While trying to focus and troubleshoot, the only thing I love more than people asking to share my screen and explaining everything I'm scrolling past, is having to do it while three people breathe over my physical shoulder.
Yep, especially because those three people are not sitting at their computers, doing work to advance the investigation themselves.
Even when I was still working in an office, coordinating incidents through a Google Hangout and a Google Doc to keep rough notes was the way to go. Want to show something? Share screen. Want to talk in private? Jump into a private hangout. Want to jot down some thoughts/unfinished ideas? Throw them into the document (the Hangout chat was pretty useless because people joining later couldn't scroll back) or into the dedicated Slack channel for the incident.
If anything, incidents have become much easier to coordinate thanks to all the tooling that we now have - though that requires an active incident commander (who also makes sure that Deanna, Deepak, and Sylvain are not just waiting, but investigating other possibilities). Fortunately, someone has written an article on how to become a better incident commander :)
I rather liked using gather.town during a period of time where our team often needed to pull together to swarm on some outage or performance program or bug. We were up against a very tight deadline for a client and there was a massive feature bumping up against some hard realities.
I absolutely wouldn't want that to be my daily life, but while we needed it, it worked. More than that, it was better than being in an office- when I wasn't needed or wanted to crack down on something without distraction, it was super easy to get away from the noise. When I saw a bunch of avatars in a meeting room, I could pop in without causing a disturbance to see if it was about anything I could pitch in on.
Thankfully, we're long past that point, and it became a lot less useful to the point that our team stopped using it not long after we were out of crunch mode.
