Jacob Bleser

Fiance, writer, photographer, product engineer at Discord

Web dev, ADHD, Dungeons and Dragons, tech culture, gaming, and social media.

Living in Brooklyn

Now

Obsessing over personal sites with the aesthetics of social media pages

muan.co

Posts

  1. Modern web dev
  2. Optimize down not up
  3. React in 2024
  4. How I write CSS in 2024
  5. The many kinds of functions

Micro-delay Hell

Something I've experienced with every remote team I've worked with is the "micro-delay" phenomenon. Essentially, because most (if not all) conversation among remote teams is handled asynchronously (most commonly through Slack), it can take a very long time to make any meaningful decisions. The problem is that any one engagement isn't so long that it's a problem. A reply can usually come within 1 hour, to as long as 1 day. But, these engagements tend to stack on top of each other, meaning it can take upwards of a week to have any meaningful discourse. If the team was fully in-person, this situation would quickly dissolve, as I could easily just go talk to someone and have a quick chat. Part of the problem is that most of the remote teams I've worked on aren't full time, so the in-person solution would only alleviate the problem, not solve it. There are some interesting solutions I've seen implemented that solve this problem. The team at Admiral uses an always-on camera system during working hours. So even though the team is distributed, they are still effectively in the same room with each other. Another solution is "office hours", where team members have no-appointment-necessary timeslots where anyone can stop by and have conversation. I feel like this system is more realistic for part-time teams.