Ask HN: Do you have inspiring spontaneous conversations while remote working?

Did you see this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24665472

For me, the spontaneous conversations were always a bit of an annoyance in the office. They seemed to detract from work rather than adding value. This will probably vary from sector to sector - in my sector (finance), I found the adhoc conversations were a distraction, and often ended up on obscure tangents that were rarely useful.

Get used to async chatting in the general channel... in text. That will solve your problem.

Our Friday stand-up is pretty much an opportunity to share a song from a year and why it's meaningful to you personally. The idea was suggested by our scrum master last June and it has gone down well. It's been good for maintaining the bonds while remote working and also learn a bit more about colleagues.

That and having an understanding that everyone has ups and downs especially as we will face into winter and the uncertainty around what that means. In an odd way I've learned more about the team than I would have if we were in the office.

We never had those where I work anyways.

I responded with a no, then deleted because in fact the count of I spiring conversations didn't go down that much. It's the smalltalk and politics and jokes that is not there anymore.

I do remote gamedev with an artist friend. This type of conversation really only happens during long calls. Usually I'd call to discuss a problem and when that's done, we usually stick around some more to chat about random stuff, bounce jokes around until we somehow stumble upon cool ideas.

I think what makes it work is that since we just finished straining our brains to solve a problem, the relaxed post-discussion time helps refresh the brain and allows for fresh ideas to subconsciously come in.

Yes. But only with the people I already had these kinds of conversations before. It's also important to note that the quantity and quality of those moments have decreased. The reason being you are not sharing as much time a day with them as before.

Not really right now. Usually(before covid) we have off-sites where all remote devs spend time together - it was the best time for new ideas.

I've always worked remotely and it has always been the case. We always have random conversation out of nowhere.

Interestingly enough, I find were having more of these conversations working remotely than we did in the office. I think part of it is that using MS Teams other people are a lot more accessible, just drop into the chat and leave a message. If they are busy no probs, if they aren't then they will reply and we talk about whatever. Sick of typing, drop into a voice or video chat. Want to talk work, then it's easy to share a screen. A lot easier than looking at a screen over somebodies shoulder.

Whilst I do miss going out for a coffee or some such, I'm finding that I'm actually enjoying the social side of working remotely a lot more than the forced socialisation that was occurring physically in the office.

I was sharing an office with my co-worker; we work together on the same topic and that was ok. But interesting conversations? Not happening at all. In the end, we're no friends or no particularly good team. Moving to remote work allows us to cut that bullshit quite effectively.

I'm now working remotely, but sharing an office together with friends (we're hanging out together anyways, so still makes sense in terms of isolating). We have lots of conversations, help each other and give spontaneous lightning talks on how to use $tool better.

I think having people around you is important, people that encourage and help you develop yourself.

No.

We tried having daily "tea break" calls and weekly "Friday drinks" calls, but attendance was so low that we just cancelled them.

Amongst people who were already friendly we still have private group chats in our work Slack, but the number of conversations is obviously far lower than when you're all in the kitchen making breakfast or tea in the morning.

We had a conversation about why the daily and weekly open conversation calls weren't working, and the resounding answer was they they felt like enforced fun. It's just not the same as meeting someone in a corridor or on a smoke break or in the kitchen.

> 1. Do you miss these conversations?

I worked as a contractor in the office and never really thought about it. Like I had conversations with people in the break roomwhere they know me maybe because they see me talking to my boss but I don't know who they are or what they do. Or I overhear people talking about their work and I got to catch a glimpse of what they do (I wrote internal web applications they used so this was useful information to me).

I'll never admit this, of course. I don't like being in the office. I'd rather work from home forever. I think all I'm missing is a decent fiber gigabit (symmetric up and down) connection (for me and everyone else) and I should be good.

I think I have as many conversations like that over slack (in text) and during standups/planning (video call) as I had in ${job-1} in the office. Don't miss them really.

Different things work for different people. Always-available group video call works for some for example. Don't expect any universally-right solutions though since they depends on the people. Some won't be interested and that's fine. They would probably skip an in-person conversation too.

In my team my personal Zoom room has become a communal channel. Somebody would join my Zoom at ~8:30am and it keeps going until about ~5:30pm everyday. People are free to come and go as they wish, people from other teams join, when people come looking for us they come into the Zoom call etc. This includes other people from other teams from different countries. If things do get private/technical/disturbing we just go into breakout rooms. When I finally get online at 9am or so there are usually four or five people already in there.

So to answer the questions: I don't miss them because I didn't lose them, and it has worked great -- our team is the highest performing one with the least amount of cabin fever. The reason why it's successful is because it isn't management-driven "mandatory talk time." It's just a bunch of people hanging out.

I've not been having these conversations since covid, and yes I miss them a lot. I prefer to flesh out ideas by kicking them around with others, and this is has suffered significantly. I've noticed a real lack of engagement in online communication at work, by others and by me. Personally, I'm bored of online communication having used email since the 90s and seeing it degrade into an ad-hoc workflow mismanagement tool. I suspect others are weary of opening their emails in the morning, too. The surge in online communication due to covid actually makes me more weary, and the dwindling engagement I see in Zoom, Teams etc suggests to me a similar creeping dissatisfaction. When it's feasible, I plan to ditch email other than transactional necessities, and conduct all work interaction by phone or in person. Webcam feels unnatural to me, it's more like being on show than being in a conversation.

My intuition tells me you'll get quite different answers from different people, especially introverts vs extroverts.

The Linux kernel and most other open source projects have primarily been built by fully remote teams. But every few days there’s a thread full of people wringing their hands about how there’s no way to do spontaneous, creative, collaborative work remotely.

1. I think there is a shift - whereas formerly you had these conversations more with people you were physically around, but on less occasions, you can have them now with everybody and anytime. However, there are some prerequisites, imo mainly around communication style, predisposition or culture. I think the essence is that both parties are able to figure things between the lines written and empathise a lot despite the restricted medium.

2. using video chat often helps. once I had a longer video conversation with somebody to get to know each other it is much easier to go ahead thinking about things only in a few chat lines. mostly it helps also to be informal with language and plain with concepts in chats

Not exactly what you are thinking of but inextricably linked: My company went through a phase of instability a few years ago. A friend introduced me to a very senior IC about a technical problem based on a hallway conversation. in our informal meeting, the IC began to question the value of my project. shortly after, my manager (who always had total visibility into my project), reassigned me.

Maybe this is a creative destruction success story, but the informal nature of all these discussions prevented me from having the chance to gather and present information on my work.

Additionally, when layoffs started a bit later, every single "How is it going?" felt like it could end up tipping the scales, which made every trip to the bathroom a stressful gauntlet

We are a fairly small team but yeah we still have those sorts of conversations.

On a Tuesday morning we have a get together for the whole team, we have a chat about the current issues we're having and what we've been working on. Normally goes on for about 90 minutes and this seems to keep us generally on the same page. This is our only real 'scheduled' meeting, other ad-hoc ones can happen but its not all that often.

Beyond that we rely on slack. We have a channel for things we want to celebrate, where we can all share on the wins. We also have department specific channels for general updates on things others should probably know for that topic. Sales, Marketing, Engineering, etc. We try to keep the general chit chat out of those so there isnt too much noise. If something goes back and forth a bunch of times we just start a zoom chat and people who want to jump in will do.

Then we have the smaller group DMs that are just the people we'd normally chit chat with as the day goes on. As long as you get your notifications set right so its not bing bong-ing all day then it can be nice to chat sh*t with each other sporadically throughout the day.

1. No, I don't miss them. Quite the opposite: Having to handle people who constantly felt the need to provide "feedback" and "input" used to be a big distraction, which is now more manageable due to the slightly higher threshold for initiating communication. The ones who seem to miss these "spontaneous conversations" the most is management, who seem to have been told that we should be made to have them. As for the more enjoyable conversations, they may be less spontaneous now, but remote collaboration tools ensure that they're still possible.

At the office, we usually had such spontaneous conversations around lunchtime, and they were sometimes work-related and sometimes not.

2. From time to time. When I want to talk to someone, I use one of our remote communication tools to have a text chat with them. Some prefer to use a voice chat or telephone call instead. Either way works fine.

Most of the good spontaneous conversations I've had at work were previously on Slack anyway, for a couple of reasons:

- You're not interrupting someone / taking up their whole time. If you have a thought, they can wait until they're free to reply, and if you're both free at the same time you can have a good conversation. But you were still able to write out and communicate the thought.

- More people can join and provide input. I can always talk about things with a couple folks on my team, but it's super valuable to have someone from another part of the company pipe up and say "Hey, what about this" without having to consciously think of inviting them (and interrupting them, see the above point - the way to do this in person is to have extremely large "user group" meetings that are low value for their opportunity cost for most of the attendees).

- I can easily find people in other parts of the company / work across teams because teams tend to be in physically separate locations. It's super easy for me to run something past someone who works in the other building; it would take about 10 minutes of my time total to go there and back, and then I'd have to hope they're at their desk.

- This is something of a mixed blessing, but conversations are logged, so you can reference them later. To the example you give about chatting about things after a conference, I tend to write up what I've learned or ideas I've followed on and put them into Slack pretty quickly, with the expectation that we'll have a conversation about them at some later point but not immediately.

What I've been trying to do is to expand all of this and drive even more conversations to Slack. (To be clear: have the conversations in existing public channels, not in DMs, and avoid tagging people in. Also, do not expect people to read any particular conversation. Slack has a pretty good search feature, so if they ask about something later, link them to the previous discussion. I'm not at all advocating that you take up people's time with pings on Slack.) We do also have occasional video calls for higher-bandwidth conversations, but I've found they work best when they're structured as accelerators to an async written conversation and not as discussion forums in their own right.