I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.
In contrast, when I worked in office, I found these fabled “lunches with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team” didn’t ever happen. A lot of the mythical spontaneous collaboration that supposedly happens in office seems to be just that: a myth. At least for many.
I think only a few people manage to build such a network inside a company. But those are usually the successful ones, because they know much more than others.
It's not super hard. You just have to listen to when people are asking for things, try to help and read an org chart.
90% of the engineers I've worked with in bigger companies wouldn't know how to find someone in the company outside of their direct reporting structure.
Honestly it's pathetic. The rest of the organization can't work like that and these are table stakes social skills IMO.
I seriously think the "headphones on, get into flow" trope is the most damaging meme in our industry. Management also takes huge advantage of the low-information environment that engineers seem comfortable in. Most of them don't even (really) know what our product is or how it's sold and marketed.
For most people it's hard, especially for the stereotypical "IT nerds".
I think the best tip for people who have a hard time is: Watch who of your colleagues know "everyone" and spend as much time as possible with them. If they ask you to go for lunch together, always join. If you can work on a project with them, do it. They will casually introduce you to all the people over time, and might just tell you the newest company gossip.
I'm closing out 3 decades+ around the "IT nerds" and if anything they spend _more_ time socializing than "normies". The difference is typically that their socializing tends to specialize around fandoms/activities instead of generalist/community things like civics, sports and family.
Not to be overly harsh but the problem is with seeing those who don't share their interests as people equally worthy of attention. IT nerds typically have trouble meeting people where they're at instead of the other way around. And most of the time it's because they've never made any effort to do so.
That's why I say it's not super hard.
It's also becoming more of a societal problem in general as younger people spend more and more time isolated and socializing in bubbles. I think it's a serious and growing problem that people don't have friendships outside of their immediate peer group age-wise.
My brother's kid is in her early 20s and her and most of her friends don't see people at 30+ as people. They don't value their opinions and it has all sorts of negative effects on their lives like they struggle to obtain/keep jobs, etc. That's not a blanket generalization though -- we have some team members in that age-range and they're great.
They happen all the time for me at small to medium companies. If the legal team is two people whose desks are by the door, then you are going to eat lunch together at some point. It would be weird not to! Just wait until someone says "anyone want a coffee?" or "who brought lunch?" and then stand up.
Obviously this doesn't happen when the legal team is located three buildings away. At that point you might as well be remote from the perspective of collaboration.
I think they say that the knowledge transfer did not happen during that. You don't want to bring work to people who are trying to take a break from it.
If you want to talk about work in any depth then you have to formalise it, yeah. The sales team might tell you they're frustrated by their process at lunch, but they're not going to sit down and explain the whole thing.
I've found the benefit of lunches together is that you get familiar with everyone, and they with you. There's more of an assumption of good will and competence between people who know each other.
Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.
In a large company you aren’t going to be in the same country let alone kitchen. Ok can eavesdrop on conversations across our slack channels no matter where they occur, in person I’d be limited to the small subset of people I sit near.
Plenty of places are sub-optimal in organization (or some other aspect)… while still being functional and successful.
Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.
Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "steer the entire ship".
Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.
The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.
Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.
Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.
My first programming job, I had a private office to myself. It was amazing. I close the door, I’m left alone. I leave it open, people stop and talk and I walk and talk to them if their door is open. Was incredible. Never had anything like it since.
Yep, this was the Microsoft Way for a long time. It is the best. I just visited their huge new campus and it's a bunch of open "pods" and "focus rooms". Blech.
They did retain the MS tradition of an incredibly confusing floor plan. We used to say the last interview question is "can you find your way back to the lobby?"
The best office layout I've had was Infinite Loop at Apple. Private offices with lots of little open discussion spaces -- exactly the opposite of today's open offices with lots of little private discussion spaces! Perhaps shows how the job of the people signing the checks for the office differs from the job of the people working in the office...
That does sound kind of ideal, easy to signal when available, easy to turn off the rest of the world when needed, hopefully I'd get to experience that too someday :) Maybe we need companies to go back to this model? And also have long hallways, where people can bump into each other and (optionally) chime in on each other’s problems. We could call it Chime Labs.
Because often it happens so randomly. Sometimes it takes two people to be on a natural break at the same time, hungry at the same time, or just how two people got on at a meeting.
I absolutely agree with this point. I fit in as an interdepartmental communicator for engineering and while it took time to accumulate the deficit of gossip[1] since we had a very solid understanding of the system at the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually the gap of understanding from that casual interdepartmental communication became too wide, however, so now I take active steps to have check-ins with people on different teams to make sure we've got a good comprehension of where our shortfalls actually are. Probably owing to my own negligence, I've been burned a few times now by being told by executive that X is really critical only to find out that no one outside that executive actually cares about it. There is a lot of "wasted" office time chatting and being friendly, when you go full remote you, or someone on your behalf, needs to keep some of that chatter going to make sure there's still an understanding of where the product shortfalls are.
1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.
lol. Apparently folks where I work don’t ever talk at lunch. I work remotely, and over the course of about 20 meetings I discovered that what everyone “knew” was wrong because none of them talked to each other and each assumed they knew how it worked. Each person knew their own piece and had an incorrect idea of everyone else’s. There were twenty different systems in twenty different heads. These people all shared an office and lunch space. I work remotely.
Any large scale engineering product where “who you’ve talked to” is how things “get done” is going to fail.
Really you are just outing yourself as a member of the political class: someone who believes feelings and opinions matter to the behavior of CPUs.
This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related.
Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.
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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.
dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.
> The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team"
The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.
I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.
I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.
I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.
My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.
If this knowledge is genuinely valuable, it should be transferred deliberately rather than by chance. If part of your job requires understanding what the accounts team does, you should spend time shadowing them and getting proper context, not rely on overhearing conversations at lunch.
The argument that important knowledge is best acquired through incidental office interactions sounds more like nostalgia for office culture than an effective approach to knowledge sharing.
