I appreciate any effort to increase social cohesion in remote teams, but intermingling it with one of the main stressors of my work environment—keeping up with team communication—isn’t the right way IMHO.
The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.
Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".
As in, take time in your day to wander and roam. (I would go for a ~1hr hike in the mornings as my “commute”)
It gives you a sense of distinction from being home or “at work”. The routine cardio, and musings you have while walking make it well worth it.
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.
* 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.
However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+
Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.
That's one reason people feel like they have to keep hiding it and it builds up to burnout.
This is the fundamental difference between what a healthy remote-first company starts to look like versus the soulless version historically in-person companies try to sell.
To the author, thank you for sharing your version of the dynamics.
This is the difference. Most teams have scheduled daily (!) meetings, so such rambling channels often times feel more like another chore and therefore fail because they haven't emerged of a natural need from the team.
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.
As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
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.
.. 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".
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
isnky -> is my Inam -> I am In -> I?
Funnily, the first two autocorrected when I typed then in and I genuinely didn't know what isnky was supposed to mean.
On topic though, if no one else can read it it's like writing in your own local notes files.
While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.
As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.
Team chat is for the project.
A single rambling channel sounds like a good idea though.
http://www.jacobelder.com/2025/02/25/habits-and-tools-effect...
I'm trying hard to understand why it has to be a personal channel. Water coolers aren't personal, that's the whole point.
In particular you're still adjusting what you write to be OK for anyone in your team read, so the distinction with the other "casual" channels sounds thin.
OTOH if your team doesn't have a casual place to say random stuff, it would be a nice improvement to get one.
It might not help in all situations, but I see some people threading their posts to avoid that effect and somewhat keep a context to their thoughts if someone wants to jump in.
As a result 1:1s tend to work much better technically for socializing, but it of course doesn't bring the group vibe.
The idea in the article sounds really nice! Unfortunately does not really scale to larger companies than maybe 5-10 people.
We also tried scheduled casual talks with the whole team, but didn't have more success than you.
I think the closest we get was the small talk before meetings start, but as we're starting to get auto-transcript for all our meetings that also became very bland.
When doing deep work in some problem domain, often I find the brain starts to drop these highly ephemeral fragments of ideas (that are sometimes downright ingenious). Caveat is they often only come once, and then they're gone if you don't grab them.
I often keep an envelope or scrap paper next to my desk where I write down any idea I have, whether it's "I should fix this" or "what if I did that", really no matter how small I try to put it to paper.
What usually ends up happening is I somehow end up with a fairly concrete todo list of easy improvements.
I'd imagine this is highly team dependent. I'd personally love if my company adopted this. I think only one other team member would actually participate though. We're far too busy.
Like, if the ceo said something very stupid in the last All Hands, well, you use the ramble channel to talk about it. Sometimes this works (you feel like you’re not the only one that thinks X), but it could easily go south.
I’ve seen this dynamic too: once people start venting, the channel can spiral. I sometimes wonder how to steer that energy into something constructive. Maybe it helps to let people express uncertainty or frustration before decisions are final, and to respond with context before things snowball.
It’s tricky, because most coworkers only overlap on the job itself, they might not share much else in common. so their “bonding” can easily turn into shared complaining.
Curious if anyone has found ways to keep that from going south without shutting people down completely.
Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool
These micro‑interactions gave valuable context: which teams were under pressure, where things might be stuck, and sometimes where a quick helping hand was needed.
When we went remote, we tried to recreate this with a single global “coffee chat” channel. It worked for a while, but quickly became noisy.
I really like your idea of having one ramblings channel per person instead. It feels like a cleaner way to keep that background awareness and human connection alive without overwhelming everyone. We’re going to try this next.
I suppose you could do something similar with local sub-org/2-pizza team, but bit of a different vibe, and then if there is a #topic channel would your thought on topic go in #topic or #ramble-name?
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.
> - ideas related to current projects
> - musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback
> - “what if” suggestions
> - photos from recent trips or hobbies
> - rubber ducking a problem
Work-related and private topics should be separated, IMO. Some might be interested in the former but not the latter, and also might be interested in them at different times (of the day/week). There’s also the formal/legal aspect that the work-related topics can count as work time whereas the private ones doesn’t.
All of these people are salaried, why does it matter?
My point is that channels should be set up such that it’s well-defined whether they are work-related or not.
So when you're at the office, you never have a chat about a non-work topic at the coffee maker?
Besides, multi-tasking exists: sometimes I need to let my brain idle on another topic for 15 minutes, because I'm working through something complex, or just wrapped up a project and have a meeting.
Certainly, nowhere I've ever worked has tried enforcing anything like this. I've had plenty of co-workers who made a point of wandering over to socialize for 5-10 minutes every day, which must have easily added up to an hour a day - but they were also the expert that knew exactly where everyone was and who needed to coordinate with who.
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
Yet here goes my rant. Nothing can replace a good in-person interaction. Perhaps I'm the old guy in the room. When teams are trying to build something there is nothing like water-cooler talk and banter about the work that helps relate shared challenges. Granted this is going to very specific to organizational needs.
I don't work in software development so perhaps my needs are different than most on Hackernews. I've managed teams in person and remotely. I've found that managing in person is a much more productive way to work.
It can be intimidating to join in when you’re new though. You got to lurk for a while to read the room a bit and learn the culture.
Pick a channel grouping that makes sense (by-team/by-project/by-manager) and Just Start Typing. Busy channels are alive and will create their own culture organically. Freely mix in work talk with pictures of cool stuff you found while walking the dog. "threads" makes this extremely manageable.
PS. between the two Mastodon will be better, you can fully disable all federation and even have SSO! + setting up a private Bluesky is quite a bit harder
I think this whole "we are all a family" trope that companies push has pretty much been seen through by remote workers.
High performers usually have their own thing going on outside of work and don't need the workplace for socializing.
_Algernon_•2h ago
Edit: I may be falsely blaming the contrast, but something about the design is causing me eye strain. Im not sure what. Here is a screenshot how the site looks to me: https://imgur.com/a/LNVCMRc Maybe someone else can figure it out.
MrGilbert•2h ago
_Algernon_•2h ago
Maybe its the font or something else? Something about the design is causing eye strain at least.
MrGilbert•2h ago
bapak•2h ago
mavamaarten•2h ago
baobun•2h ago
The page has a (JS-dependent) light-mode/dark-mode switch. It defaults to "light". Meanwhile a browser configured to default to dark theming will only partly apply the themed parts (the pages own function being stuck in light), resulting in an objectively unreadable black-on-dark-gray.
Even enabling JS, the button in the upper right corner still has to be clicked to make it readable.
shakna•2h ago