[extropy-chat] Email is for the old folk now

[Emlyn]

On 01/08/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> > Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.
>
> Oh, how absolutely dreadful. School! Work! Why bother, if we can
> have fun on WoW or SecondLife? Inability to hold a steady job?
> Look -- a bright and shiny object! Neat! ...what were you saying?
>
> > "It used to be just fun," says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who
> > studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. "Now
> > it's about parents and authority."
> >
> > It means that many people often don't respond to e-mails unless they have to.
> >
> > Boyd's own Web page carries this note: "please note that i'm months
> > behind on e-mail and i may not respond in a timely manner." She, too,
> > is more easily reached with the "ping" of an instant message.
>
> Have you ever tried working when the damned "ping" would interrupt you
> every half a minute? But hey, it's only work, right? That boring thing,
> with authorities one has to report to? Fuck that, let's go play WoW.

Oh, the horrors of a WoW addiction... I've had to learn an entirely
new level of self control to work remotely on a machine with WoW
installed. I've been successful though.

Anyway, I've been experiencing the change in online communication
styles through work. I'm currently leading a development team where
everyone is remote - I'm in Adelaide, we've got two guys in Sydney
(who both work from home, no office there), and a guy in Brisbane,
some related people and our infrastructure in Canberra.

We have a "standup meeting" every morning at 10am (eastern standard
time - we had to pick a timezone as our "reference time" to make
things easier), say what we did yesterday, what we are going to do
today, flag any obstacles, then we sign off and off we go. That
meeting is held using VoIP (Skype actually) + IM (also using Skype).

Then the day commences (continues - we do start earlier than 10am!).
If there is stuff that multiple people need to work on, we catch each
other on IM, start up a voice conference using Skype, then someone
kicks off a GotoMeeting meeting, so multiple people we can see one
person's desktop (check out GotoMeeting.com, the technology is awesome
for Windows people, it's owned by citrix and uses their technology,
incredibly responsive). We've had many team coding sessions where
people in multiple states are taking turns using one guy's machine;
for example, a session a week ago where our Brisbane based guy
(actually he might have been on the gold coast, he moves around a bit)
shared out his dev environment, and myself and a guy in Sydney took
turns coding up some difficult multi-threaded stuff to resolve a
problem.

We also have remote secure source control (use of which is fully
integrated into the Visual Studio .net IDE through plugins), a remote
secure bug tracking/issues management system, and a "content
management system" (an internal portal thingy) for information storage
(you know, word documents and stuff).

I was working remotely a few years ago, and you could do it, but it
was clunky. Now, this geographically dispersed dev team is functioning
extremely smoothly - in fact, there are many ways in which it is
superior to a co-located team. For instance, all our IM is recorded by
default, we can easily record voice conferences and remote desktop
sessions too. Sometimes when one team member is demonstrating a bunch
of new stuff to the rest of the team, we record the gotomeeting
session, then put the resulting .wmv file on our internal portal for
later use as a canned tutorial or as documentation. Easy.

IMs can be really irritating, because they interrupt you, but they are
better than a phone. You can still ignore them if you want, you can
use status settings to tell people you are busy, you can see if other
people are busy or even at their machine before you bug them. But yes,
I have total overload some days, with Skype, MSNMessenger going off
while I've got urgent email turning up, phone calls, and someone
standing next to me talking to me! That sucks.

As for email, well, I'm only using gmail these days (much to the
horror of the procedures oriented people in our org, who think we
should be using our severly screwed up corporate Exchange based
email). Still awesome, best email ever. Hardly any junk mail gets
though the filters, either.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *
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