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0 pointsdagw13y ago0 comments

The one big difference I have found isn't about communicating with your team, but that when you are actually at the office you spend a lot more time talking to people not on your team or in your department. People with entirely different backgrounds and working on entirely different projects.

This can lead to new and creative developments and projects that would never happen from simply talking to people on your team. These projects have, at least for me, often been the most fun and challenging (and profitable) project I've been involved in.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

marknutter13y ago· 2 in thread

Again, this could happen online just as effectively. But even so, this is fairly obscure benefit to working on-site.

webjprgm13y ago

I tried to propose an idea where I work of having a threaded chat room to mimic conversations in the hall. It could get even better by having some intelligent gleaning of conversation keywords and showing those visibly by each chat room, so people know when their ears should be tingling and can join in on the conversation.

The method of a single chat room means multiple crossing conversations become hard and there's constant distraction trying to see what people are talking about only to find it's not interesting to you.

marknutter13y ago

The product I work on is called http://kona.com and we use it to collaborate online. It allows us to have multiple chat rooms going on at the same time for one team that are separated out by topic. We have discussions both dedicated to work topics and non-work topics. It simulates the "water cooler effect" quite nicely.

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