Ask HN: Is any tool lacking for more companies embrace remote work?
I know there is a work culture in the way too, but aside from that, what kind of tool (if any) would make more companies decide to try remote work?
About half my team is remote, and that's not uncommon for my division. We use Slack for collaboration. It was rolled out recently - prior to Slack, it a mix of (lots of) email and Skype. We use BlueJeans for larger meetings.
For day-to-day work, this all works well. But, it's also ingrained in the culture - we've had many remotes for a long time.
For new project kick-offs, especially greenfield dev, it makes sense to bring the remotes into the office for a week or more. I've done this three times now over the past 5 years. It fosters a sense of team and also allows easy white-boarding and fast/effective collaboration.
All my remotes are within an hour +/- time zone and a short flight away (office near DC, remotes in Carolinas and Mid-West). Teams spread across continents introduce more problems.
The reason for this is that when it comes to work society is still largely caught in Taylorism / assembly line thinking. When you had to maximise the output of an assembly line measuring work in terms of time made sense. With office / white collar / knowledge work this management approach simply breaks and it has been broken for decades: Mock work, people pretending to "work" while in reality they're only butts in seats is a widespread phenomenon that not only impairs productivity but mental and physical health as well.
It shouldn't matter how much time you spend on a task as long as it gets done before the deadline and you're available for others to ask questions or give feedback. The current system favours those who are less productive. It also favours those who've learned to game the system.
There are saner, more reasonable approaches to assessing work such as results-only work environments and value-based pricing. It's about time we adopt approaches like these instead of relying on 200 year old cargo cult management methods.
https://convergenttechblog.com/2016/12/22/the-microsoft-surp...
Comments here are enlightening:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13166032
Its a product that finally got almost everything right when it comes to a digital whiteboard. And yes to another point that was raised here certainly integration with Mircosoft services was a plus. Its great to have a computer interface that is remote on half the board and white board interface on the other. You can mock up while you have the specs inches away from your face on a huge screen so everyone in the room can read and interact. The skype integration kills it as well; there's been a number of times I've seen teams huddled around the board mocking things up with one or two people remote.