "someone" instead of being the middleman. I have no idea why anyone would ever want to do a "quick call" without telling someone the reason first. I'm perfectly fine with taking a call with a co-worker who wants to discuss something they're not sure about, but then they'll ask me "hey, can we talk about X because I'd like your input". Which isn't a "quick call" in my book. I don't mind meetings either, but I dislike meetings which are solely there to make pseudo workers or bad middle managers feel like they accomplish something. If there are more than 3 people attending a meeting then you can be pretty sure it'll be a waste of time. If there is no agenda you're going down the road of the "quick call" which is essentially that initiator hasn't done their due diligence beforehand.
> With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time.
I don't know about that. I tend to find that incoming "quick calls" with peers, even where they've turned out to be anything but quick, tend to be at least reasonably useful. People do always ask first as well, rather than calling out of the blue.
Overall though, I find working as an engineer at home to be an isolating, and increasingly depressing experience. I really like team I'm working with at the moment but we're scattered to the four winds and barely get to spend any time together, so I'm keeping half an eye out for any roles that are local and might involve a bit more facetime.
When I left my last role for the last 3 - 4 months I was going in 2 - 3 times/week after a handful of us made a pledge to do so and, honestly, it's the happiest I've been at work since the beginning of the pandemic.
I wouldn't say I regret leaving - it was definitely time to move on to something new - but I think that experience, versus how I feel at the moment, is somewhat telling.
I'm almost always in the office. I basically only work from home when I'm going to do something that isn't work where it would be inconvenient for me to leave the office. Like if I have a dentist appointment at 11 am, or the daycare has some event at 2pm... That sort of stuff. It's not that I mind working from home, it's that I prefer working with people. That doesn't mean I don't get "quick calls" though. Even from people in the building... I guess that maybe some of the "quick calls" from people who work from home may actually be because they're a tad lonely now that I think about it.
It takes 15 minutes on a bike to get to my office though. When it took me an hour I worked from home quite a lot.
Indeed, when I want to do a "quick call" to get pointers on something, or to clarify possible implications of technical choices I'll always send a message on a platform / channel that can be muted with some text like "i need your input on X, give me a call when it suits". That way the callee can chose to mute and/or choose a time that doesn't interrupt their workflow, but also give them the opportunity to contemplate the issue. This way the other person is in the right frame of mind to get to the meat of the issue, get a quicker call, and most importantly get the right direction / decision without hampering productivity.
> though I'd argue that the loss of the smoke break did a lot more damage to this than remote work.
Eh, coffee breaks serve the same purpose as a smoke break in my opinion. I'd guess nowadays the amount of coffee drinkers is probably the same as the number of smokers back in the day.
Interestingly, in my experience, a "quick call" has been something where the other person doesn't want an email to get forwarded. That's why they don't include the subject in the message/meeting invite. Usually some political maneuvering to try and get ownership of a project or push off a failing project to another team/organziation.
I guess it's down to personal experience but I've never gotten much out of "going to the water cooler / coffee" breaks. There was something magical about the smoke break where you had to go outside and talk for a few minutes. I've never been a smoker but I usually joined people on those breaks. You can do the same with a short walk and talk, but those aren't something you do every hour or two.
> Interestingly, in my experience, a "quick call" has been something where the other person doesn't want an email to get forwarded. That's why they don't include the subject in the message/meeting invite.
First off: Are water coolers even a thing still? At least in NL we just bring our own bottles and use the tap to refill it :p
Second, I've not once in my life had a productive "water cooler" conversation. Not a single time, it's pretty much always just socialization about literally anything other than work. Same with lunch, people don't want to talk about work during their free time, and they don't. I've certainly never heard of anyone having a sudden eureka moment spontaneously like that either, and if they do these days they'll just post it in slack so that people can refer back to it rather than it disappearing into the ether as soon as the convo ends.
As for the idea thing, I can't say I've ever had many such a drastic PR where the approach was completely 180 degrees from what the PR is doing, and even in the rare occasions those do occur, both parties are usually more than okay with then hopping onto a short (meaning max 15 minutes, not some hour long monstrosity of a "quick chat") call to align.
> Second, I've not once in my life had a productive "water cooler" conversation.
I just realized it's worse than that. If the old adage on innovation "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" is true, then water cooler simply cannot help much. Then, what you need for innovation (and not just a warm fuzzy feeling of a possibly good idea) is actual time to work on it, not a water cooler.
> First off: Are water coolers even a thing still? At least in NL we just bring our own bottles and use the tap to refill it :p
I know of two cases where office water coolers are super useful: in areas with high temperatures where cold water is much better that the warm water coming out of the tap, and (if your model supports it) for getting a cup of hot water for tea. I've also seen them used in areas where the tap water tastes funny, but that's more of a patch.
I’ve had plenty of productive “water cooler” conversations. Especially with people from other teams, as we don’t interact with each other much. Cross pollinating ideas in a large organisation is conducive to spontaneous creativity.
However, neither of our statements are very useful as they are just anecdotes, a result of our personal experiences.
As you say, these are just ancedotes. There have been studies though.
Even if you subjectively "feel" that spontaneous creativity is increased, these chats don't make companies more profitable. So I'm guessing that this "creativity" doesn't have much actual value, and forced in person work certainly has a high cost to the employee and society.
That is not incompatible with adding some context in the "quick call invite". Even when I was working from the office, sometimes I would have to say no to someone who was reaching out to me or bumping into me in front of the water fountain because I was in the middle of something. In that case I would just ask to send me a message with some context and I would go back to him/her when I had more time to dedicate on that.
Maybe not incompatible but certainly diminished, the idea is you randomly stumble upon someone’s work or ideas who you wouldn’t have otherwise talked to if it needed to be scheduled, personally I think lunch in person is where this shines the most
Productivity doesn’t go down with fully remote work, but I think the kind of creativity that organically comes from ideas being constantly shared and discussed does
To be clear, I don’t think it’s always people’s job to be creative, and company’s should absolutely have roles for people who can work remotely who just join scheduled meetings and execute “the plan”
Innovation is about attention, not ideas. If you want to encourage that, you need to give folks a forum to share their ideas that they feel safe and supported. If your team is good at that in person at lunch, then having an “ideas” meeting with the folks who would be at lunch would work for that. If your team is bad at that, there’s likely some folks who don’t embrace the new ideas at your ideas forum and until you get them fixed, the folks with ideas aren’t going to bring them up for fear of looking dumb or whatever.
I’ve worked remotely and had a great time innovating, and I’ve been in person and had a terrible time innovating. It has always come back to giving folks a comfortable forum to share ideas and not rejecting them.
Many fully remote teams or companies host regular more laid back online events.
Where it doesn't work is in hybrid offices because people showing up at the office won't want to connect to some random videocall to do what they do all day every day.
The problem is all of those acts take you out of flow state. I don't want and I can't randomly brainstorm when I am deep into coding. Even if I have to go take a quick water I would try to do it as quick as possible to continue with the problem I am focused on and I couldn't pay attention to the random conversation or brainstorming at a cooler.
Flow state is really powerful, but it’s not constant. I don’t want to be in flow for 40 hours per week. And to tell the truth if I get a few hours of flow a week, I’m lucky.
So I don’t want to shut the door on any interactions in the unlikely chance that it interrupts me in my optimal state.
What I like to do is block off “deep work” in my calendar a few times a week. Then people can think about if they want to interrupt.
This has let me look at these “quick call” or “hi” messages as just part of being human and having a pleasant team where people are happy to interact rather than dings to maximum team productivity.
Unfortunately as of lately my professional life has been terrible for flow state due to various reasons related to working in a corporation. So I might consider switching jobs. Interruptions, blockers, depending on others, etc.
But I love being in flow state, luckily I can still do it with my side projects. With side projects without being interrupted I can easily spend the whole day coding and at the same time building 10x to 100x as much as at a corporation job. Of course it's less realistic in a large company to have it, but I just wish my actual work was like that.
Maybe if I could make one of my side projects to bring in enough, I could just do that. I would say that would be a dream.
> This has let me look at these “quick call” or “hi” messages as just part of being human and having a pleasant team where people are happy to interact rather than dings to maximum team productivity.
It just depends on the human type I guess. Extraversion vs introversion.
> But I love being in flow state, luckily I can still do it with my side projects. With side projects without being interrupted I can easily spend the whole day coding and at the same time building 10x to 100x as much as at a corporation job. Of course it's less realistic in a large company to have it, but I just wish my actual work was like that.
Unpopular opinion: a very small team of skilled programmers that have experience working together and are often/continuously in flow (whether alone, or pair programming), can 10x/100x outpeform multiple teams in a large corporate setting.
I definitely agree with that, and I have been on both sides of the coin, with a little team doing a lot of projects very quickly and also a corporation job where things move very slowly. Also having done so many side projects.
The unfortunate usual thing is though that the jobs that pay a lot usually involve a lot of people. Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not proven yet, but when it actually is proven and will start to make a lot of money, there will be a lot of people hired and which breaks what it had initially.
And the more people and teams you put on something the slower the pace will be per developer, for sure.
There are moments in time in a lifecycle for a start up or a business, where there is that golden point, but it always seems temporary.
> Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not proven yet, but when it actually is proven and will start to make a lot of money
What if we stop at making a lot of money in a proven business, and don't hire more unless absolutely necessary? Keep the team small and lean, retain the talented people who brought you here via profit sharing, and just...relax?
I am surprised that this model is almost non-existent.
It is an unstable model; if it’s only necessary to hire when someone leaves, there’s no slack - what if someone gets long term sick? What if someone feels burnt out holding the thing up but nobody else wants to hire more - by the time that person leaves it’s necessary to hire more but also late to start the hiring process to find the perfect one replacement and who has spare time and redundant knowledge to train them?
When it will start to make a lot of money, it will do that by having lots of customers, therefore more support requests, more payment troubles, more feature requests, more scaling concerns, reliability and maintenance.
When it starts making money, competitors will notice and may start copying it; relaxing will let them catch up and pass you and take your customers.
There is always entropy, things fade, decay, things need continual “growth” just to stay in a steady state - getting that growth perfectly tuned so it doesn’t grow bigger and need more employees, and doesn’t shrink and wreck the company, it precisely counters the decay, is much harder than growing bigger.
Lifestyle business is not unheard of, some people hit on a great idea and execution and it’s a money printer for them, but it seems that more people who try it either can’t get enough money, or struggle to do everything without hiring anyone until they burn out, or have to hire someone and then have to get more income to pay them and are in growth mode, not steady state.
To whom? For my sanity and productivity that's the most important at least.
I only enjoy working when I am in that flow state captured by the problem without having to worry about interruptions.
This is when I provide most actual value and also get most enjoyment out of work myself.
Everything that takes me out of it feels like annoying and frustrating interruptions.
And usually I have to then try to not show my frustration and act like I am happy to do small talk or whatever, so I wouldn't seem rude.
"To whom? For my sanity and productivity that's the most important at least."
Optimizing for you vs the team is often not the goal.
"This is when I provide most actual value and also get most enjoyment out of work myself."
In most companies, it's much more valuable to have a team productive than a single individual, even if it comes at a cost to the individuals.
IE Assume a team of 10, and that working like you suggest provides 1.5x productivity for you, but you working like this cost 0.15x to each other person on the team because you are slower at responding, etc.
If it had no effect on anyone else that would be super weird (it would mean nobody depended on anyone, etc. Basically that being a team didn't matter).
Let's assume when you don't work like this, it cost nobody else anything, but is really crappy for you (0.6x)
With you working like this, team productivity is 1.5x+(9*0.85x)= 9.15x.
Without you working like this, team productivity is 0.6x + 9x = 9.6x.
Obviously it's different at different numbers and tradeoffs, but optimizing for individual productivity, when it costs things for teams, can often end up a net loss. Not always of course.
You can argue it costs nobody else anything but i think that would honestly be a silly argument. We should admit there are positives and negatives to the tradeoffs here, and sometimes the aggregate works out and sometimes it doesn't.
For a developer, arguably "flow state" is arguably the most important thing. Provided, that is, that requirements are clear and people are in sync what should be worked on.
What do you think is the most important, if not flow state?
Well, you kind of assumed it away in your second sentence, but alignment is more important than individual productivity. And unfortunately, meetings, interruptions, and other communication are the best tools most teams have for that.
> And unfortunately, meetings, interruptions, and other communication are the best tools most teams have for that.
In my experience, once people know each other well (whether via direct face to face communication, or via observing each other's slack messages and PRs), it's much more efficient to put things in writing.
Then everything is in the open, for everyone to see and discuss/comment on. People can go back over previous decisions, people can see the context over why something was done, people can check previous votes. And, most importantly, people can do so when they need to do so, preserving their individual flow state.
By the way, when I said "flow state", I also mean the team's overall flow state, not only ICs.
E.g if we break down a feature in two parts, can we efficiently sync so the parts we make fit well together. Do we pair program, do we each take our chunks, how often do we sync and how, that's also "flow". My point is that "flow" here is still the most important thing for developer productivity. If you want to be doing your own part of the task, but I keep interrupting you with "hey, got 5 min", obviously something is wrong in our flow.
What is more, I can't be convinced that allowing these interruptions is the proper way, the price of achieving flow. I see that more as a symptom that we didn't agree on the ground rules, and that's where our flow goes wrong. Maybe we can batch the multiple 5 min interruptions into longer planned sessions, with agendas, where we go over your concerns and questions, which you spend the time to formulate and put on paper. That way we have a focused time with an agenda and we both can prepare for it, and there are no context switches for the rest of the workday.
I think the problem is that you consider "alignment" a thing on its own, but to me it's merely one of the components needed to achieve a good flow. In experienced teams where members are attuned to each other's communication styles, and respectful of each other's time and attention span, alignment doesn't necessarily need to be attained by meetings and interruptions.
Hence my point still stands that flow (individual and team) is the most important thing for developer productivity (and happiness)
Teams are not a simple sum of independent productivity of individuals.
(If they are, it implies they don't need to be a team, since nobody is dependent on anyone else)
You say that like it's not possible to have a balance—have enough meetings and communication to properly coordinate the team, while still leaving each individual enough uninterrupted time to get plenty of flow-state work done.
The posters above advocating for flow state aren't saying anywhere that they don't want to have any communication with the team. They're saying they need the flow state to get their own work done. That's fully compatible with agreeing, as a team, that there are certain times when you don't interrupt your teammates short of an emergency—and other times when everyone's fair game, and still other times for regular scheduled meetings.
So many of the "quick calls" could just as easily wait until tomorrow, or a scheduled block of "interruptible time" at the end of the day. Saying "But I need to interrupt you now!" during a time designated for deep work means that you're optimizing for your individual productivity rather than the team's; instead, you could write your question down for later, and switch to a different task for the time being, or work around it, or research it yourself, or a dozen other possibilities.
While that is true, good team members don't interrupt each other and make sure they maximize both their individual and team interactions.
"Hey, you got 5 min" all the time is a symptom of bad communication and bad team flow. It means lots of things are not clear, often, things that can be put in a knowledge base, or batched into a longer conversation.
The price we pay as an organization when team members switch context is high, and if your culture is a culture of constant context switch, then it's not a good culture. Let's not normalize interruptions as "the price to pay" for being in a team. We can be in a team with better dynamics than that.
Surely the C-suites of the company will employ whatever brilliant ideas that we talk over the water cooler. The water cooler is the fountain of innovation after all.
Perhaps they should put all the water coolers in the executives' offices, so they can listen to all the brilliant conversations that take place at the water cooler.
To be fair, when i worked at IBM Research (Watson), there were collaboration areas at the end of each hall.
They got used quite often, and there are plenty of times where someone noticed another team or person working on something and discovered it applied to what they were doing and collaborated.
One example from an area i know well - if you look at static single assignment form for compilers, which is the basis of all optimizing compilers these days, two people came up with the static single assignment part, but had no idea how to create it fast , and ran into some others whiteboarding control dependence for other reasons, and realized that it solved their problem.
You've never been in an office and had a productive, random interaction with a coworker?
Like, never?
I've had it happen on a regular basis. I see someone and suddenly remember to tell them "oh, I did some work on that long ago, I'll share it with you" or you overhear a conversation about a topic you didn't know they were looking at?
Same. I have fond memories of working in a small team (~8 engineers) in a single room around 2010-ish. We'd often just walk to each other's desks, read the body language and ask each other "what are you working on?" and just engage in these unscripted, natural discussions that may have resulted in a pair programming session, or a cigarette outside accompanied by some good old-fashioned complaining about management.
Don't get me wrong, I think working remotely and home office are great. But something was undeniably lost, at least for me.
Walking to someone else workstation is a different thing from the so called "water cooler talk". When you go to or simply turn to the nearby team member (or even far away) you initiate a conversation one way, so you judge when a person is not busy and ask him/her. And then discussion happens. This is not unlike a call to that same person (you can ping him in chat to clarify if he is busy) and in general is a close enough substitute for office, at least remembering that for that small quality of life improvement every person mush pay with full 30 awake days per years of wasted time for commute.
But the original proposition by the RTO managers is different. They posit that such spontaneous talks happen in a place different from any workers workstation, e.g. watercooler or kitchen etc. That is a two way conversation which to happen much check the following - both (or more) persons mush happen to go to the same place at the same time, and they both must have a topic to talk about in that particular moment. And those linkedin propagandists claim that a lot of such talks are supposedly highly technical about the project itself. Which is honestly never happens in my limited anecdotal experience.
I think the biggest change with online communication is moving these random encounters into peering into what other teams are doing, or what they're discussing.
For instance we had someone from a completely unrelated team bump into a project thread discussion our firewall rules, and coming up with the proposed changes he was working on and wanting to brainstorm something that could work beyond his team.
You'd need an incredible level of luck to bump into that precise discussion at a water cooler, and it would require a super broad call to get people to gather on that subject the "normal" way. But having most communication in Slack, indexed and accessible cross-team gives incredible opportunities for these kind of interactions that would be just impossible on the previous office culture.
Random - yes. Productive - no. Also never observed it on my big project. How would it even work with a member of a separate team working on totally different subsystem of the project?
IDK, I spent plenty of time around a watercooler and I don't recall something like this happening even once for me or people within my earshot.
The one thing I saw that actually works like that metaphorical watercooler is going to a bar and drinking together, or engaging in a similar activity that involves relaxing and unwinding. Of course, that's not something people feel comfortable about, plus it comes with its own set of issues and exclusions around time, family and alcohol, but that's the one type of situation I saw where people actually have those serendipitous productive interactions managers dream about.
I think they meant "forced" as in "artificial" (as in: "hey, let's start a video call to pretend we're at the watercooler"), rather than "mandated by management".
Yeah, I know there's people who are able to make it work, but not me, in general.
I can get a fairly similar experience on the org chat, though, and sometimes at the start or ends of meetings. And just meeting up in real life every now and then helps a lot.
Why is it that every time someone tried to push RTO agenda in a thread, "water cooler talk" has always been pushed like it is one of most important thing in a job?
Is "water cooler talk" the new "open office layout"?
> Is "water cooler talk" the new "open office layout"?
Yes. It used to be that "water cooler talk" was considered an unproductive waste of time. But for people pushing an RTO agenda, it suddenly became the go-to argument for RTO. Very often, the same PHBs use this to push RTO, who back in the day complained about people doing "water cooler talk" on company time.
At the same time, open office or cubicle layouts are proven to be detrimental to work output, concentration, health and happiness. But same as RTO, it is not about any of that, nor about collaboration. It is about PHBs fearing their loss of purpose and control.
> .. been pushed like it is one of most important thing in a job?
because it is actually one of the most important thing in a job. During Covid, work was boring as hell because there were no spontaneous interactions or small breaks to chit chat with other people.
And guess what, most of the colleagues I have talked to mentioned that they missed those kind of interactions. Barring some super introvert ones who just want to be left alone, but those are a tiny minority.
I notice I often breathe deeply after a telecon. As if I was holding my breath during it. Even if the telecon was quite laid back. It doesn't happen in water cooler talks. Have there been studies about what causes this, or even how to alleviate?
Absolutely the same for me, as well as having extremely tense legs during/after online meetings.
I think the general phenomenon is often talked about under the umbrella term "zoom fatigue" - besides the fatigue this also encompasses stress and anxiety. (https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue)
As sister comments are pointing out, it's a pretty common thing ("zoom fatigue")
Personally the best improvement was closing the camera feed, and that has been my team's experience as well.
There will be extremely few meetings (mainly HR and meetings with external vendors) where we set the camera, and even for those you can do the opening and presentation with camera on, and just shut it after that for the meat of the discussion.
The biggest part is we're presenting documents and slides either way, so seeing the person's face somewhere just doesn't help. In particular we want to check the meeting transcript realtime to be sure it matches what we're talking about.
Overall I've seen no downsides doing it since the pandemic, and don't see going back to camera on meetings by default.
Yeah it became a big topic of interest during the pandemic when everyone went remote. It's colloquially referred to as "zoom fatigue". That should find you some of the research.
i believe one problem is that in online meetings and phone calls pauses are more awkward and uncomfortable. that means people avoid pauses to think before they speak, which makes online meetings more rushed. which would explain the feeling of GP after a meeting.
the question is how to make online meetings more relaxed.
There's no problem with socializing, but this can also be a special appointment where everyone is free to join and can talk about stuff that is not related so a specific issue.
We do a weekly fixed appointment where we gather together and smalltalk about whatever is on our minds.
We also have something like that. But since it is not spontaneous, not every participant in the same state of mind and hence those meetings are a dud. Whereas participants in water cooler conversations are there because they want a break and want to chit chat. So conversations are more natural and hence enjoyable.
I've had trouble implementing this in the past. We have biweekly social calls with my team, but a lot of people don't take part! And even when they do, when we have the full team (~12 ppl), usually maybe like 3-4 people dominate the convo and it's not super satisfying.
Have you found any tricks/ideas from the implementation at your org that has made it more successful for you?
I was one of those 3-4 people who felt compelled to drag the conversation forward just to avoid awkward silence and fill the time slot, ugh how I hated that period of time with remote work
I actually "bump into" way more people on Slack than I ever did in an office. In threads, various interest channels, random DMs. And the quality of discussion is generally higher too (because of text and async reasons)
For instance, every morning when I come in there is a person on my team that will talk about their family, their kids, their life, and that goes on for about 15 minutes. In the spirit of team building, I entertain it for awhile. But that does come with a cost.
Someone came in a few weeks ago not feeling well, but decided not to stay home. Ended up having covid and spread it to others. It's hard to be productive when half the team is out sick.
Every day I have to be in the office with others, I truly hate it. The pandemic was hard, but I absolutely miss being able to work from home every day.
> We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.
To me this sounds like neither you nor your coworkers... talk? Like you're not used to communication unless the photons you receive in your eyes are the same ones that bounced off someone's face (or unless there's a face at all).
I still took coffee breaks to unwind for a tiny bit of time, and I still talked with teammates during those times while I was taking a moment to unwind. Async. The conversation would either stop after a few exchanges, or continue for the next minutes.
Not much different from, say, IRC or Discord. Obviously there will be professionalism in the "real" channels, but other than that it just happened that sometimes a teammate would just send me a DM like "hey, have you watched this series?", or I would post in a shared channel something like "yooo look at this thing I built last night".
I don't really need any specific medium to talk to a person. I can have my preferences, and other people can have their preferences as well, but there's still not much difference either way when it comes to getting to know each other. There's some people I only know through text chats that I'm on better terms than with some I know in person. There's some people I know in person that I'm on better terms than with some I only know through text chats.
The water cooler thing is a myth. I've spent my fair share of time in tech company offices and have never seen, nor cannot think of, anything worthwhile coming out of those encounters. Like other posters said, a shared meal with colleagues is a different story, though it will typically increase social connections rather than generate new productive/business outcomes
While there are of course frequent chats and interactions while in the office, the called "water cooler brainstorms" is a complete and total myth propagated via soulless linkedin seo and ceo posts. Like this stuff never happens on random and the few technical discussions I've seen or participated in a third place (i.e. two+ coworkers meet at any place which is not their workstation - kitchen/watercooler/smoking area etc.) were never resembling anything productive for the project or innovative. That in my not quite humble opinion is an utter BS perpetuated for the misguided RTO policies.
PS: disclaimer a) I do support short spontaneous calls and like them, but try to never initiate them on my side, because I understand they ARE very disruptive. disclaimer b) I actually like working in the office in some aspects, but it is totally not worth 30 full awake and unpaid days of my life per year wasted on commute. Like not even order of magnitude close in benefit compared to the waste of time.
People are fixating on the mention of a water cooler but I think the key point is:
> it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review
In my team we work mostly remotely and have a lot of ad hoc calls about issues, after an initial exchange of messages introducing the problem so that it can be loaded into memory. In my experience talking about a problem on a call is almost always better than text tennis. You're focused, our minds work better and are more engaged when we're talking and it's quicker easier to summarize then question ad hoc ideas, etc...
I still have PTSD from pre-COVID days when I would be working at in my cubicle and have someone "drive-by" with a quick question and plop their laptop on my desk.
"Can I ask you a question?"
(Ugh) "Sure."
It might only take five minutes. Then I'd reconnect to _my_ work. That and getting over my, admittedly emotional, irritation at the interruption would take another 5 minutes.
I really liked being able to delay those folks to when it was convenient for _me_ while working from home.
> rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review
This is my biggest frustration when working with new people. Too busy to explain context, then let me do it my way, then in PR review tell me to flip the whole thing based on specific context only few people had along with team specific style nits. Finally, manager asking why it's taking me so long to complete the work.
I like my isolation. As an employee with minimal stake in the outcome of my teams, I don’t ever want to discuss ideas in the workplace. I’ll walk the other way around the office to avoid such a chat.
OK? But I'm not arguing that there don't exist tensions between employers and employees, of course there are.
I'm saying that liking isolation and not wanting to interact with others isn't good for employers, and don't be surprised if they push back on it. It amounts to saying, I only want to do the fun parts of my job, not the boring but necessary bits, like co-ordinating with other humans.
It could be that you are working for a very healthy organization where having a quick call is no big deal as they don't happen that frequently. In that context, you are entirely right. If all the quick calls are just that, quick calls from direct team members then this entire article does not apply to you.
However, there are many, many, many (really a lot) of organizations out there that are in various degrees but continuous state of chaos. Things like constantly shifting deadlines, goals changing, roles being poorly defined and various other things.
The sort of company where anyone who cares about their work will find themselves in a boiling frog type of scenario if they are not careful. They try to take up extra work that is not technically part of their role description, or simply by being knowledgeable attract attention.
In those companies where everyone is a continuous state of mild panic it isn't just one "quick call" it is a steady stream of them, interrupted by unannounced actual calls. Or, if you are in the office, people constantly walking by and "quickly" asking for things.
Certainly, when you find yourself in a situation where the documentation is always lacking. If you then make the mistake of writing the few pieces of documentation that actually are useful you suddenly might find yourself in the position of "knowledge holder" where everyone flocks to for their questions. In companies like this knowledge holders then get over asked (with questions often covered in the documentation), making it difficult for them to focus on their work.
In that sort of situation you need to be competent at setting boundaries as companies will often not do that for you. They happily take advantage of someone running 100% of the time, so they don't need the expense of another FTE added to payroll. Or if I'd have to do a slightly less cynical take, because they simply do not realize they are missing an FTE. Or, to go back to a more cynical take, they are filling roles with seat warmers instead of competency.
In a previous organization, I have had to actively enforce what the article suggests and more. Even then I eventually decided to leave as I simply couldn't see a path forward with the company getting their structure in order in time and me keeping my sanity.
A few of the things I started doing (some overlap with the article):
- Set my teams status with a message encouraging people to ask the question, not just greed me. Eventually, I did include a link to one of the "no hello" websites. I think https://nohello.net/en/
- Refuse unannounced teams calls from most people except a few people. I'd hang up and just leave a message along the lines of "hi, bit busy with something at the moment, what was it you are trying to reach me about?".
- Decline meetings without a clear agenda.
- Decline meetings with a clear agenda, but where I was simply not needed. Sometimes it was not related to my responsibilities, I would let them know and if I could, I would forward the meeting to a person that was responsible. In other cases, I simply was not needed in person because the information was already written down somewhere. In that case I'd provide them with the information.
- Decline meetings during my lunch break.
- Decline meetings that overlapped with other meetings in my agenda, specifically stating I was not available due to another meeting.
- Block a few moments in the week in my agenda as "focus time", set those to private meetings. To the credit of the company, they eventually did recognize that a lot of the IT engineering staff was sitting in too many meetings and then as a company policy blocked of two afternoons for everyone as focus time.
- When getting general help requests about things I knew for a fact were written down in documentation, I'd refer them there first. Ask them to go over the documentation first and then let me know if they had specific questions.
To be fair, this was an extremely chaotic and continually panicked company, with a lot of extra things compounding all of this. But it isn't that rare either as I know plenty of people who actually burned out over similar things at various different companies.
I’ve done plenty of meetings in a remote only setting where at the end I say “if anyone wants to hang and chat about things further, or just hang out and socialise, feel free to stick around”.
People get to choose if they stay. It’s at a natural context switch (end of meeting). It’s deliberately informal and not organised (“hey, let’s just hang for a bit”).
The opportunities are there to achieve the same goal as the water cooler.
When I see people lamenting what has been “lost” I usually read it as “I don’t want to look for alternative solutions”.
This may sound reasonable, but the world is not black and white. If we turn every quick question into a complete meeting with agenda and whatnot, the organisation will become extremly bureaucratic. And at some point people will start making guesses instead of reaching out to experts because it is just too much work.
So in my opinion, the author is a little bit selfish too. The company cannot 100% align with what best works for you.
> The company cannot 100% align with what best works for you.
There's 2 thoughts in that one sentence
1. The overall productivity of the company may be increased having a single individual accomplish less of their _individual_ goal. People helping each other can multiply productivity.
2. What one person thinks works best for them may not _actually_ be what makes them the most productive. It is a very rare person that works best in a complete silo, separated from any input from others; likely almost nobody. It is an _uncommon_ person that doesn't benefit from some amount of casual discussion about what they're working on. If a developer thinks they are most productive working on their solution start to finish without ever discussing it with someone else; odds are that developer isn't very good at what they do.
The authors approach, in my opinion, will lead to nothing but confrontation and probably decrease productivity significantly. Then again, it sounds like that's the goal
> So in my opinion, the author is a little bit selfish too. The company cannot 100% align with what best works for you.
No, of course not. It is a scale/grade where balance needs to be found. Unfortunately, in some companies the balance is really off where in order to maintain your sanity you do need to set clear boundaries like this. If not you will not even be able to think clearly as you are in a constant state of being interrupted.
There is also a big difference in the quality of quick questions.
For example.
1. Bad, no context: Hey, quick question.
2. Still not good: Hey, quick question about why Y is part of X (where the reasoning is clearly documented).
3. Better: Hey, I was looking at Y and X and see the reasoning for doing it like this, but I still have some questions about the details.
As far as why I rate these the way I do:
1. certainly is bad because it just means I get a ping, need to respond, need to wait for the answer (being distracted again from what I was doing), etc.
2. Is just a waste of time but is okay enough as I can just point to the documentation and ask to follow up if the question is not covered.
3. Is much better as I know what it is about, you have the right knowledge as well, and now we can actually answer your question in a meaningful way.
Having typed this out I realize I am just repeating the article. Which also does not say that everything needs to be a meeting with a clear agenda. It basically boils down to one thing if you want something from someone make sure to include enough context.
It really is not that difficult :)
To me it seems more about scheduling a meeting when a simple email or message might do. Which is kind of the opposite of scheduling meetings with agendas etc.
If it’s really a “quick question” just write it down and in the off chance that it develops into something else you can have that meeting.
Of course it’s also a cultural/etc. thing. Some people are just horrible at expressing themselves in text or communicating asynchronously (the “Hello [I won’t tell you what I need until you reply”] ones or those that think that they are being helpful by making their messages as terse, short and consequentially vague and unspecific as possible)
I’m not sure how can that be beneficial for the team/company if it significantly affects productivity.
Why go for a quick 5 min call when an email thread that will need you to context switch 10 times will do? That being said there is a lot of meeting which should be replaced by a email and vice-versa. Also, When there is something you don’t understand properly, coming up with the right question or meeting agenda can be very hard. Finding a common ground is better served by face 2 face communication rather than an email. When a slack thread is getting too long, a quick 5-10min VC often do wonders.
And replacing all slack threads with meetings is similarly non-productive. Making everything a slack thread and refusing to ever go to meetings is bad. But refusing to write anything down and forcing everyone to exclusively go to meetings is bad. So find the most effective through line. Most often that’s:
1. Slack message with enough context that someone can answer
2. Discuss on slack until it’s clear the topic is going to need 3+ people to decide on or is in need of higher bandwidth, such as a screen share or just is urgent enough that talking while moving would be faster
3. Hop on that quick call
4. When you realize you’re missing folks you need or whatever and it’s not urgent enough to drag them into the call, set up a full meeting
Nothing in the article contradicts the above flow, and the above flow is what works best in my experience
Yep. Frankly, these articles are just keyboard warrior antics from introverts that are feeling on top of the world with the wave of WFH. Conflating “what’ll get me back to my IDE faster” and “how can I make all communication so structured that I never have to genuinely interact with anyone at work on a human level” with an actual increase in productivity is just a sign of immense naivety.
Thankfully these people tend to be quite vocal about these views online so I can appropriately take it as a soft red flag when hiring.
Or, these articles are written by people who deal with so many "quick calls" and a continuous stream of meeting invites without clear agendas that it actually does stop them from performing what is their actual job description.
This would also apply to people working in offices where someone stops by their desk every five minutes. If you are constantly being disrupted in your work, have to shift focus, rinse, repeat, it makes sense to start setting boundaries.
Question, do your job openings by default include one of these phrases?
- Thrives in high-stress environments
- Excels in demanding situations
- Delivers outstanding results in challenging circumstances
It's a welcome change from the extroverted era to be honest. There's a middle ground somewhere though, including but not limited to cutting through the bullshit, posturing and rituals and getting to the point.
I'm the furthest thing from an introvert and I still despise having managers pulling me into unprompted random bullshit calls that could've been a slack message, usually because they don't read the status messages posted by the people doing the actual work.
The large, overwhelming majority of impromptu meetings I've ever been in that didn't have a fellow engineer on the other end of the call have been nothing but massive time wasters. And usually if it's another engineer a few messages is more than enough, anyways.
1) are your goals aligned with the ultimate success factors of the company?
Probably.
2) are the people who want to stop you from doing your job aligned?
Probably not.
Ask yourself if people who "just want a minute" would go stick their arm in an industrial metal press, willingly. Don't they want to make a good impression? Or would this be a horrible act of self harm that is completely disruptive?
There are valid arguments here so I broadly agree with where the author is getting at.
But some points are a stretch and that weakens the whole argument.
Point 3.1 : you waste HOURS of time debugging the wrong piece of code -- going off on a quest based on just one single chat message with incomplete info (and not even a stack trace as you deem it so essential yourself)? You don't ask any clarifying questions to validate your assumptions before sinking hours into work? Is that not your fault instead?
Point 4: so you want a whole IT support ticket (with attachments and priority classification if IM allows it) in a single chat message?
Why are you accepting support requests on chat instead of via a ticketing tool that keeps track of request volumes, history, SLAs etc.
If your workplace doesn't care about this level of productivity management and efficiency anyway -- why bother with these rules of engagement.
Also when someone pings you about an issue ... there is a chance you already know about an outage/issue and are working on it...and might just say "I know, fix is on the way by EoD, sit tight." If so... the whole stack trace and explanation of the problem scenario, what they have tried etc is all useless waste. They are just trying to optimize THEIR productivity by pinging you first instead. Two people can play this game.
3.1: A skilled person does, but it's still easy to get led down the garden path, even for very skilled engineers, especially when something is urgent, or at least "urgent"
4: Stakeholders really like chat, and it's a constant battle to make them go through the motions to report things properly. Why wouldn't they like it, it puts the burden onto you rather than them. It's often a tricky balance to strike, depending on the organisation, they can often be more important than you.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for productivity, when the sacrifice (being pleasant & accessible to coworkers) isn't worth the gain (more focus time coding).
Sometimes it seems that we're over focused on efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. And I get it, because it's very hard to "be both". You can either spend your day coding away solving problems or you can spend your day discussing with people figuring out what the problem is. Both pursuits have clear failure modes; you can spend a lot of time trying to understand the problem better without really getting anywhere and you can spend a lot of time solving the wrong problem. How do you know when you have the right balance? 50/50?
> How do you know when you have the right balance?
Find the right balance by understanding the needs of the whole business, the needs of your department, and the needs of your specific team, and your manager’s expectations of you. Then balance all that with the work assigned to you, deadlines, etc. And then align your day to day work with what the business is telling you is most important.
(This is also how average engineers can put themselves in positions to be promoted ahead of “rockstar engineers”. Companies promote and elevate employees who have the most positive impact on the business, not people who have the most impact on the codebase)
Agree. I think the key distinction this post misses is between being effectively collaborative and adaptive to others’ communication styles (the fatwa against the naked “Hi”) vs. producing back-pressure against organizational dysfunction (a norm that throwing a vaguely titled hour on a dozen folks’ calendars w/no preliminaries or agenda is acceptable).
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for being highly interruptible, when the sacrifice (productivity) isn't worth the gain (satisfy outdated notions of office etiquette designed by extroverts who want to vampire other people's attention unnecessarily).
Agree, especially when no one writing code, or managing anything, has a meaningful measure of their "productivity," or how removing or changing variables might "optimize" it. People talk about optimizing their productivity as if they had a meter on their desk showing a number, but it just comes down to subjective experience and mood.
People who act like their time has so much value they can ignore and talk down to their co-workers end up with no professional contacts worth anything when they get laid off. "I had my head down coding, I didn't have time to socialize or make friends." Optimal for an hour, maybe, but a losing strategy in the long game.
A well-functioning organization would not devalue people who are more judicious about their use of time, preferring productivity over unnecessary socializing.
But while what you're describing does not describe a well-functioning organization, it's definitely true in practice. People who buck the silly social dynamics in office cultures will be perceived as less productive whether it's true or not and are frequently devalued.
A knee-jerk response to what I just wrote of course will be maybe those people just can't see the real value of all these allegedly silly office rituals, but before you jump to that conclusion, consider the possibility that it's at least equally likely that the people perpetrating the rituals are overvaluing them.
The point is all of these social dynamics and office rituals should be open to being reexamined every so often to see if they're truly adding the value people think they're adding so they don't devolve into rituals people do because they're rituals. Keep the good ones, ditch the useless ones, and be proactive about objectively evaluating which are which.
The organization doesn't devalue people. Other individuals feel put-off and alienated by people who act the way the author of the article describes. Like it or not personal relationships matter, reducing friction matters, and small talk and the apparently wasteful social rituals can add to team and organization cohesion. Lone wolves, high-performing or not, get perceived as not team players, not someone willing to help others even with small things, hostile to routine human interaction.
Some workplaces go too far in one direction or another. I would prefer working in a more casual and friendly environment even if that meant engaging in idle chit-chat and signing birthdays cards, rather than a workplace where everyone had to shut up and pretend to optimize their performance. In my long career I have always found jobs and freelance work through friends and former work colleagues, and a big part of that comes down to them perceiving me as someone they enjoyed working with and hanging out with, not just someone who optimized my productivity and told them to buzz off because I had to write more code.
> People who buck the silly social dynamics in office cultures will be perceived as less productive whether it's true or not and are frequently devalued.
Younger, I would have agreed with your sentiment. Now, I appreciate good coworkers. If I don't have a socialisation outlet during the day, it's just draining and I burn out faster. If you're a person that is just a grumpy Gus isolated in their cubicle, you can make your team less effective and undermine the team spirit.
This is where I feel like management fails. To build a team you need to really pick personalities that work well together and honing and tuning the group composition is something that managers can do. Put the introverts together. Put night owls together. Parents are more understanding of taking something to over to cover for someone because they need it sometimes too.
This is a phenomenal general rule and can be expanded well beyond engineering and social norms:
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for productivity, when the sacrifice {insert impact} isn't worth the gain {insert output}.
When you interrupt mental work, you just doubled that person's effort. At a minimum. Now tell me it's not worth it. Managers don't care because it"s not their effort.
Don't be fooled by the use of the word "optimize" which suggest some minimal gains over the current situation. In the short term you double the effort of that person/team, in the long term you will get frustration, people asking for huge raises (to reflect the effort) and then people just quit.
For larger enterprises with complex org charts, I consider an agenda one of two invaluable tools for meetings, the other being post-meeting minutes including a RACI chart.
If someone can't think up a few bullet points for a meeting in advance, that person has not prepared for their meeting, and will waste some of the participant's time.
Not creating (one-line) minutes that most importantly include decisions that have been made in the meeting is also the perfect set-up for wasting other people's time.
I see this similar to the effort of writing a good commit message.
Most times that person not preparing the call with an agenda is told in the middle of the meeting that he should have invited someone else that has knowledge on some key point and it ends up needing another meeting to be scheduled. With more context, people may have told him prior to the meeting that person needed to be included to.
Yeah, this is one of the more common failure modes. One meeting wasted, and possibly lots of time lost when the next meeting can only be scheduled much later.
All easily preventable if the person organizing the meeting prepares for it, and shares a brief agenda so that other participants can prepare to, or find replacements if they themselves are the wrong person for the meeting.
> So we both embark on a completely needless adventure of changing random parts of the code and scratching our heads as to why nothing makes the error go away. I end up wasting hours because of a typo.
Wow. That's just straight up admitting being an idiot and blaming others for it. If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to ask for a stack trace that is on them. They wasted some of your time. (Or at least I guess you can argue that.) If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to blindly modify random parts of the code then that is on you and you only.
Confused people ask confused questions. Because they are confused. If they could ask the right questions they would have already helped themselves. It is your job to not let their confusion overtake you. Ask questions until you understand the situation. Software engineering is not a SWAT raid. You can and should ask questions and shoot only later.
I highly disagree. A call has a definite start and end. Async chats leave an open thread in your mind that needs to be constantly polled and interrupt flow much more than a call.
In my experience calls rarely have a definite end. "Quick" calls often turn into 30 minutes or an hour of the colleague talking about things unrelated to the issue they wanted to discuss originally.
In the office I've had people sit at a desk next to me and just talk at me for more than an hour about themselves. Trying to politely end these kinds of conversations just results in a brief blip in their monologue before they go back to it. I've even had to get up and walk away after someone wouldn't stop talking at me.
For whatever reason there are many people who are incapable of thinking about how they're using other peoples' time. The only defense is asynchronous media like chats or emails where you aren't forced by social politeness into continuing to be disrupted.
Below a certain threshold, "quick calls" are the best thing to do.
Some of the most inspiring discussions come from someone bringing up an issue they have right there and then. Good discussions often start from something that doesn't seem so important, that doesn't have a clear outline from the start.
If there isn't the possibility to start a discussion instantly once in a little while, there is a good chance it won't ever happen.
>Good discussions often start from something that doesn't seem so important, that doesn't have a clear outline from the start.
Yes, but I've never once had a "can we hop on a quick call?" turn into that. Almost every single one of those that I've encountered could've been settled in a handful of chat messages. The things you describe happen to me during unplanned asides in meetings, long-term general chat channels, or impromptu in-person chatting.
My impression has been that the people who want a quick 1-on-1 call just don't like typing.
> My impression has been that the people who want a quick 1-on-1 call just don't like typing.
Yes, similar to my ex (can't get rid of her completely, shared custody of the kids) who always insist on sending voice messages. She just don't want to type and keep sending voice message after I told her several times I hated that because it made looking for past information super difficult.
By the way, wasn't there a slack like app that was working kind of a walkie-talkie kind of system within a team?
You're right that it happens much less with calls vs in the office where there is the important signal of physical presence. Personally I only get very few "can we have a quick call" at all. But I feel like it's a culture thing, people shouldn't worry about making a quick call proactively, once in a while. And maybe acceptance will change that remote workers should e.g. have a remote camera always-on. I'm not entirely decided but tend to think it would be a good thing. Maybe it would be more accepted if a person that is being looked at would get an instant signal about it.
> Below a certain threshold, "quick calls" are the best thing to do.
Sure, but give the person you asking for a quick call the context to decide if they also think it is a quick call. All the article basically is asking for is to provide enough context when contacting people.
If you do text, you only help once. The problem is solved for everyone else, and you leave a trace for people searching for similar problems.
On the other hand, in secret 1:1 calls with no trace, that only help one and only one person, you can appear busy and productive while also helping people in secret, and doing so multiple times for the same or similar problem. You reap the rewards multiple times.
And since people never put any initial effort at all (they just say "hi do you have a minute?" instead of describing their issue), if multiple people have the same problem right now, then you have plausible deniability for your multiple calls because you didn't know that they had the same issue, so that's why all calls were separate instead of solving them all at once.
Don't even mention the fact that others can explain their initial problem with screenshots, or with a Slack recording (literally 2 clicks, and then doing exactly the same as they would do during the first minute of the call anyway), to get quick context and then either solve the problem instantly or jump to a call. Nono, while those things get points for not being searchable, they still leave some useful information in the history (mainly some context and the moment in time when you had that conversation), and we can't risk having that.
Also, if they send the video, Slack might even include a searchable transcription (I don't know if that's a feature yet though), and if that wasn't bad enough, if you end up not knowing the answer, the video can even be shared with others on a shared channel to save time finding the person who knows how to fix the problem.
Hopefully you understand now the problems with async text communication.
You're being cynical and it seems you take a quite extremist stance. My impression is you're blind to the value of ephemeral, low-ceremony discussion. Just bounce an idea of someone else and see what comes back. Sharing fews, helping each other learn, etc.
Not everything needs to be recorded, in fact I'm very happy that most discussions aren't.
Spare me the crap. I've seen many company wikis full of stuff that nobody ever looks up, because it's mostly irrelevant, outdated, or plain wrong content.
The value of discussions mostly isn't in the things that can be recorded or searched later, but in the effort the participants put into it.
As stated before, this is up to a certain threshold. One or a few low-friction discussions per day can be very fine. It shouldn't take up the biggest part of your day's focus time.
He does have a point though. Easily "recordable" communication is bad for office politics.
Remember that old advice to email the boss with a summary of what he told you to do verbally - asking for confirmation that you understood it right as a cover - to cover your ass?
I tend to favor calls with people who prefer calls, and text with people who prefer text. But if it starts getting abused, the situation becomes different.
I don't mind agreeing to a bare zero-effort "hi, can we go on a call?" from time to time. And I give a lot of leeway to juniors and new hires, bending over backwards more than I probably should. But if it becomes a habit you can bet I'll start delaying my responses until the other party starts putting some upfront effort.
I usually expect mutual respect. Helping each other as fellow professionals working towards the same (company) goal, is one thing. Asking for hand-holding, or expecting zero-effort to be repaid with non-zero effort, is a completely different thing.
If someone asks another to go out of their way to ignore their other responsibilities and give you their undivided attention right now in a way that's uncomfortable to them, then it's only fair for this to be a two-way street. At some point, maybe not now, maybe not soon, but at some point, some sort of reciprocation is expected if this trend continues.
My previous comment was mostly just me ranting of places where that reciprocation wasn't the case because people only ever expect things to be done in the way that's comfortable for them specifically; which in my bubble, it has been mostly with the "only-calls" people, unable to hold any semblance of conversation over text. (EDIT: The actual topic might not be the same, but the mood definitely came from there.)
A pair programming session where we're both doing something, bouncing ideas, you check stuff on your end while I also check stuff here on my end, okay, that's a good thing.
But if it's just me remote-controlling that other person with my voice, I can't call that productive, and I'd rather play that pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game while also working on my current task.
In my bubble, when people preferred only-calls it was usually also the case that they put almost zero effort when asking for help and just didn't want to bother spending literally 2 additional seconds to take a screenshot.
I can rant for even longer, for example how those same people (again, in my experience so far) prefer to go to the office to use a whiteboard in the name of efficiency, and somehow aren't bothered by the fact that you can't Ctrl+Z, that you can't move stuff around, that you can't rotate stuff, that you block the view while modifying, etc. And if you say that a few 90 EUR digital tablets would actually be more efficient, they say they can't afford it, but at the same time the managers travel (flights+hotels+transportation) to several countries in person to introduce themselves to their teams in person because this is actually more efficient.
And the people who prefer calls, and know that will be requesting calls frequently, and sharing screen frequently, and talking about stuff in their screen frequently, don't even purchase a cheap drawing tablet to make it easier for them to explain stuff graphically.
So yeah, take that as additional context for my rant.
TL;DR: If you prefer calls, I will tend to use calls with you until you abuse this, and this abuse usually happens eventually if I stay in a company long enough (fortunately not always).
Oh funny one. I have atm a part time contract where I go to the office twice per week.
I decided with a coworker today that we'll go to the office an extra day tomorrow because we'd rather do that than sit for a couple hours with headphones in our ears.
On our own, no management involved.
When it makes sense to talk, I can talk. Most of the time, it doesn't.
Not engaging enough. I write a couple lines, expect a couple lines some 1 to 180 minutes later that might miss half the point, etc. Totally different dynamic.
Having to cache in the previous state of the discussion whenever I receive a reply is exhausting. So some things are just not brought up.
And whenever it's actually an interactive synchronous live-chat, why not just hop on a call then?
Are you implying that 1) everything from the chat is immediately present in the brain when taking up the discussion at a later point, as well as 2) Last time you left the chat, all the the relevant context was well encoded as chat text in the first place?
It's certainly better to have chat text than to not have it, but whether it can make up for the huge cost of asynchronicity is another question (each delay breaks your flow, requiring you to cache-out, cache-in...)
Oef, you clearly had not to deal with the "quick" calls I had to deal with at a previous organization. If I had not set boundaries, these would easily drag on for who knows how long.
Besides, chat messages I can respond to in my own time when I have had proper time to look into whatever they need from me.
If they need documentation I can look it up, have them read it and maybe then ask targeted questions. Just to give a simple example. Which is also why "no hello" is important.
It isn't that most people mind being greeted, just accompany it directly with the right context.
Which can be as easy as "Hi creesch, if you have some time I wanted to ask about X".
If you spent even a nanosecond considering these other people, you might stumble upon the hypothesis that these people are trying to port the way they interact with others in meatspace to an IM channel, rather than assume some form of mental illness.
And if those people stopped for a nanosecond and considered other people, they might come to realization that an IM is not the same as meatspace, and maybe there needs to be some adjustment to an async model.
Also, giving context is good, regardless of medium.
If you really think that people are going to break the widespread cultural norm of greeting others at the beginning of a social interaction because of some grumpy engineers, youre gonna have a bad time
I could see that too, but in most f2f interactions, you also start with a greeting. What does the greeting accomplish? Nothing substantial, but it probably has some broader cultural value akin to establishing goodwill or the like.
They are well meaning, but they just don't realize this is async communication. They only know direct, sync communication. This is one signal that tells me they are junior (even after years of "experience").
It's why I don't use IM and just block myself off on those platforms. If it's not meaningful enough to write in an email then it's not meaningful enough for me to read.
Huh, we have really different experiences. I often describe things the other way. My email is full of automated messages, things that get blasted out to the entire organization, status updates that got sent to an entire mailing list and I don't need to read. I assume at this point that if it's an email, it's probably not important. That is to say P(important | email) < my threshold
I mean, I glace at them at some point, but I don't put much thought into them.
At least I know slack/teams messages are meant for me. If it's important, don't send me an email about it, ping me on one of those.
Open a jira ticket for every meeting you attend. (And close it). When asked about productivity treat meetings as the most productive use of your time. "I had a fantastic day yesterday, attended 5 meetings and closed 5+n tickets. I'm so productive I deserve a raise."
Managers treat meetings as the most important thing you do. (Its the most important thing they do.) The disconnect is that we don't see them the same.
Once you start taking credit for all the meetings you attend, you'd be surprised how many fewer you get invited to.
Exactly - in my experience, it seems like many managers often have a notion of engineers' work being done somewhere/sometime else, isolated in another dimension from the meetings, and hence meetings not having much effect on that "actual work".
Once you start adding tickets for every meeting and ad-hoc call, and from that it becomes obvious that these are now taking 70% of your time and what little remains is not nearly enough for the "real work", you'll find how the attitude shifts and those managers start protecting your time...
Interestingly, managers often don't seem to consider meetings "real work" for engineers, but it's almost the only type of work they do, and take credit for...
I agree with this entirely, and have griped about it to people (and here) before.
But I would never, under any but the most egregious circumstances, complain directly to a colleague who does it or (especially) send them this link.
People are different, and most people are different to me. I'm getting paid partly to deal with other people, so that's what I'll (sometimes grudgingly) do. If they're doing this all the time to each-other, my productivity is still going to be relatively high anyway.
> I would never ... complain directly to a colleague who does it
True. Nor would I. I would push for the company to publish guidelines about remote and asynchronous communication. And then if someone repeatedly communicated badly, I'd provide constructive feedback either directly to them or to their line manager.
I'm a huge advocate of full-time remote working, but those like me who feel it is the future of work need to stop being so dogmatic about how communication should happen.
I don't really like posts like this. Sure, it's a great idea in a remote context to write down how you like to communicate, and how you like to be communicated with at work. (You should do it, it's great!)
However, not everybody will agree with you and part of being a good employee on a large, distributed, team is understanding and working with other people's communication styles.
I agree with the authors sentiment, and to some degree yours. We should be flexible, but we should all try to better ourselves and others.
Their post is meant to change norms, basically a, "Hey we really should all understand why nohello.net was created". Oddly enough, the post itself is my version of nohello. I'd prefer that they started with the conclusion and then build from there. [1]
The author is attempting to change norms. I already fixed it with my kid, she asks amazing questions and includes all the right context.
It isn't that they don't agree or disagree, very few "hello'ers" will be able to defend or even explain their position. It isn't about preference or dislike. A blind "Hello" isn't a communication style, it is a faux pas.
It doesn't matter if you are remote or on the next desk over, we should do better with communication. And that includes how to deliver the message that a blind hello is poor form.
Let's get to the point: some people like being in pointless meetings/calls all day, some don't.
With remote work, you get the chance to rewrite company communication so that the above pointless meetings aren't needed.
People who write articles like the OP have realized that and view the former way to communicate as the extremely inefficient and intrusive system that it really is.
If you're in a fully text based async culture, then all the conversation, including the famous watercooler stuff and how're the kids doing stuff happens text based and async. I'd say the watercooler/kids stuff can happen more often, because you know you won't interrupt them when you ask, and they'll answer whenever they take a break.
Keywords are both text based and async. Not one, both.
There is definitely culture clash in this. I think it is probably better to normalize "available" and "unavailable" spans for the knowledge workers who need flow to work effectively. (And I am one.) If my plan was to write a prototype or debug a difficult problem, it doesn't matter if I'm expected to respond to "Hello" or "Hello, <30 word question>", I lose my flow and the job will be delayed. I might even end up permanently distracted on something else. Better would be to connect a pomodoro timer to status that says "Available at <+30m>" when the timer starts. Then I could respond to "hello" and take a quick call and ask the meeting planner to make an agenda.
> I get the sentiment, but also, for many the work place is a socialization hub.
> And what OP argue about is a direct consequence of that: small talks, serendipity, politness rules, etc.
You can do that while following the same rules of politeness and small talks.
For instance I had a colleague who used to put "Hi" or "Good morning" messages several times a day on my teams chat.
He could be as polite saying and include small talk in a single message:
"
Good morning prmoustache, do you have some time to help me on project BLABLABLA, I need assistance regarding setup of FOO in a BAR context. Mr John Doe told me you had experience with that. Here are the errors I get.
<some snippet>
If you have some time now we can maybe do a quick call, otherwise can I schedule some time?
By the way, how is the weather in Spain today? Did you enjoy some nice time on the beach with your daughters?
"
This is polite, include all the info I would need, some small talk, would give me an idea on how much time I might need to dedicate to that to give assistance, if I have to check some info in my note/wiki/whatever and either decide to stop what I am doing now and help him immediately or ask him to schedule a meeting later during the day or week. And maybe I have the exact solution and I can point him a link that will help him directly.
People who usually don't go straight to the point either do it:
- for cultural reasons
- by ignorance on how to work effectively with remote worker
- or because they want to brute force their way into you.
Small talk is fine, but when someone isn't willfully trying to engage in small talk and just is walking through a ritual to ask me a question, it seems better to skip the ritual and get to the point. Instead of "Hi [name]", them waiting for me to reply, me waiting for them to reply, and them sending their question, they could write "Hi [name], [question]" in their initial message. There are no disadvantages to this and plenty of advantages.
> Those are common mistakes that people make when working remotely. Maybe you work in an environment where productivity is low, so everyone has time to jump on a quick call or chat with you any time you ask.
Classic 'you are with us or against us' level of argumentation. Saying hello is already a _mistake_, and paraphrasing: you either like to work for a company of underperforming losers, or you need to follow the advice of the article. How convincing!
The way to stop these distractions is not to set a bunch of rules, but to document things in clear and discoverable ways that people can search to find what they need. No one wants to interrupt; people do that because it's the quickest and easiest way to find an answer. If you make something else the quickest way they'll use that instead.
No, they won't. For example: Tickets are easier to discover, don't suffer from bus-factor=1, act as searchable documentation, can easily be handed over to another team if misrouted, can be queued and prioritized, all those nice things. But people are too lazy to search the ticket system and documentation, then open a ticket and ask incomplete time-wasting questions in chat instead.
It is actually normal for individuals to be lazy, and searching docs is more work (for the asker) than just asking a quick question. This is why rules are necessary, otherwise every asker will just waste someone else's time. It shouldn't just be on the two parties in this interaction to enforce structured communication as a rule, it should also be on the company hierarchy to do so. Because in the end, the whole company will suffer if e.g. the knowledge about fixing problem X died with Bob who always just answered inquiries about problem X in private chat.
these things annoy me too but it's never going to stop, linking somebody to something like this is just going to result in everybody disliking you and then asking you for a quick call anyway when they want something.
This particular blog post is probably too snarky to share with most people, but I've had success with gently explaining the same concept to various clients and coworkers, especially ones who are working different with different schedules or time zones.
The trick is to frame their behavior as inconvieniencing them rather than you. In other words, if they send you all the details up front, then you can send them a good answer as soon as possible rather than needing them to drop what they're doing later on to send you a follow-up reply when you ask for clarification.
I've also found that, for people who seem to prefer talking to typing, asking them to record a short Loom video of the issue usually gets them to explain the problem with enough details to solve it.
The real trick would be for the company higher-ups to recognize that there is a problem and impose the rules in the original article as binding company policy.
Most of the time, im letting YOU know that the product or service YOU own is not working. Its a courtesy. If I have to jump through this many hoops to tell you that, ill just let it continue to fail until someone more important than me has a problem. Then ill point them to you.
I don't really agree about that "frobnicate" deal. If you messed up when you added a parameter to "frobnicate", you'll get "Hi, you broke frobnicate, please fix it. It's causing issues.".
You break it, you fix it, including the troubleshooting.
This guy is too concerned about himself rather than others. Working at a company means you're a resource anyone can use, live with it and don't make up your rules on how to communicate. Just do it and collect.
While I totally agree with the post, I think the tone of the delivery is likely to undermine the points made. From my perspective, for these guidelines to be adhered to there needs to be a broader buy in. 37signals are perhaps a prominent example of how this works. And if it's presented in a more pleasant way, rather than in the tone of a parent chastising a child, I think these principles can take root and become part of team/company culture.
In my last role I was CTO of a ~650 person multinational. I agree with almost everything in this piece, perhaps even absolutely everything (although I admit to skim reading it quite quickly so I may have missed something).
A lot of this is summed up for me by a piece of advice to managers that I read several years ago, almost certainly in an article linked from this site: "don't be spooky".
I.e., be clear about what you want. Don't leave people in the dark. Particularly as a manager, if you send a vague request for a quick chat with someone, they're quite likely to think it's something bad or they're in trouble, and become anxious, particularly if they don't know you well. So not only are you breaking their flow state, but you're freaking them out as well.
Specificity, along with an appropriate level of detail are profoundly reassuring from a variety of perspectives: including reassuring people that you're not simply about to waste their time.
What I've found best is a compromise: send a chat message like "Hi foo, I hope you're having a good day! I'm trying to figure something out with Postgres and I wonder if you might have 30 minutes to chat about it?". As a remote worker, there is also a social cohesion upside to having a synchronous call sometimes.
I agree the 'Hi' type are annoying, but I for sure don't expect a stack trace.
Worst case the person is from another team, and I would rather have context on why they're contacting me directly on IM. Best case is that's a coworker, and I trust that if my coworkers ask me in particular and not my team's chat, its a specific issue I will have an easier time dealing with (or I made myself available for help because I'm on toilet duty and will jump for anything remotely interesting).
If I am engaged with you and you ask me for a quick call, I either have 30 minutes ahead and agree, or I don't, and refuse. I fully expect the call to last anywhere between 2 and 30 minutes (unless you're a PO and I set aside 2 hours). The more we understand each other, the quicker the calls will be anyway, so even if the call isn't 'productive', it ultimately is.
Social behaviors are complicated. Yes of course, it's possible to have both pleasantries (hi, how are you, etc) and ask the question in very polite ways (whenever you're free, if I'm not disturbing you, I wanted to check with you about <xyz>).
But social behaviors are habitual. I spent time in many parts of Africa where it's just downright rude/unacceptable to go to someone and ask something, even if it's just a change for a few bucks. You have to go through the pleasantries and WAIT for them to acknowledge before you ask what you want.
It's impossible to change that habit, no matter the tool, medium, rationale, process, even urgency. They're still going to say "can I talk to you for a sec" and wait for an answer. I've had people do this in the middle of production issues and it's driven me crazy. Even when things are burning, their way of escalating is still only to say "I NEED to talk to you right now", they're simply not tuned to state what they want.
To not help with this, I also went through trainings on personality traits and communication styles. Some people reveal and then explain (direct communication style), and some people first explain then reveal (indirect style), they need you to go through the thought process first before concluding. I learned that it's guaranteed to create conflicts when the communication style for a person is reversed. If you give a conclusion-first to someone who needs explanation-first, they're tuned to mentally reject the conclusion – no matter how you sugar coat it or your intention or rationale.
So we have to constantly keep reinforcing what we're ok with. Just keep calm and reinforce, tell people to provide context in your chat profile, use an auto reply, copy paste a message saying "next time please feel free to ask the question..." and so on. It's kind of a never ending battle. The only thing is, please don't assume anyone is being a jerk, the same way you are not being a jerk by ignoring that message or replying tersely.
As a junior i often wrote "Hi, do you have a moment? (ok if not)" in slack (or lync at the time) to senior people when I had questions. I then didn't expect a reply unless the senior person was not busy or bored. If no reply within 5 mins I would ask the next person.
I did this when I had a question that perhaps 20 people who I knew could answer, though I had no way of telling who (if anyone) was free to chat something over with me. I didn't send a group email as the projects that I was working on contained need to know stuff, so sending details of it to 20 people would be a no-go but saying I spoke about this with Bob, here is the audit trail would be fine.
I still think that this was optimal in that situation, though I often see it derided with no better option suggested.
The optimal approach is to ask your question in a public channel.
Then all 20 people get to see it at once, they can see if someone else already responded and other people on the team who may have been wondering about something similar also get to see the question and the answer(s).
In my experience, writing in a public channel gets slower responses, if any. Especially if nobody knows the exact solution to your problem. Some people don't have notifications enabled for group chats / public channels, and even if they see the message they may think "someone else will reply".
Asking someone directly almost always results in a quick response, even if it is a "I don't know" answer. And an "I don't know" from a senior colleague can mean a lot, for example that the problem is much harder than you initially thought.
Which will lead to the senior colleagues being swamped by questions that a junior could have answered.
Ticket or bust. That way the question can go the proper way from cheap junior supporters to expensive senior ones (if necessary). It can be prioritized, subject to an SLA like time to first answer or time to solution. And the whole ticket can be searched and reused as documentation for identical/similar questions.
In that case I felt like I would interrupt the workflow of more people (i needed the answer within an hour so there would have to be a notification of some sort), share more information than was necessary (auditors don't like that) and court answers from people who I knew weren't really competent in that area but liked showing off for career reasons who were quick to 'solve' the question and would use it to try and show their superiority compared to you to others.
There is also the bystander effect - i.e. yelling call 911 vs asking someone directly to call 911
Suggestion for better option: ask your question in the first message (so they have a feel for how long the "moment" might take, and/or potentially can ask it right away), and ask it in public where everybody can see it.
I'd be OK with skipping that last option; asking for help is hard enough as it is, and I can imagine people not wanting to flaunt their imagined ignorance. Which is also why it's good for more senior people to do it, so they can set that culture that shows that it is OK.
I would ask the question that I wanted to ask immediately in the next message (usually after 'whats up'), as I didn't want to have people think about my problem rather than their problem if they were deep into something.
We were also told not to share things about projects with other staff unnecessarily.
More often than not when I encounter people with these very strict prescribed communication preferences it’s due to either, hubris, inability to manage their own time or skills issue - people are just afraid to be asked a question because they might not know the answer.
The worst is when someone “wants to have a quick call this afternoon” but refuses to use calendar scheduling tools. You then have to engage in “the waiting game” where you don’t want to start anything deep for fear of getting interrupted.
I've only met a single person in 15 years of work who couldn't touch type, and they came from a completely unrelated background and were 45+ old.
Is it really a concern for younger candidates to not be able to touch type these days? I suppose Gen Z who are phone-centric would not have much experience touch typing.
Or you could be a bit more approachable and people wouldn't feel the need to ask permission before stating the problem. And a quick, "yo what's up" is easy enough..
The truth, once again, is in the middle i suppose.
No hello is very reasonable, but only to a point. It's a specific adaptation to asynchronous communication that kicked off in the IRC days where channel idling was common - async is a radically different form of comms to in-person & this etiquette aids in adapting to those differences.
But it's important to remember that it is an adaptation for a specific comms medium & applying it too broadly may really just be a way of shirking socialisation. That's fine if you're most productive as an engineer working alone on your fully-self-contained owned project, but in most cases collaboration is beneficial. Collaboration introduces communication inefficiencies but its a known trade-off.
Especially extending this barrier-to-entry to other things like calls (verbal comms) & meetings (in-person) can lead to significant inaccessibility, exclusion & siloing. It's worth stepping back & looking at problems you may be trying to solve here: e.g. too-many-meetings or long meeting run-on. These are problems that frankly this doesn't do anything to solve whatsoever; you'll just end up with managers setting boilerplate agendas for the same "too many long meetings" & meanwhile some of the peers you may need to have a valuable short meet with will be too hung up by your requirements to contact you at all.
PG put this perhaps more gently in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.
I work with people whose days are a sequence of meetings and chats within meetings. They don't understand (or respect) that I have meetings but also must concentrate for periods of time.
Quick calls are super important. Sometimes they'll settle a matter immediately, in a few minutes, instead of dragging the decision to a 15 minutes time slot the next week.
One of my first bosses would constantly push me to make phone calls instead of firing emails, and even though I didn't enjoy it, it undeniably worked. Things got done much faster, with far less effort from everyone.
This just feels like the classic “maker vs manager schedule”, except viewed from only one side.
Most larger orgs run on a mixture of those depending on role and where they interact you get friction
If you force the one on the other in either direction that person gets nothing done. Which is functionally what this article attempts - solves writers problem (“do it my way”) but ignores the consequences for others.
Obviously which one makes sense depends on the role, but does anyone else prefer the "manager" schedule even if you're not a manager? I prefer jobs where there is a mix of responding to tickets, meetings, and small tasks rather than long blocks of working on the same thing for hours, but it seems like almost everyone who writes these kind of posts prefers the "maker" schedule.
No, chat is not asynchronous. It's a dialoge, it is synchronous.
If you want people to write "Hello, my problem is xxx" just close your chat box and ask for emails.
Moreover there are studies showing that if people socialize and get to know each other a bit before working together, there are more chances to collaborate and to reduce conflicts.
I endorse the general thrust of this post, however:
Calls can be much more effective than messaging for detecting and handling the XY problem now that users can easily screen share, because you can often see why the user wanted to do X, not just (as in their two lines of text) that they wanted to do X, and you may be able to solve Y and make them happier.
I went through that with a coworker who kept saying hi and quick call. I reckon we are from different continents and with way different cultures so I once entered one of these "quick call" and asked him politely if in the future he could ask his question directly and I would answer when I have time and that would leave me time to check for information if needed. I also asked him if he could put some context when asking for a call so that I can decide to ask him to schedule a meeting some other day or accept it right away depending on my schedule/load.
Once in a while he goes back to his old ways but more often than not he is adding context.
Some people just think you are their personnal stackoverflow / github copilot if you don't put any limit.
I enjoy being able to shoot the breeze with clients etc, and relate to each other. That's not to say I haven't worked for folks that I genuinely winced when they'd ask to jump on a call: it's more a matter of whether the relationship feels adversarial.
This is the best guide to improve anti-social behaviour in remote workers and disrupt teams. Just refuse to answer when people text you "Hello".
Oh, come on...
Am I loosing time waiting for your "hello" back? Well, guess what: maybe I took it into consideration the fact that you're busy, and that I might be waiting for hours, but not answering at all only makes you a jerk.
This is far from politely refusing "quick calls" when busy. And no: you can't be always busy: if you want to keep telling yourself you're working in a team you need to allocate a reasonable amount of time to social interactions.
Do you really expect me to send you a calendar event invitation to have a quick call with you once in a month? To update you about something that might even interest you? Maybe it's not going to be communicated in the most efficient way possible, as would be with an email, but certainly it will be done in a way that would keep us human beings, not mentioning the fact that it would also improve team work.
If you do, please do not expect me to sit next to you if we happen to meet in person, and be happy and friendly.
The best way to interact with people who feel this way is to not play the games. Eventually the isolated individual will be managed out or adapt to a more sensible posture. Best to work around them until then.
My favorite impact that I've had on my organization was the "no agenda, no meeting". It became a meme, minutes before the agenda-less meeting was supposed to take place someone would send it to a meeting chat or email, usually followed with ":)", especially if I were one of the attendees. In the rare cases I forgot to follow my own stubborn rule then it was a whole show, in hindsight, probably should've broken it at least once a quarter along with some penance to really help cement it.
However, I managed to "bully" everyone into following this simple rule because I had some influence in the organization; I was a manager of a large department.
Unfortunately, interns will probably get an eye-roll for such suggestions, even if they reference their superior's rule.
My point is, don't send you colleagues this link, you will come off as rude. You'll get further by e.g. feigning surprise to the lack of agenda, and maybe you get to use that opportunity to spark a conversation about the importance of an agenda. If you're a manager and above, then by all means, use your influence to force it, it will make everyone's job easier in the long run.
Oh, as for the messages that contain only "hello", just ignore them, they will either solve their own problem or quickly jump to the point once they tire of waiting for your equally pointless response. Or just have a chat with your colleagues every once in a while, maybe they genuinely care about you and your cat.
> 1) Cultural norms - This may not work in all environments
If you have the luxury to pick and choose, going to a company where that works is a huge improvement at large.
In my personal experience at least, I've seen no place where the "let me quick call you" is a norm and engineering is also decently respected and paid appropriately.
> 2) You have an issue which requires cross function help. Hard to frame a precise question when you don't know which features are the most significant.
You'll need more investigation either way, I'm not even sure you'll be able to properly decide who should be part of the meeting. The whole "who should I talk to" can be potentially be done better by chat, where you ask a whole group at once who's concerned by your problem and further narrow down as you get pointers.
Messaging a whole channel at once will probably be better accepted than inviting random people at a meeting to realize none of them were concerned.
> You haven't seen places where people say "Hi?", especially in the context of remote work?
The whole bit from the article:
> > You started a conversation by writing "Hi", or "Hello", or even maybe "Good morning Sebastian, I have a question". And then you waited. And waited. And waited for minutes (or hours if I was busy and you were patient) without a single word explaining what problem you were facing.
Yes, I've seen this in places, many places. Most times the person doing it immediately got guidance to stop doing it.
The only place where it persisted was a small shop where the founder and managers would also be doing it, and the technical team was leaking away at a speed I couldn't check for very long, as I was out pretty fast too. That could be one of the most clear sign they don't give a damn about online communication and won't care to adapt.
>...decide who should be part of the meeting
TBH I'm not sure to understand your answer. Of course I'm talking from my own experience, how could I speak for you ? Also, calls are costly, using them to understand who you're actually supposed to call feels wasteful. That can be done completely asynchronously in most cases.
For the chat issues brought up in this silly rant the most effective solution I've found is to create a culture of public chat rooms with your entire team, instead of individual direct messages.
"Quick Call" people are a personality type so they are not going to change.
> You probably received a link to this website because you did one of the common mistakes of working remotely
This is probably a factor behind execs crying "but muh productivity" and scaling WFH back.
These are huge distractions, agreed, but not answering messages like this or responding with _a link to a fucking website telling you how wrong you are_ will never not be perceived as asshole behavior.
A better approach is to _just respond to the message_.
Saying "hey! How can I help?" Takes two seconds to write. Shit, you could probably automate this.
Responding to asks for "quick chats" with "hey; I can't do a quick call right now, but happy to talk when I'm free. Mind scheduling something on my calendar?" is much more respectful and most folks will do just that.
Sorry for the harsh language. This is the kind of incredibly elitist and condescending behavior that make people like Eric Schmidt call us "arrogant" and spend billions of their own money finding a way of getting us out of the way.
I get the sense of this, and it's ok, too draconian. Maybe works for people like you if everybody is like you
But sometimes the question is fuzzy, to me "hey got a minute?" means "I'm about to unload something confusing on you, and I don't want to break your flow state, so let me know when you have a minute to take it"
I'm a tech like the author, and personally I'd prefer not to see all the details up front, because I can't control my flow and I'll start scratching at their problem right away even though I was busy doing something. I'd rather have the sign lit up that says they need help, WITHOUT KNOWING what it is, and then when I'm ready to help them, I'll find out. If it means I need to check on some stuff first, then fine, we'll set a meeting a for it at some point in the future (that's now the agenda), even if it's just "Let me get back to you in an hour about that"
It's also important not to get so caught up in the remote, ivory tower of self-importance of your work/time that you forget maybe interacting with your co-workers is more important than you think, even if it takes up time you'd rather have to do something else. If someone else is paying your salary, your time is probably not THAT important.
I am constantly annoyed by people's poor communication skills, but I find it much more efficient to lead by example and communicated back, sooner rather than be passive aggressive.
No agenda for meeting? Email back or chat in the group channel kindly asking for an agenda, maybe throwing in something useful along with it.
Co-worker sending me one of those "Hiya" type messages, well "Good morning! How are you today?" Sooner or later they get to the point and I schedule a proper meeting about it.
Simultaneously, 1) I am frequently annoyed when dealing with these help-asking, "can we hop on a quick call?", "good morning [name]" interactions and vehemently agree with the author's frustration with them, and 2) their tone is so condescending and rude that I'd rather deal with 1000 of the former interactions than 1 interaction with this individual. I can't imagine linking this post to anyone.
> There is another possibility - you're lazy and selfish, so you don't care how your interruptions affect others because your questions need to be answered right now with minimal effort on your end. But I'm sure that's not the case.
> So, when I answer your "Quick call?" with "What's the problem?", that's really for your own good :wink face:
Please do not ever write sentences like this in a professional context where you are not friends with the recipients, it's terrible.
It sets the tone to "adult to children discussion where I think that I am smarter than you" which is the last thing you want when you try to solve on of your pain point.
One the other hand if you want me to avoid interacting with you as much as I can that would be spot on.
This is great, but I wish there was a shorter and more to the point version for me to link folks to.
Each of the ideas in here is solid, but there's too much writing around the core idea -- a sentence or two for each point and then a tldr like "put in some basic level of effort if you're going to ask for others' valuable time." would do it for me personally.
Normally: no agenda, no need to attend. But since our team is currently small, we have a deliberately agendaless meeting every morning. We talk about anything: somebody's daughter got engage, an upcoming vacation, that gnarly engineering problem that never got resolved yesterday. It's an anti-standup, and it's designed to take the place of those transient "water cooler" convos.
It seems reasonable to me. I tell my reports to decline meeting requests unless the invitations include an agenda and a clear goal.
If you're asking for 30 minutes or an hour of someone's time, it is only common courtesy to tell them why.
If you send someone a message, don't just say "Hi". This is incredibly bad manners in the context of asynchronous communication. Give the recipient an opportunity to prioritize your message. You don't know what they are doing. They could be fire fighting. They could be tied up in a face-to-face conversation. They could be in deep flow. They might have three or four other messages to prioritize alongside yours.
If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.
This is all a matter of being kind and accommodating to your colleagues, enabling them to work with you effectively, and making it easier for them to help you.
Purposefully making your colleagues' lives more difficult is a recipe for an unpleasant working environment.
> If you don't give someone the information to make an appropriate prioritization decision, all you are doing is inducing anxiety.
Disagree here. I used to think the same "why you only sayibg Hi and not what you want", but I realized it doesnt have to be my problem if I dont let it become one.
You said Hi? Expect a Hello from me sometimes during the day. You needed something urgent? "Why didnt you tell me?". A "Hi" isn't urgent, so I know I dont feel the burden of not being able to assign it a correct priority.
A lot of people have trouble recognizing when their teoubles are really other people troubles in disguise.
"I tell my reports to decline meeting requests unless the invitations include an agenda and a clear goal."
We have a team that works this way 100% of the time, assuming the invitation is not coming from higher management.
They are always the last to deliver and the team with the most critical bugs. If you don't make time for back channel sync, you will become an isolated island and your product will eventually suffer.
How so? There is no excuse for sending a meeting invite without an explanation as to what will be discussed or what you hope to achieve. That just results in aimless meetings that either have too many unnecessary attendees or missing people who do need to attend.
When someone asks you to provide an agenda for a meeting, do you really just ignore them?
When you work with complex stuff, there will always be one or two urgent meetings where the caller doesn't have time or the data to set up a proper agenda.
A meeting invite saying "oh shit, all hands on deck" does not need to be due to bad planning. Obviously this should not be the norm, but when it happens you cannot simply instruct your people to ignore it.
I hate to say it, but dealing with high priority incidents with a meeting invite saying "oh shit, all hands on deck" and no further information does not sound healthy. The organisation should have a proper incident response plan in place setting out communication standards and channels.
If someone felt they had a genuine need for an important meeting with an unknown scope, unknown attendee list ("all hands" suggests that they don't know the nature of the issue or whose expertise will be needed in resolving it), unknown objective, and it sits outside of the normal incident management then I would still ask them what on earth the meeting was about. After the fifth time someone asked, and they had to take time explaining it, they might start regretting not giving any kind of context in the meeting invite.
> If you don't make time for back channel sync, you will become an isolated island and your product will eventually suffer.
This doesn't seem to align with your hypothetical example. Of course, for project sync, there should be regular sync meetings, and cross value stream meetings. There should also be design reviews and retrospectives (both regular and ad hoc). It would not be appropriate to schedule any of these without an agenda or scope.
I think what you're missing is that this isn't just this person's preferences. These are things that bother many, many engineers and don't provide any value compared to the alternative.
Good etiquette isn't common sense, and that's why there are books written about it for centuries.
I think the core advice here is excellent and something I frequently think about when I receive requests for help, "can we hop on a quick call?", and "hi [name]" - but it's written extremely condescendingly and obnoxiously. This person seems intolerable to work with or interact with in general.
Meetings without an agenda and a published list of minutes and actions are effectively theft. You're stealing people's time and with that company resources.
However, having said that I've found these kind of "Hi can we chat" meetings are great ways of flagging corporate sociopaths and general losers. They make it their career to schedule as many of these as possible to get out of doing other work.
By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating yourself even more. While it can be distracting to jump on a call while you actually meant to focus on some coding, it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review (yay! asynchronous!).