Item — HN Reader

by LazyMans·3y ago·view on hn ↗

Something I heard from a large company in Atlanta. Productivity didn't drop off a ton, but innovation did. People are effectively in silos at home and they couldn't figure out a way to recreate the collaborative effect that was seen when you have a bunch of loosely affiliated engineering teams working in close proximity with each other.

I'm not saying you can't get close to similar levels of collaboration remotely, but it's hard and it requires thought.

The biggest thing I was always pushing for was use of public channels in slack. If you silo all your questions in direct chats, you never get that "I overheard you talking about x" effect. Some companies just don't get it.

For Amazon, they have company offices all over the world. For many projects, there's a good chance you may need to work with people from several other offices, and may need to take early morning meetings to overlap with people from Dublin, as well as late night meetings to overlap with people from Sydney or Tokyo, and everything in between.

So, those meetings are going to be on Chime. Or Slack Huddles. And either way, once you're doing that because some of the people are remote (in another office), you might as well do that because people are remote (working from home, wherever home might be).