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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away.

I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.

Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.

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> I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.

I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings.

I totally agree! I hate being stuck in a meeting and thinking, "If I could hit Google right now, we'd have this answered already."

Luckily, this company doesn't have many meetings, so it isn't a big deal.

I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting.

Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).

Lots of times, unforeseen questions come up at meetings, in fact, if they don't; that's a sign the meeting wasn't really productive at all. Google should be on a large screen in the conference room. Or Bing if you're into that. Most meetings I get invited to end up with "action item" which means really, people go back to your desks and Google, research, test, decide, etc. so we can have a followup meeting to decide what we could have decided together in the first meeting if we didn't shut ourselves into a conference room, away from the world on the pretense that the meeting will be 100% productive that way.

Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.

Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.

Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.

> I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings. reply

But when the questions and comments are not well expressed keeping the loop in text (email or Slack) makes the things worse. Obviously if you can just fire a voice conference everything can be sorted out but in my, just personal, experience remote workers are working more asynchronously and you don't expect to talk immediately without scheduling it earlier, much earlier than on-site where it is spontaneous.

Having to take the time to write them down in a clear manner is a major benefit of text media (e-mail).

Half of the time, you end up not sending the e-mail because you found the answer while organising your question.

It's almost as if different modes of communication are appropriate for different kinds of problems! Who would have thought?

Not in every case. It was often an excuse for my last manager to not do anything like write down requirements. "I thought we talked about that." "Yes you changed your mind three times and I can't remember what the final outcome was."

Personally I like having things done in writing as you have something solid to refer to afterwards.

The proper action with such people is to send a follow up mail. "I summarized our decisions from the coffee break...".

Sure, instead he'd just change his mind three times distributed across hundreds of Slack messages, and you'd still have no tracked resolution.

When you have a decision born of a conversation, the only useful thing to do is to write that distilled, focused result on some median other than the discussion itself.

This problem ultimately has little to do with remote vs colocated; The same applies whether the discussion happened in verbal discussion, a meeting, an email chain, messaging, etc.

That problem is easily solved, look at the most recent message. Though a lot of the problem was caused by incredibly incompetent management.

Tip: after a meeting / conversation, create the user story as you understand it based on the conversation then tagged your manager on the item and ask for confirmation. Ideally, you'd have a product manager who keeps an easy to read backlog; but if you don't then you need to take matters into your own hands.

If you don't have someone taking detailed meeting minutes, the meeting might as well not have happened. Always take notes and send to all participants promptly to verify accuracy. Isn't this Running A Meeting 101?

I don't think the author is claiming that more expressive or rewarding friendships form as much as he's claiming that remote really makes you focus on the meat and the content of the colleague's output. That's actually something I LOVE about working remotely. There are far fewer politics because instead of saying "Oh man, Jimmy looked at me cross-eyed last week, I don't want to do anything with him anymore", you just say "Oh, Jimmy needs help on this issue. I'll send him a reply in a minute."

I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data.

This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning.

I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.

In a previous job I gradually instituted by own work-from-home policy for similar reasons. This situation was more due to negativity breeding itself in the office (which was a result of politics) and less about the politics directly.

When I'm having a rough day, I might be sitting there silently thinking negative thoughts about some situation I just dealt with through the computer. But if someone else exclaims some frustration aloud while I'm also in a bad mood then I'm more likely to join in on the bitch session. Eventually I realized how toxic the environment was, and I started working from home as often as I could get away with. Occasionally I was reprimanded for not showing up enough, but that led to an Office Space-like situation where I would show up just enough to avoid the hassle of "a talk."

My productivity at home was well over double (or in the office it was far below half, depending on how you look at it) and my outlook on life became a lot more healthy.

Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.

This is probably a personal thing. I'm definitely an e-mail editor, but plenty of people prefer real-time or near-real-time communication to the precision of a carefully considered e-mail.

At least Slack allows editing of messages...

A proper frictionless peer-chat-videoconference tool is actually better than face-to-face. You can share data; you can have facetime with arbitrary people around the 'building' without wasting time walking around. You can hear everybody and tell who is talking in a large meeting. But only if everybody uses the tools.

Worked this way for 5 years. One of the best work experiences of my life. So I don't believe folks who dis remote working, if they've never tried this.

Very few issues that are easily resolved f2f can't be resolved on the phone. It just takes people who are really great at communicating to make it work.

f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.

Actually having worked remote for a while now, what I do observe quite a bit is there's way less office politics on the remote teams. One of the reasons is my coworkers "are" their code, emails or talking heads on google hangouts :)

Less face-to-face interaction == less politics.

Emails vs. "face to face" - there's no need to actually be in a physical proximity for that conversation to take place.

This is a big reason I like remote working (and can't wait to find another job which is remote). I find office life really political and very inefficient. Our team (and others who stop by our area) is very chatty, and there's a ton of political (Game of Thrones level) maneuvering. My experience of remote working is that you're insulated from a lot of that--or at least you're in a lot more control of how distracted you allow yourself to be. Politically there are still stressors from time to time, but at least you're hopefully just judged on your output rather than how many hours you sit in your chair, the car you drive, the length of your commute, how you dress, and whether you shave daily.

Seriously, videoconfering (hangouts, webex, zoom.us, appear.in, etc...) solves this. As a matter of fact I can get a face to face meeting faster with remote worker than on-site workers.

Totally disagreed. In person is still 100x better than VTC. It's certainly a matter of opinion but you can't categorically say it's been solved

I think remote teams are in a never-ending pursuit to replicate that face-to-face communication. But as you say, nothing can really replace the face-to-face interaction. So I agree with you.

But the main argument I am making here is not that virtual communication is superior to a human one. Rather I am saying that a vague notion of culture is all that ties remote workers to their virtual teams.

But maybe I badly phrased it here because what I call culture is also man-made.

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