@sthoko Had a question. This seems like a video call/ voice call without the receiver having to click answer/ pick up right? Making it instantaneous, trying to make it closer to real life conversation compared to having the receiver answer an incoming call on say slack/ zoom.
What if the the receiver is away from keyboard or let’s say there something private happening in the background of the receiver, won’t these be some issues if there is no answer button on the receivers end and sort of be an invasion of privacy?
@kheumann We detect when you're idle and mark you as busy. We conflate multiple statuses as "busy" to other people in your team.
The receiver also chooses when to unmute. If you are the receiver you may hear someone else say "hey X, can you help me with this?", but you can only answer once you unmute. We basically skip the "calling" part. The sender can immediately start talking. Think of it more as a walkie talkie.
@sthoko Saw you both are software engineers. Would you actually appreciate a teammate randomly starting a convo with you while you’re working? I feel more comfortable dm’ing them first to see if they’re free and then starting a slack hangout/zoom meeting.
@lilolme2 I think the root cause here is that you don't know if someone is actually free, so you would rather DM. Our app makes it easy to tell who's free, since we mark people busy if they're idle, or in conversation or in a meeting automatically (we conflate statuses for privacy). People can also manually go unavailable if they want to focus. Being available on our app means "I'm down to chat". Being available on Slack may mean "I'm working async right now".
All things considered, we do make it possible to "nudge" someone, so they just get a notification that says you'd like to chat whenever they're free again. We've gotten feedback this is a great compromise for teams that may not be comfortable reaching out immediately.
Working at Amazon (while in the open office) I did get interrupted by teammates to ask questions but these interactions made me feel closer to them over time. We think the remote-work behavior of scheduling socials (which the team may not even want to attend) or hopping from meeting to meeting is not the end solution of how we will interact in the future. They don't feel natural.
