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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 wa

by rethab 2y ago

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!).

prmoustache 2y ago
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.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  Exactly, providing context in quick call invites can make a big difference, even in a remote setup
- repeekad 2y ago
  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”
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    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.
  - Olreich 2y ago
    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.
soco 2y ago
The post is about requesting context and preferring long lasting traces for a technical interaction. Not about socializing.
ctm92 2y ago
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.
- cdrini 2y ago
  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?
  - repeekad 2y ago
    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
- repeekad 2y ago
  Scheduled social time over zoom is not social time, it’s work prescribed team building If anything these kinds of “meetings” felt like they made the culture on my team worse because they felt so forced and inorganic
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > We do a weekly fixed appointment .. 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.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
A quick call isn't socialising - it's solving someone's problem. It's not ephemeral happenstance, it's a planned interaction. I'm not sure you understand the water cooler moments if you think the 'quick call' is in anyway a replacement.
- seeEllArr 2y ago
  [dead]
LunaSea 2y ago
In my experience forced online water cooler talk has never worked and was always incredibly awkward and boring.
- axitanull 2y ago
  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.
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    Paid work holiday trips or conferences could simulate this missing social element for remote teams. Ironically enough it would be by bringing them back together (but maybe in a more fun way than a regular office).
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    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. This is why the paper (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCytron.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCyt...) has five authors and reads like one written by two different teams :) I think the better argument is that it's not how newer generations seem to collaborate or operate, not that it never worked at all. It definitely did work in the past.
- prepend 2y ago
  Forced is horrible. But consensual is great.
pdimitar 2y ago
lose**, not loose, I really don't get why so many people can't learn a few basic English gotchas.
- maleldil 2y ago
  Second language speakers, careless typos because HN is not that important that you _need_ to check everything…
Gravityloss 2y ago
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?
- cdrini 2y ago
  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. It's become a bit of a meme now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460 Personally I've yet to find a cure :P
- lvncelot 2y ago
  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 https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue)
- liveoneggs 2y ago
  stand during the meeting instead of sitting
  - em-bee 2y ago
    i don't think that helps. 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.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  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.
axitanull 2y ago
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"?
- thyristan 2y ago
  > 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.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    Sorry, PHB?
    - gvurrdon 2y ago
      A manager who behaves like this character: https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > .. 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.
throwawaysleep 2y ago
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.
- PickledJesus 2y ago
  Well, that's honest! But presumably you can see that it's at odds with the interests of the business..
  - axitanull 2y ago
    Having employees unionize is also at odds with the interests of the business.
    - PickledJesus 2y ago
      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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mewpmewp2 2y ago
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.
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  Maybe "flow state" is not the most important thing?
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    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.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      "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.
space_oddity 2y ago
Does it really foster collaboration and innovation?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sensanaty 2y ago
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.
- goralph 2y ago
  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.
  - stevenAthompson 2y ago
    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. Hard to justify the cost/benefit.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  > 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.
Quothling 2y ago
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.
- tankenmate 2y ago
  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.
- bartread 2y ago
  > 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.
Yizahi 2y ago
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.
altacc 2y ago
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...
creesch 2y ago
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/ 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.
quectophoton 2y ago
> 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.
sirolimus 2y ago
Agree, this blog post is primarily for hermitic autists.
whateveracct 2y ago
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)
dijksterhuis 2y ago
I completely disagree. 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”.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
This is ideology masquerading as data.
rumblestrut 2y ago
I am so glad to be in the office. 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.
haliskerbas 2y ago
> 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.
jdhzzz 2y ago
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.
pbrum 2y ago
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
EasyMark 2y ago
Most people don’t mind the occasional “hi” ….. What they hate is 10 an hour.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Counter: when this says 'no', it really means, 'modulate'. Working remotely gives us the ability to have infinite water-coolers any hour of the day. Great power, great responsibility. People take this personally completely forgetting there is a much larger world than theirs.

by rethab 2y ago

prmoustache 2y ago

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.

space_oddity 2y ago
Exactly, providing context in quick call invites can make a big difference, even in a remote setup
repeekad 2y ago
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”
- prmoustache 2y ago
  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.
- Olreich 2y ago
  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.

soco 2y ago

The post is about requesting context and preferring long lasting traces for a technical interaction. Not about socializing.

ctm92 2y ago

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.

cdrini 2y ago
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?
- repeekad 2y ago
  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
repeekad 2y ago
Scheduled social time over zoom is not social time, it’s work prescribed team building If anything these kinds of “meetings” felt like they made the culture on my team worse because they felt so forced and inorganic
RestlessMind 2y ago
> We do a weekly fixed appointment .. 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.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

A quick call isn't socialising - it's solving someone's problem. It's not ephemeral happenstance, it's a planned interaction. I'm not sure you understand the water cooler moments if you think the 'quick call' is in anyway a replacement.

seeEllArr 2y ago
[dead]

LunaSea 2y ago

In my experience forced online water cooler talk has never worked and was always incredibly awkward and boring.

axitanull 2y ago
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.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Paid work holiday trips or conferences could simulate this missing social element for remote teams. Ironically enough it would be by bringing them back together (but maybe in a more fun way than a regular office).
- DannyBee 2y ago
  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. This is why the paper (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCytron.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCyt...) has five authors and reads like one written by two different teams :) I think the better argument is that it's not how newer generations seem to collaborate or operate, not that it never worked at all. It definitely did work in the past.
prepend 2y ago
Forced is horrible. But consensual is great.

pdimitar 2y ago

lose**, not loose, I really don't get why so many people can't learn a few basic English gotchas.

maleldil 2y ago
Second language speakers, careless typos because HN is not that important that you _need_ to check everything…

Gravityloss 2y ago

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?

cdrini 2y ago
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. It's become a bit of a meme now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0rpDY9460 Personally I've yet to find a cure :P
lvncelot 2y ago
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 https://spectrum.ieee.org/zoom-fatigue)
liveoneggs 2y ago
stand during the meeting instead of sitting
- em-bee 2y ago
  i don't think that helps. 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.
makeitdouble 2y ago
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.

axitanull 2y ago

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"?

thyristan 2y ago
> 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.
- dijksterhuis 2y ago
  Sorry, PHB?
  - gvurrdon 2y ago
    A manager who behaves like this character: https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/Pointy-Haired_Boss
RestlessMind 2y ago
> .. 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.

throwawaysleep 2y ago

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.

PickledJesus 2y ago
Well, that's honest! But presumably you can see that it's at odds with the interests of the business..
- axitanull 2y ago
  Having employees unionize is also at odds with the interests of the business.
  - PickledJesus 2y ago
    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.

deleted 2y ago

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mewpmewp2 2y ago

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.

RamblingCTO 2y ago
Maybe "flow state" is not the most important thing?
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  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.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    "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.

space_oddity 2y ago

Does it really foster collaboration and innovation?

deleted 2y ago
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sensanaty 2y ago

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.

goralph 2y ago
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.
- stevenAthompson 2y ago
  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. Hard to justify the cost/benefit.
probably_wrong 2y ago
> 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.

Quothling 2y ago

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.

tankenmate 2y ago
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.
bartread 2y ago
> 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.

Yizahi 2y ago

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.

altacc 2y ago

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...

creesch 2y ago

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/ 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.

quectophoton 2y ago

> 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.

sirolimus 2y ago

Agree, this blog post is primarily for hermitic autists.

whateveracct 2y ago

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)

dijksterhuis 2y ago

I completely disagree. 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”.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

This is ideology masquerading as data.

rumblestrut 2y ago

I am so glad to be in the office. 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.

haliskerbas 2y ago

> 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.

jdhzzz 2y ago

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.

pbrum 2y ago

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

EasyMark 2y ago

Most people don’t mind the occasional “hi” ….. What they hate is 10 an hour.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Counter: when this says 'no', it really means, 'modulate'. Working remotely gives us the ability to have infinite water-coolers any hour of the day. Great power, great responsibility. People take this personally completely forgetting there is a much larger world than theirs.