Comment by auiya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by auiya | Hacker News Reader

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> What was a matter of just getting six people in a war room for a week and getting that hard problem done

As a person who at a previous job was often pulled into said "war rooms", we almost never "got that hard problem done", but we did always make management feel good about not being able to fully solve hard problems. Mostly these "huddle-work" scenarios created more problems (long term) than they solved, because people weren't motivated to solve the problem, they were motivated to leave the war room. I do my best work when I'm not constantly distracted by others, but many managers simply can't understand this and instead hamstring their employees by having "war rooms" and white-boarding sessions and stand-ups and deep-dives and all the other nonsensical ways of preventing people from actually focusing and accomplishing a task. Good riddance to the on-location office and all the hot garbo that comes with it; the rest of us will be quietly humming away, getting tasks done and solving major problems without such managerial hindrances.

There are entire classes of problems where a group of n persons working effectively together will produce a much better solution than 1 single person on an island (where n > 1).

In those situations, white boarding and deep dive are useful activities.

Business owners would absolutely love it if you could just run a complex (high value-add, high margin) business by only getting a bunch of commodity developers just pulling JIRA tickets from a heap, quietly humming away.

Reality is that, collaboration is important and is required in order to create non trivial products, and thus the margin to pay for the “people doing real work”.

I agree collaboration is very important. What's interesting to me though is that very early in my career (pre ubiquitous video conferencing), I worked for a large multi-site corp. Me and another developer were the only developers in the local office, yet somehow we were able to collaborate using phone calls and email to build some pretty cool software with other team members in various offices around the US.

I'm not saying that digital tools are always perfect replacements, but there is a large gradient between a single person on an island and sitting shoulder to shoulder at a fold out table (which I have also done).

This claim is commonly made anecdotally by extroverts, but I've never seen real evidence that it is true.

I'm at least 50% convinced that there is a natural selection where managers are the people who like that stuff but people who stay developers hate it. I totally agree with you, from the moment I step into one of these rooms with my laptop in hand I just want to get out of there and back to my chair, my monitors and time to think things through.

"war rooms" are excellent in three cases:

1) creative brainstorming (ux, ui, branding, early architectural decisions) to ensure everyone can present and validate their ideas, and people are more on board with decisions as they saw democratic backing (or, at the very least, feel that objections they raise were heard!)

2) bringing staff that would normally be spread across multiple buildings and units together - the bigger the org and the more stakeholders involved, the more important a common space for (at least) the leadership team is, especially to cut through red tape and organizational barriers.

3) when you have an immediate problem (outages, GDPR incidents) to solve and secrecy is involved - no need to take care about people not in the loop, seeing stuff they are not supposed to etc.

What "war rooms" often enough end at, unfortunately, is cramped chicken coops. Not enough space, sales/PM people directly sitting and blathering in their phones next to developers, ... for months. That's a farce.

As a cynical take: Often the real purpose of a war room is not to actually solve the problem, but to provide visible evidence of Serious Business™ Happening, even if it's all just performative. A product owner calls a war room to visually show higher-ups that things are happening and people are nebulously doing things and looking very serious while doing them. It's performance art, but it is re-assuring to the people paying the salaries.

Oh, never think that you can get away just because you are remote. Now we just have multi-hour ‘this is a war room’ meetings, where the entire team is trying to get work done while connected to a permanent zoom session.

Arg. Screw that noise. I refuse to join these "co working zoom hours" where everybody is on the same zoom call. Or zoom happy hour. Or any of that. That stuff is dystopian as hell.

Remote work is great if you are a contractor with well defined scope. In fact it is ideal. You can set firm boundries with your client.

But being an employee who isn't just a cog in a machine, remote is rife with pitfalls. You lose connection with the greater company. People you used to work with on other teams. New hires. There is no doubt a huge chunk of people within my own little org that were hired over the last 1.5 years that I don't even know existed. I've lost complete track over the greater org.

Naw. A year from now it's gonna be almost exactly like what it was like in 2019. There is a reason why we didn't do this pre-lockdown and it wasn't just because of "micro managers" or "the suits justifying their work". FAANG companies pour huge amount of "HR marketing dollars" into their office environments. It literally helps them attract new talent.

I really just don't see these "hybrid" things panning out long run. We'll revert right back to 2019 before anybody knows it.

I agree with "war rooms" not being as effective...but whiteboards, standups and deep dives personally can be helpful.

I think the key thing for me is that I never force people to sit in on these.

When an employee starts a large piece of work they don't understand that I feel have some knowledge on. I ask if they would like to whiteboard a solution with me...or deep dive something in the code, or do daily standups just to talk about w/e is on their mind

Doing these remotely is totally fine, but I do feel these activities...or atleast whiteboarding and deep diving is nicer in person for me

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