Comment by gitremote

> Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

You've outed yourself as a young person here, because young people have this social fear of messaging senior engineers. Messaging at work doesn't need to be synchronous like in personal communication. Messaging at work matures into optional asynchronous communication for efficiency. See the No Hello (https://nohello.net) protocol.

There is actually a lower bar for quickly bugging a colleague over messaging than walking over to their desk. It's actually impolite to shoulder surf and skim your colleague's email inbox to determine if what they're doing is important. For senior and above levels, reading emails can be more urgent than having an IDE open. There can be production issues, environment issues, vendor tickets, and emails from senior management that are communicated over email. Or they can be submitting an HR form that has their personal details.

Before 2020, software developers in open office environments naturally gravitated to messaging over talking in person, because having no office or cubicle walls means if you're talking out loud at someone's desk, you're bothering others sitting nearby. Sometimes this happens anyway, and it can be hard for some people to read code or emails while listening to colleagues talking right next to them.

> There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.

There is minor degradation in educating novices, like maybe it's 2% to 5% worse, but in open office work environments, the majority of communication is messaging and emails anyway due to lack of privacy and sound-proofing. Screensharing is easier to see than huddling at someone's desk, and quieter for your colleagues next to you who wouldn't hear all sides of the conversation when you're using headphones.

> Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

Odd. Even when working in office, I messaged colleagues, because it is less disruptive than walking up to their desk to interrupt them. They can manage when they are available to respond, asynchronously or synchronously. You need to follow the No Hello (https://nohello.net) protocol, though.

In person interactions is better, but we have a good amount of open-source projects that do fine with remote interactions. The issue with remote interactions is with processes. Instead of having tooling to promote adhoc interactions, most teams will get into some kind of rigid structures because the tooling is imposed from high.

I loathe having slack because it quickly becomes full of noise. There should be friction from having another department chiming in. Having announcements in #general and #random have a cognitive load. I like email, because you can have filters and deal with things when it's suitable to do so. Slack is no where close to that.

> Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

I haven't yet tried this, but I've wondered for a while if it could be a good thing to just be visibly in voice chat while working if you aren't in a deep focus mode. Make it easy for someone to jump on and have converdation.

I've seen people do it and call it open office and it be at specific times, but I'm thinking even more casual than that.