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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling open source projects flourish in spite of their distributed contributors.

Text chat is a poor replacement to in-person conversation as it is occasionally async and a lot of meaning is lost. Video conference is better, but is less spontaneous and makes it harder to pull someone else into the conversation. Above all, text and video eliminate serendipity - I won't overhear the the conversation my colleagues are having about a pain-point I solved 2 days ago. I don't think channels on slack can ever replace this for me - following a text discussion takes my full attention, unlike people talking within earshot.

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>I won't overhear the the conversation my colleagues are having about a pain-point I solved 2 days ago.

That is ridiculous. If you solved something like that, post it on some channel everyone is subscribed to, instead of trying to "overhear" problems people are having, not to mention you are willing to be distracted perpetually, listening for problems your colleagues might have...ridiculous.

Yep, this is the thing I commonly hear when people rail against remote work. It usually all falls down to a lack of planning and organization. They basically want the capability to interrupt any person at any time so that person gets pulled from their work to HELP THEM. Which is definitely efficient for the person who does the interrupting, but what about the person that got interrupted?

I'm not saying employees shouldn't help others, but there is a time and place. You can schedule calls, send an email, or even send something in a Slack channel. All three of those say "a response in a few hours is acceptable" instead of HELP NOW!

Serendipity is not a planned activity by definition. Additionally, people's minds are wired in different ways: what's ridiculous to you is perfectly fine for me.

What is ridiculous to me is wasting my time trawling through a #general channel (419 unread), filled with irrelevant, ephemeral muck just for the 0.5% chance that someone posted a solution to my specific issue.

As ill-luck will have it, I got injured since my previous post- I will be working remotely for a while in the new year and I am not looking forward to it. Seriously.

The complaint about scanning through #general for a 0.5% chance that someone solved your problem is the same as the other fellows complaint about listening to all of the #general office chatter on the chance that some of it could be relevant to you.

I think the answer to both of those situations is a searchable Q&A board. (internal StackOverflow)

StackOverflow has already addressed the problem for most topics that can be discussed publically. What remains to be addressed is the internal/sensitive topics that people are unwilling to discuss in the open.

There are some projects attempting to replicate SO functionality but so far we have not seen one gain adoption like Slack has in the chat space.

Sorry about that pal. Hope you get well soon...

I realise that async communication isn't for everyone, but personally I'd pick it every time. Discussions where people get some time to think over and edit their replies are so much more enjoyable.

> I won't overhear the the conversation my colleagues are having about a pain-point I solved 2 days ago.

Listen, I agree that this happens. But in my experience it happens so rarely that it does not outweigh all the negatives of having to drag a bunch of people to the office against their will day in, day out.

As for slack and such being a poor replacement to face to face, I'd say that it's because not all people are cut out for remote work. For me personally, I don't like it when somebody chats me up about things that are better suited for a slack (or even email) conversation. Things like getting the spec details buttoned down (which is actually the bulk of shop conversations, unless you're at a very early stage in your project) - you'd want to have a paper trail/reference to go back to once you start implementing. And remembering details from hallway conversations is hard, so you have to distract people from their work again or get blocked.

My experience has been the opposite of yours.

I worked on a remote team for several years and recently migrated to an in the office job in a similar line of employment and was surprised how often such things occur. In your case it may either be that your work does not lend itself to such activities or you are potentially unaware that they are occurring.

Slack is poor replacement for face to face. It is good for communication for many types of projects and teams, but it cannot convey a person's facial expressions or emotions that otherwise might be present in their voice. My current organization, while onsite, has teams spread across the globe that we interact with. Attempting to solve complex engineering problems via email and chat is doable, but takes longer than throwing a couple of the engineers in a room with a whiteboard (and so the company pays for travel when that is needed).

In my experience, remote work is very situational. Certain jobs, tasks, and teams will lend themselves to remote work, but those items are not the majority of work yet.

> but it cannot convey a person's facial expressions or emotions that otherwise might be present in their voice.

We're now talking software development, right? I accept that those things can be very important in other endeavours, but to me the person's well thought out and articulated opinions are much more useful than all those things. I agree, it takes time to put your thoughts in writing and often you end up tweaking your original ideas because you realized a better way of doing something while writing them down, but that saves a lot of time for both parties, provides a solid piece of documentation you can refer back to afterwards, and usually results in a better implementation which covers more edge cases, has fewer bugs and is more maintainable in the end.

> and so the company pays for travel when that is needed

In my experience it's almost always been a waste of time and money. It did provide other benefits, such as getting the remote people to hang out together, but that's neither here nor there. But then again, I never really valued whiteboard conversations much over discussing in writing (slack/email).

I'm the exact opposite, a text discussion I can trivially multitask with other things, but come up and talk to me and not only can I only focus on you, but anything I was thinking about before is likely wiped out too.

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