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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations.

And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.

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Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper. Remote first companies do this all the time. Employees feel way better about it if the company provides hotel and accommodations when doing destination meet ups.

> Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper

I am a fan of hybrid (people can choose whether or not they're in the office).

However, you want to be able to collaborate effectively at any time and not have to wait for quarterly gatherings. I've got complex problems to solve together with my team mates!

Hybrid usually means office is required every week. It’s terrible

Exactly, that's basically "not remote most of the time"

I haven’t found in-person meetups to be that useful. In my experience they only really started happening in late 2021/early 2022 due to the pandemic, and since then they’ve been severely curtailed due to the market downturn. So when you do meet up it’s more about finally seeing people in person, team building, and restating your team’s goals and mission. Any brainstorming I’ve seen happens in over-long sessions with 30+ people in attendance, where a ton of ideas are generated but there’s no actual momentum once everyone gets on the plane back home. The real collaboration happens in the interstitial times- lunch, breaks, and so on. Which again points to the importance of having at least part of the team co-located.

Full disclosure, this is at a company that is hybrid and not remote-first. But I’ve seen the pattern repeated enough times across various teams that I don’t think my experience is unique. And I say this as someone who personally prefers to work remotely- I’m just not unaware of what’s lost in that environment.

We used to do this in a startup I worked at. Was a lot cheaper to book a big AirBnB for the meet-ups than to have a fixed office space. And we could pick interesting meet-up locations.

> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need.

This is not the dichotomy you make it look. There are lots of other tasks to do, and for those I personally would often go in a cafeteria or public space, since I didn't mind the distractions -- reading code, doing code reviews, reading docs, writing docs, responding to emails. "Coding" was a relatively small part of my day as a SWE at [FAANG].

The problem is just that there are some people who are able to concentrate while lots of other people are having lots of non-related conversations around them in a cafeteria (sounds like this might be you), while others can't. And the latter will prefer home office to a cafeteria or even to the usual open-plan office...

I find debugging to be easier when everyone has their own machine. You can screen share the primary person's screen but then have others try out little things and do exploration on the side. And I'm far better with my desktop setup than I would be on a laptop that might not even have a mouse.

> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming.

Really? what does it bring that you can't do remotely? I can hardly think of a problem where "being in the same room" is a requirement to have a productive discussion

I'm pro work from anywhere so long as shit gets done but...

Picking up on social cues. Bouncing ideas around using a whiteboard. Speaking quickly without that ever so slight lag on Zoom which means you struggle to get a word in without potentially talking over somebody. Having food or drinks before or afterwards to unwind and build relationships and kick things around informally.

There's lots more.

Maybe it's just me but I don't really want to think about work outside of working hours, much less hang out or 'unwind' with my coworkers before or after work.

Nobody said it was outside of working hours.

you just said food or drinks before or afterwards. people don't have food in the middle of the day after a meeting.

The differences with in person are that conversations have a much higher fidelity. There can be spontaneous multiple conversations going in the same room which is impossible virtually without spinning up another videoconf session, people leaving, people re-joining, etc. So it really is much better for brainstorming and doing the “figure things out” mode of software engineering. Once you’ve figured things out, the implementation can be dome remotely.

Sharing meals during this time together also helps build relationships and trust within a team. I mean as you work, or even offsite at a restaurant - go out to breakfast or lunch during the work day.

> Having food or drinks before or afterwards

That's not work. That should NEVER be part of work, even.

You sound joyful to work with.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

Also, please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

+1 every time we have these in-person sprints they are dominated by the managerial types trying to make the engineers and designers engage in trite 'activities' they read about online or in some book. And even when the result of the sprint is one poorly thought out doomed to fail concept, the managerial types parade around their ability to run a sprint, the outcome of the thing not really relevant at that point.

It's not a requirement, but it helps a lot. The biggest factor might be latency, which makes it much harder to informally coordinate multiple people talking without speaking over each other.

Gee, I wonder how people worked before we had Zoom calls and we were all working in different locations across the country. Either people were really smart before, or we have become really dumb now.

All in the room works for reviewing ideas, not creating them.

Even for that I feel like asynchronous works better. You often get stuck on someone’s pet peeve and waste an hour when on something like a Google doc you can have 30 different threads for comments concurrently

Good point. The 20th century is over and the networks and iron are amazing.

Iron?

Iron = computers/computing gear. See Big Iron for mainframes. Sorry, I'm old.

I understood what you meant, but I'm also old.

>It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming.

Hasn't every study on brainstorming found that it's not a good way to generate good ideas? With having people breathing the same air in a small space believed to be a contributing factor to that.

Yeah high CO2 concentration is probably making people less sharp, but mostly I've heard it's about people being less creative due to consensus-driven thinking

Per https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1194301106584616960:

> People in groups self-censor and anchor on each others ideas, reducing creativity.

Also can be anti-inclusive when "anchor on each other idea" is a euphemism for that guy repeating what a more shy person said, but louder, stealing credit.

With remote, usually comes a more doc-driven culture, where someone's original idea can be easier to identify and make sure they get credit.

Lots of people are too shy or anxious to break perceived consensus or even just to challenge a "stronger" personality in person. Put them in a chat room and they get all fired up.

And in dysfunctional workplaces, breaking consensus can put your job in jeopardy.

I have a hunch that the sort of mental incapacity that comes on with higher CO2 levels lends itself to group-think, so it's a combinatorial problem. I think you'd still get the same problems outside, I just think they're more pronounced in a stuffy meeting room.

Yes. Brainstorming is better done by

1. Brainstorming questions, not ideas (then go answer them)

2. Soliciting responses anonymously and quietly. This avoids both hierarchical biases and "Loudest person wins" bias. And not to excessively disparage verbal processors (I am one myself). But it's important for them to realize that the constant talking can drown out others' thinking, or their sharing, or their will to live.

I’ve experienced recently people thinking they were doing some creative brainstorming and being productive by being in person collaborating in a big room, but the output ends up being basically the same solution or idea that was created using remote collaboration. And of course everyone’s exhausted at the end after a week of “collaborating” for 8-10 hours a day. It seems like it was mostly theatre.

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