[oliviabenson]

Sending a message can be a big hurdle when you’re new to a job. A junior person likely has a very deified view of senior team members and believes that their time is sacrosanct. Encouraging junior people to “just ping me” is like telling an arachnophobe “it’s just a spider”.

If you work with someone in an office, natural opportunities arise to grab some time, whether it’s when they’re bumbling around the office, grabbing something to eat or walking from a meeting.

A remote company can create an environment to address these problems, with structured time for conversations but it is very difficult to get right.

I am a fan of both remote work and in office work. Remote work is cheap and has little margin for error; in office is expensive as it is paying for guard rails that make it (relatively) difficult to get wrong.

[karmakaze]

I don't find it difficult--I regularly book time to do pair programming over Tuple with everyone who's up for it on the team. That's in addition to taking opportunities to chat on Slack about anything they're working on, e.g. PR reviews.

[erik_seaberg]

What I've seen work is for the team to have a private channel, and whoever isn't in the middle of something can answer, and the whole team will see that answer sooner or later.