Comment by etangent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etangent | Hacker News Reader

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There's a common attitude that goes something like, "It's the Internet age! What in the world could be stopping X from employing Y who lives in a place Z?!"

Well, I worked at a place where most of the team was remote. It absolutely sucked. I barely knew what the coworkers were doing (sure, my boss had a better idea than I did, but I am certain even he would have preferred to have employees physically around him for routine interaction), what kind of people they were, and the reverse was true with respect to their knowledge of myself. The time zone difference only exacerbated the problem. This "lack of people knowledge" problem at remote workplaces causes everyone to under-invest in building long-term relationships with everyone else (because nobody really knows what everyone else is really like), and the culture nosedives. [1]

Now, clearly, remote employment can be necessary (consulting offers a typical pattern), but the common attitude that there's no reason at all for not just having everyone work remotely is incredibly annoying.

[1] Speaking of culture, remote workplaces offer a clear explanation via counterpoint of the vaunted but often misunderstood term "company culture"---culture is what you don't have when everyone is working remotely.

My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you. I don't think it has much of anything to do with if they are onsite or not, but with other factors in your organization.

For example, I found it very valuable to already have a great relationship with everyone else. We kept the conferencing software going all day, the boss in it too, and it never felt like being watched, instead it felt like being connected to people I like. Whenever we had an issue we talked, voice or chat depending on the issue, just like in the office.

When you try the same in an environment where you already don't care much for one another - I'm not even talking about negative feelings! - the the same setup will only make it worse and lead to even less cooperation. When I'm not sure of someone then of course I use remote work as an excuse to interact with them even less.

But that's not a question of working remote or not - only that "remote" enhances dysfunction that's already there. Yes, when it doesn't work it works better on-site, which is not an argument against remote, but to fix the atmosphere and the relationships.

> My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you

That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those people, and that's fine. In my case, I ought to have been collaborating, but the remoteness plus time difference (plus language difference!) exacerbated the communication problem.

IRL communication is incredibly high-bandwidth. If a person sits next to you and doesn't communicate with you much, you already know something about that person: that he or she does not enjoy chatting. When the absence of communication is due to remote location, you don't even know that.

The communication problem at remote workplaces causes everyone to underinvest in building long-term relationships with everyone else (because nobody really knows what everyone else is really like), and the culture nosedives.

> That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those people

You disregard the rest that I wrote, probably because of an unfortunate habit of mine to edit my initial two sentences again and again until I end up with 20 more sentences half an hour later... my commenting habits are more appropriate for chat.

In any case, my point is collaboration is not a question of distance. A lot of highly successful projects by distributed teams not least in the open source scene show that too. Even in my current pre-startup project I'm working with another programmer whom I only met once long after we had already done a lot of work together, very successfully and requiring a lot of cooperation. It is a people/personality issue though, thinking of all the programmers I can think of it's true the same thing would definitely not work with all of them. It's good you bring that issue up.

>>My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you.

Not in my experience. I mean, if you never, ever talk to them despite sitting next to them, sure. But most people aren't that anti-social.

Even if you don't make an effort to talk to people around you, general office chatter (e.g. water cooler talk, conversations in the lunch room, etc.) should be sufficient for you to keep a finger on the pulse of everything, so to speak.

That's a management and culture problem, not a remote problem. You need good management who understands remote in order for it to work.

Umm, at a small startup you're lucky to even have a manager.

You have a founder (or several) or you are the founder, so sure you have or you are a manager. They may not be managing - that's a different problem.

Small as in value->0 as t->years++? Sounds correct!

That seems to be the core problem - strong remote teams need strong written communications and some overhead as far as project manager, product manager, or both. Some companies can afford that pverhead, others don't.

I've worked remote for a year and my experience is the exact opposite. I generally know my coworkers well enough that I feel comfortable when I've actually been around them. We use Slack, we have daily "standups" for scrum, etc.. Almost everyone has some clue what other people are working on. Everyone works in NA, so there aren't serious timezone issues.

My experience has so far been that I never want to step foot into a real office again if I can avoid it.

Which is why everyone needs to spend time in communicating. IRL communication is accidental rather than deliberate. Distributed teams need deliberate communication.

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