
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale - k0stas
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20200309
======
disillusioned
>I eventually turned off Slack notifications entirely, after experimenting
with many different variations. @here is an abomination; notifications in each
"other Slack instance" need to be set separately; it spams your @#$!! phone
with every single message anyone types, even while you're on your PC. Forget
it, notification privileges revoked, and I've been much happier since.

Eh, I've found Slack to be highly competent at presence management, when it's
working correctly, which is most of the time. It's usually smart enough to
know I've walked away from my computer, and to start pushing the notifications
to my phone instead, and then stop again. And I'm pretty sure it dismisses its
own mobile notifications once I've cleared them on desktop, too.

> Third, it's highly integrated, not to say bundled, with Calendar, to the
> point where it obnoxiously auto-schedules a Hangouts meeting id even for
> your team lunch.

This is a setting in your GSuite Admin panel.

Also, I feel like Hangouts Meet (the evolution of Hangouts itself) is a much
better product in general, and the Hangouts Meet Hardware is surprisingly
decent, if expensive. Hangouts even has auto-captioning, which is kind of
cool!

Surprised the author didn't call out Slack video calls. They're... also
decent! And baked right into Slack! (So no incremental cost!) But they only
work for meetings with people in your Slack workspace, so that's a bit auto-
limiting.

~~~
t-writescode
I've used Slack at 3-ish different companies.

Each company has different practices when it comes to Slack; and, as someone
who has used Slack so much that it's mentioned about him at those companies
(not always in a positive light?), I have a few thoughts and rules about the
best Slack usage that I think help, in general.

1) At any not-small company, you're going to want to almost immediately change
your Sidebar from "Everything" to "Unread and starred conversations".

2) Star all channels that you personally need to keep track of (or want to
keep track of for a certain amount of time) and all people that you want to
talk to or are currently in an important conversation with.

3) Unstar channels and people where #2 is no longer the case.

4) Create private channels for any conversation / project or issue that will
ever require more than the people that are currently in a 'multi-person
private message'. Archive them when the issue is over.

5) Use @here sparingly and @channel way more sparingly. If you're at a company
that doesn't use @here / @channel sparingly, mute them for the channels that
use them in excess. My current company has a meeting room shortage, so every
single time a meeting room is freed up unexpectedly, there's an @here in one
of our channels. That channel has @here notifications disabled.

6) If you can, in your broader "all the devs hang out here and can chat about
work stuff" or "talk with ops here" channels, consider adding group aliases,
so you can say, in those channels @ops, or @team-ops to notify just that group
when things are important.

7) Use @here sparingly, yourself. Use it only for extreme situations.

8) Give chatty bots their own channel. Having the pull request bot for your
dev team in the same channel as active development is going on, or in the same
channel as other teams are supposed to come in to talk to you about a project
your team is working on is just not the best.

9) Current, unproven experiment: at my current job, my team is experimenting
with a heavy use of threads. Previously, we had multiple projects occurring
concurrently and historical knowledge on features is spread across the team
with a lot of new members, so we can't use the tricks of private channels per
project to as much effect. Threads have a lot of weaknesses when it comes to
readability and following; but, they do reduce the chances that someone's
important message will get lost in a swarm of other messages on more pressing
issues.

edit: Whoops, thought of more.

10) Use snippets for any bit of code even slightly long. I'm thinking like 7
lines or more. There's syntax highlighting, and they're collapsible, saving
precious screen real-estate

11) Use Posts for large format messages you want to post to a channel or
multiple channels. They have formatting, headers, and so on. They're also
collapsible, again to save on screen real-estate.

12) Personal preference: try to not send multiple, short messages, unless
that's your company's culture. It breaks up the conversation and makes it a
bit hard to follow where a thread is, if you're using threads. For example,
which message do you put the response on? The part where the situation got
confusing? A random message in the middle? The last one? The first one?

edit 2, 3: more adding (I'll just add more after this and not say I'm adding
more, if it happens again), and some removing some unnecessary information

13) Mute channels that you want to remain in, but don't want to be bothered by
(maybe unmute @here and @mentions on this channel). This could include your
company's random chatting channel, or the operations channel, or even your
personal team's channel if you're currently heads down in a major project, but
you might need to be pinged for something serious.

~~~
greenhatman
My biggest irritation in Slack is when people direct message me with 'Hi' and
then wait for me to respond before they tell me what they need from me.

Please just tell me immediately what you need, so I can decide how urgently I
need to reply. I don't want to reply to you, and then have to wait for your to
type out what you need for me. It's a big distraction.

~~~
kbutler
Yes.

    
    
      > Hi
      < Hi.
      > Do you have time for a question?
      *internal sigh*
      < What is it?
    

It wastes both parties' time.

But some people consider it more courteous. In general, courtesy is a low-
level de-optimization (non-productive words/interactions) striving to avoid
higher-level impediments (taking offense, etc.)

~~~
rzzzt
No Hello: [http://www.nohello.com/](http://www.nohello.com/)

Previously discussed on HN:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19648415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19648415)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294)

------
lima
Missing from the list of videoconferencing tools: Google Meet. Hands-down the
best and most reliable tool we've used because it "just works", and is already
included in GSuite so there's no extra subscription to deal with. Probably
spend at least one hour per day using it and can't remember having any trouble
with it, ever.

The app works even in unrealiable network conditions and somehow doesn't skip
a beat when switching between wifi and mobile network.

The only annoyance is not being able to share a single screen on Linux, but
that's a Chrome limitation.

~~~
Jonnax
Is it the same as hangouts?

I've only used hangouts and it uses all my CPU destroying battery life and
causing loud fans.

~~~
lima
No, it's a separate product and has none of these issues.

Classic Hangouts is going to be turned off for GSuite customers such that
there's exactly one conferencing tool, and one chat tool remaining. Hooray!

------
AshamedCaptain
"Airpods (when connected to iPhones or iPads) have very low latency, not
detectable by humans. " "Linux bluetooth is hahahahaha sorry I forgot what I
was going to say."

Makes me seriously doubt any other latency measurement done by him.

The AirPods (even when connected to an iPhone) are said to have a latency of
around 250ms [1] with the Pros having around half of that, 120ms. This makes
both of them terrible as far as wireless headsets go. Even within Bluetooth
headsets, the original AirPods are absolutely terrible, with the Pro now being
in a much better position, but still nowhere near "low latency".

No surprises, since AAC is nowhere near a low-latency codec (this is not AAC-
LD, it is plain old AAC-LC). The latency actually _improves_ when connected to
BlueZ [my experience], likely because SBC is actually a much better codec when
properly configured, something that few Bluetooth stacks do [2].

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/22/airpods-latency-
test/](https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/22/airpods-latency-test/)

[2] [https://habr.com/en/post/456182/](https://habr.com/en/post/456182/)
[https://habr.com/en/post/456476/](https://habr.com/en/post/456476/)

On another topic 150-200ms of latency is definitely human noticeable, even for
me, that I don't have very good hearing nor reflexes. Still I would say most
likely not noticeable in a meeting room environment, except for one-person
videoconference.

~~~
rectang
In music applications, 10ms is considered noticeable, which should give us an
approximate idea of the physiological bounds. Asserting that 150-250ms is "not
detectable by humans" is _way_ off.

~~~
nitrogen
You really start to notice even at ~250ms because people start talking over
each other without realizing it during a conference call.

------
ahnick
I don't think Keybase is getting a fair shake in this post. The author is
using the ChromeOS Android app. This seems like a fairly unusual setup, but
maybe Chromebooks are more popular than I think? Plus the low amount of memory
in Chromebooks guarantees that this is probably not going to turn out well.

Most people are going to use the Electron App on either Mac, Windows, or Linux
on a laptop with a decent amount of memory. Also, the part about no "GitHub
integrations" is false too, because I'm looking right at githubbot that is
maintained by the Keybase team. Maybe it doesn't support all the things the
author is looking to do, but that is different than saying there is no GitHub
integration at all.

~~~
client4
A number of great Keybase features have only appeared recently which may be
why there's a mismatch between the blog post and Keybase's current features.
In the last few months there's now:

* Ipad support (nascent but works)

* Bot integration (VERY interesting permission structure [https://keybase.io/blog/bots](https://keybase.io/blog/bots))

* Neat SSH CA

------
viraptor
I'm curious why people want to have work slack available on their phones. I
can imagine some specific roles where it may be useful, but in general... why?
I can't imagine it being more than an extra distraction. What's the use case
for it?

I'm asking because I've seen many people complaining about the phone
notifications from their work.

~~~
cs02rm0
For me it's partly about being responsive - if I'm away from my desk grabbing
lunch, in front of the TV, picking up the kids from school, if I can unblock a
colleague that's a win in my book.

But even for a fully remote company, we have occasional client meetings. That
often means meeting up beforehand, coordinating things on the fly as travel
times change and maybe some people have to skip meeting before and go straight
to the client, etc. Slack on a phone gives a consistent, single comms route
for this rather than switching to text/WhatsApp/etc even if you know their
numbers.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Be mindful about setting toxic company cultural expectations from your
generosity. Others within the org may not want to give their time away for
free.

~~~
nitrogen
Sometimes taking 3 minutes to respond to something at the right time gives a
much better impression and more uplift than 30 minutes chained to a desk at
any other time.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Until that response time is expected nights, weekends, holidays, and while on
vacation.

------
jspash
I expected this article to be about the downsides of being forced to work from
home (possibly due to recent events). But it's just a list of 4 SaaS tools
that this company happens to use. And they just happen to be fully remote. I
don't see the correlation.

Any chance of changing the title to something more...I don't know, accurate?
It's a good write-up otherwise and I enjoy these kinds of posts.

~~~
romanows
"Several grumpy opinions about remote _working tools_ at Tailscale" would do
it.

------
moogly
At my employer we've used Skype, Lync, Slack, Teams, Slack again, Zoom for our
meetings and whilst some have started to become OK now (Slack and Teams), it's
laughable to me how bad the voice experience still can be considering how this
has been a solved problem in the gaming community for what, 15 years?

Today? If I could choose, I'd just use Discord. The only annoying limitation
is the 10 people screenshare/Go Live limit but that's only really a problem
for company-wide meetings but thankfully in my case they're usually not very,
ahem, informative (and thus not essential), plus they get recorded anyway.

~~~
andor
Most of the videoconferencing tools support the state-of-the-art Opus codec.
If people are not using headsets though, echo cancellation is required, and
that can seriously mess with the audio quality.

Gamers use high-quality headsets with good microphones. Anything Bluetooth is
still rather low quality because of the codecs used by the legacy hands-free
profile. This will improve with Bluetooth LE Audio.

------
sandGorgon
Did you try jitsi meet for videoconferencing ?
[https://meet.jit.si/](https://meet.jit.si/)

------
stickfigure
As a long time (paid) user of whereby (aka appear.in) I've been pretty
disappointed by recent changes. You used to be able to visit
appear.in/anything and get a room. Now there is an explicit and annoying
"create a room" step. It's still much simpler than Zoom, which is why I still
pay for it, but if someone created a service with "the old appear.in
experience" I'd switch a heartbeat.

~~~
sokoloff
What’s complex about Zoom? My experience matches the article, which is “it’s
easy and seems to work for everyone”.

The app UI can be confusing for advanced features (annotations and the like
and people sometimes have a hard time groking single window sharing [or
remembering that’s what they did]), but basic video and full screen sharing
“just works” IME.

~~~
stickfigure
You need to install an app. That's a massive hurdle compared to "visit this
link", especially when interacting with customers.

------
rauhl
> We're using Notion as a team wiki and note taking app. It's ... okay. I
> mean, it's probably the best tool for the job, and it's great in some ways,
> but it's severely limited in others.

Has anyone had experience using Org Mode files in a Git repo to achieve the
same effect as Notion or a team wiki? Seems like it checks many of the same
boxes (forgive the pun): todo lists, easy links, hierarchy, tables, Kanban
(with org-kanban), formatting. I think that it would address the issues, too:
‘show me what changed’ would just be git diff, comments could live in comment
blocks, todo lists and reminders are rather insanely powerful & flexible, and
it’s very extensible and, of course, free software.

~~~
throwanem
Everybody needs to use Emacs to get the benefit, so it's a non-starter. I wish
it weren't.

~~~
hinkley
So I thought, but there seem to be vim and IDE addons as well.

------
torvald
> The "show me what changed" view is nearly useless; tons of updates about
> tiny clutter changes, but no good way to give me a deduplicated list of all
> the docs that changed. Virtually any wiki's RecentChanges view is better.

We use Quip ([https://quip.com/](https://quip.com/)), it's very equal to
Notion.so, and suffers from the same issue. But Quip has a small API, and
every hour i just grab my stared documents, flatten them to plain text and
`diff` them. Changes are sent to email by a cron job.
[https://github.com/torvald/quipdiff](https://github.com/torvald/quipdiff)

------
abdullahkhalids
Has anyone managed to replicate the linked Gmail guide[1] on Thunderbird? I
currently am able to reply+archive[2] some emails, but the todo emails hang
around in my inbox till I complete the task and then archive them.

Ideally, I would like to not see the ToDo emails till I am ready to look at
them.

[1] [https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-
how-...](https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-
gmail-more)

[2] Ctrl+R, compose reply, Ctrl+Enter to send, A to archive message.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
I figured out a workable solution, using Thunderbird tags.

1\. Customize Thunderbird toolbar and "View" button/menu to your toolbar. This
reveals some hidden functionality that I discovered by accident just now.

2\. Go to your Inbox folder and Tag some messages as "To Do" (default shortcut
"4"), and then archive them.

3\. Go to the Archive folder and from the "View" menu select Tags->To Do. This
will display all "To Do" emails in the folder.

4\. Under the same "View" menu, select, "Save view as folder" option. Select
appropriate settings on the popup window and create your shortcut.

5\. Now you have a shortcut folder in your folderpane that displays your ToDo
items. At this point, you can revert step 1, as the toolbar button is not
needed.

Now, if I can't deal with a message before the end of the workday, I can do "4
A" on the message to make it disappear from my inbox, while still keeping it
handy. The only downside of this system is that I need to select "Archives"
folder to update my local copy of the folder. Otherwise, newly ToDo-ed emails
won't show up under the shortcut.

------
PeterStuer
Having spent two decades in online meetings and conf calls with many partner
companies, both SME's and Corporates, in my experience the only thing that
'just works' right of the bat under all circumstances is GoToMeeting [1].

For in-company meetings you can of course use whatever you feel comfortable
with, but when it comes to large meetings with many external parties, some of
which will phone in, many of which are very restricted in what they are
allowed on their computer, nothing beats GoToMeeting (no affiliation), and I
have tried or been forced to try a lot of different solutions.

For email we use O365/Outlook. Although I use GMail for personal/family stuff,
I find the Outlook client still beats everything else out there for business
matters, and O365 mail has been pretty solid the last few years.

As for planning, notes, follow up, tracking etc. We use Tasks in a Box [2]
(full disclosure, I am affiliated with an investor in this company). It
integrates very well with Outlook and has been pain free and solid since the
2018 release.

I don't like Slack, nor Teams. Skype used to be fine for persisted chats but
they ruined it. I'd love Discord for business. I use it with colleagues and
some like-minded companies, but as of now it is not acceptable for many
businesses.

[1] [https://www.gotomeeting.com](https://www.gotomeeting.com)

[2] [https://tasksinabox.com/](https://tasksinabox.com/)

------
viraptor
Another one for the videoconferencing is AWS Chime. It pretty much just works.
It doesn't try to be an amazing product on its own which makes it free from
weird features and bloat. The best one I've used so far.

