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Cody Crumrine
Cody Crumrine

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Development with Walkie Talkies doesn't sound fun.

This is the second article I've seen about Microsoft Teams supporting a walkie talkie like "push to talk" feature with there right Samsung phone.

https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-microsoft-verizon-partner-digitally-enable-frontline-workers/

I happen to be a big fan of Microsoft for the last few years. They're making a lot of smart decisions to win credibility with developers that wrote them off as enemies of open source long ago.

But I first saw this feature in an ad that says something like "reach your co-workers 24/7" and that just sounds awful.

Chat apps like Slack, Teams and Zoom have brought alot of value to distributed teams - and I'm glad we have them. But nothing comes without downsides, and I also think we need to worry any the disappearance of "deep work".

I'm not for saying everyone should be undisturbed with their headphones on all the time, but I do think we need to intentionally limit and manage or connectivity (so... 'Yes' to being undisturbed with our headphones in more of the time than we are now).

Turning my phone into a virtual walkie talkie feels like a big step in the wrong direction.

What do you think? Am I just being a grumpy old curmudgeon? Is bad news for productivity? Or is it just a cool new feature?

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