Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

zachholman.com

17 points·colinscape··3 comments

This article entirely ignores why (given the choice) people avoid the sort of work style incompatible with remote employees.

There's a very revealing section at the end where he talks about the necessity of occasional in-person meetings:

It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a two day trip. Creative problem solving becomes easier, people identify closer to real faces instead of just avatars, and all around it can be a great experience than sitting around computers all the time.

This entirely corresponds with my experience. In a multi-timezone remote team, this is something that happens once every few months, at great expense and inconvenience. Everyone else calls it "Tuesday".

I understand the tendency to think face time is infinitely more valuable. For my managers, I completely understand it is one of their few options for insight into the deep work they've tasked me with. However, I've found the reality is that these face time meetings are just a stand in for actually understanding what it is you've asked me to build and how what I've done might be related. I spend all of that meeting rehashing design concepts and essentially catching them up. So then they can finally parse what is essentially an extra-long commit message.

They'll laud the meeting as "We met in person and got so much done!" I'll remember it as yet another round in the lecture circuit of a design.

In the end, face time is probably always going to better for collaborative work. Speed up communication time and processing time improves as a result. But for single-worker tasks, I've found the opposite to be the case. The overhead of the conversations makes it take an hour instead of the 15 minutes for essentially a "long commit report" email.

or that face time replaces lack of tl;dr in the "long commit report" ?

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