If you're remote, ramble

> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run".

Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations.

I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings. I think people learnt a lot from following all the internal blogs.

And it still lives on today where we reposted this post!

We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.

I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.

So while the Q&A format is good to have available, I’d discourage creating separate channels around a person. I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.

I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel. That’s the place where all of the relevant people will be relevant and watching and it’s the first place they’ll search in the future.

Fwiw, Marek's technical corner still exists and still gets some activity.

This is also known as "driving your kids to school."

When my schedule allows, I walk my dog with my daughter and pause at her bus stop and meet her friends. Years ago it was a 45 minute walk, round trip, to daycare.

Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never

* pick up Becky from school

* feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today)

* sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am)

* sorry "train canceled"

* will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment

While all these can be completely valid reasons, it's just funny hearing one of these daily. On a side note, I also kinda like my job and am not interested in slacking.

I can also vouch for this. Going to the park near my house to walk for 30 mins is great just for the sake of getting out the house and moving my body when I'm feeling anxious. It does wonders for me. Important part to is that I walk for as little or as long as I want, no guilt or shame, no expectations.

One of the best parts of my day is to put on my straw cowboy hat on, no shirt and walk around the block at around 10am to get some raw sunlight on the body. No phone just walk around.

Yeah... Maybe read the post because this is complete off topic.

“I see you’ve only had 15 rambles this week”

“Isn’t 15 the minimum?”

“Well, yeah, if you just want to do the bare minimum. But look at Todd over there - he has 37 rambles”

“Well if you wanted people to have 37 rambles why wouldn’t you make that the minimum”

> I'm with the other commenters who agree in spirit, but would hate the details in the post

This seems to happen a lot: Someone writes some highly exaggerated career advice that has good intent at the core but turns into overly weird suggestions by the end. They might be trying to be memorable or to make an impact by exaggerating the advice.

Then some people, often juniors, take it literally and start practicing it. They think they’re doing some secret that will make them the best employee. Their coworkers and managers are more confused than impressed and think it’s just a personality quirk.

As a manager I found it helpful to skim Reddit and other sites for semi-viral advice blogs like this. With enough juniors in a company there’s a chance one of them will suddenly start doing the thing written in a shared post like this. Knowing why they’re doing it is a good way to help defuse the behavior (assuming they don’t really benefit but rather do it because they perceive it will look good)

Yeah, I don't like it in "channels" either because it's too random. What I started years ago at a previous company who was using Confluence (yuck, I know), as the knowledge base was to have a "Personal Space" where I created internal blog posts. I still do it at my new place using their tools. What I do is more "bloggy" and than "rambly".

When I'm considering a refactor, I write up my thoughts in English (which often helps clarify things rather than focusing in code at first). And then I point the rest of my team, to the post and say something like, "I'm going to tackle this next Wednesday, let me know if you see anything wrong with the approach". People who care and have options can chime in, if they're too busy they can ignore it. But everyone is given the chance to comment.

But where I find the real value is when I'm working on a new algorithm or analysis approach. Our internal blog software natively supports LaTeX math blocks (like GFM), so I can write out my algorithm ideas using formal math notation. I've pre-found a bug or bad idea many times just by translating my English into LaTeX. I actually find the expression of those ideas in a blog post the key tool to solidify ideas before I code them.

I'm under no illusions that most of the team even reads what I write, but the work of formalizing it for semi-public consumption really clarifies my thoughts and keeps me from spinning too much while I'm actually writing the code.

These aren't super formal academic quality publications, more like semi-formal ramblings, but I think the difference between hitting "publish" vs just typing in a channel slows me down enough to really think through things - and those who do end up reading them are reading slightly more thought out idea than a stream-of-consciousness rambling which means they'll get more out of it too.

I think the pos tog having a designated spot is to remove friction. Otherwise you can gummed up trying to decide where to post: “is this worth bothering the team? Maybe I should just message my friend? Or should I just bring it up in the next standup? Or maybe the retro…”

> Assigned channels where you are expected to post your random thoughts feels utterly dystopian to me.

I agree that if it becomes a top-down expectation or a performance metric it would be terrible. The practice at Obsidian was emergent and bottom-up. Maybe that's because of the small team size and flat structure. Also why the article states "They should be muted by default, with no expectation that anyone else will read them."

Agreed, it’s one of those things that works well if it happens organically but not as a policy. I’ve got a personal wiki at work where I dump a bunch of useful stuff, it has helped people and attracted attention which is nice. I think the easiest solution is to have longer-form team meetings once a week.

> The last thing we need is a formal framework of how to have organic discussions.

this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working

computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)

Nothing in this post suggests any kind of expectation, mandate, or obligation to post anything in any kind of channel.

The problem that this post is trying to address, is that these kinds of informal rambling channels -- which have enormous value -- almost never happen organically.

I’ve never used such rambling channel, but I “ramble” quite a lot. For me, the chore is not ramblings, but scheduled meetings. On my dailies, no new information is created, and basically I just repeat things which are known already by interested parties. I never wait for meetings to say things. I would just loose time.

Also, during informal random meetings, scrum masters don’t kill spark of great ideas by saying “we should discuss these elsewhere”. It happened numerous times.

Although it really depends on the team's maturity to acknowledge that they are missing social interaction in the first place.

I'd also argue that "scheduled meetings" doesn’t translate to "water cooler talk" automatically. So even if you'd have regular scheduled meetings, you might still crave for some socializing.

We schedule a 2x a week 15-30 minute no-project-talk socialization meeting for our fully distributed team. It helps a LOT. We also have dedicated rambling channels in slack, active much of the day.

I have worked for remote companies since covid and even though we have daily meetings, a dedicated space for ramblings actually sounds like a cool idea. We usually try to keep our meetings strictly on-topic.

> Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings,

.. And because we spend 30-50% of our day in meetings, some person is always saying "take this offline" or "we'll circle back later".

I always ask the "dumb" questions, even when I already know the answer, because there are always people too intimidated to speak up, and it sometimes facilitates a deeper discussion.

This is true because it has happened to me. I was at a place where there was a very ingrained hierarchy in the culture where people were afraid to ask questions in public (slack), to discuss problems and solutions, because the "leaders" were so thin-skinned, doing anything outside of being ticket-solving machines was seen as wholly objectionable.

I got tired of the abject fear that some of those idiots were stoking so I took it upon myself to set the example for the more junior people and started rambling and asking questions and doing the things that the "leaders" obviously didn't like. You can imagine how that went as I got a bit more bold week after week... I've never been more relieved, and proud, to be canned.

Happened at an ex-employer's where they were prying on people's chats, emails, whatever accounts they were logged into while connected to their network without them knowing, and using what they found for office politics. From what I found and had confirmed from someone in IT, at a minimum at least one manager was using mitm software, IT had sslstrip on network traffic (I know there's a real security use for it but they also used it to pry), managers requested IT to let them read other people's emails, and managers had logs of chats (not sure if that was feature for admins/paid subscribers). Also happened at a well known company someone I know worked at, where they monitored and fired people over what they wrote in chats.

Careful with what you type if they're paying for the software, devices, and/or your traffic is routed through their network.

> The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.

The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.

I love using the unreads thing in slack while I'm brushing my teeth or waiting for my tea maker to finish. Tinder for work spam. Everything is processed as quickly as possible, into either "to-do" or "done/ignore"

Do you really pursue "inbox zero" on slack? That sounds like a full-time job in itself.

Slack isn't really an organized way to do organizational knowledge or communication.

At best it can be temporary or short term messaging and there's probably something missing between slack and email that needs to exist in the world.

I'm not a notification or interruption driven individual, and it shows in my productivity. Having a place to put things or share things, can be helpful.

> "threads" makes this extremely manageable.

Strongly agree. This is what threads in the project channel are for.

Creating excessive channels for everything gets out of hand quickly. It’s a habit you see from people who worked at small companies before threads were available on discussion platforms.

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“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit

In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.

We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.

Yeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams

That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?

Thank you for having the guts to leave this comment and not pretend like people are always perfect and optimistic.

I think that's precisely why the ramblings should be a separate channel apart from all the emails and more serious communication, but I have some thoughts why this still might not work.

I used to be guilty of leaving walls of text in our "random" channel, and we weren't even remote back then. My reasons weren't entirely irrational. Most of the time I felt like I wasn't taken seriously because of the way the business was run and it was the only chance I had to speak "out of turn". These workplaces that encourage a lack of boundaries are usually small startups that hire inexperienced people. Ultimately whatever anyone said was used to manipulate them or for the rotten parts of middle management to "steal" ideas.

I'm not a fan of this concept either and I think it's easily abused by all.

I think they meant each person has a public channel of their own.

There's a distinction between random (probably not for work, 'water cooler chat') and 'obviously divisive' topics like politics. Particularly in the US, those are the sort of things you avoid.