Comment by shanemhansen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shanemhansen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Maybe you need to work on your communication skills? I realize that's a snarky sounding answer, so let me expand on that. Face to face communication is nice and has benefits. But there are tradeoffs. It's clear that your company has decided that when making a decision between having certain team members be remotely part of the team or not at all, the choice is clear. So maybe the appropriate course of action is to accept the benefit of continuing to have access to those individuals and work on adjusting your communication style to support distributed teams. Protip: a remote first workflow also improves documentation and communication if you have more than one office.

Personally, I welcome the chance to work with a group of minds that isn't restricted by the filter of "lives within x hours of office". The world is full of amazing projects created by people around the world working together.

I think your observation is valid, but in my experience the drawbacks of remote working are dwarfed by the benefits.

In the end, not everything that works for one will work for another. The previous commenter may need to work on their communication skills but so may the people who are now remote. I think the one problem is these discussions (this is the third in as many weeks) is that people tend to take a stance of "My perfect work environment is ______. Everyone should adapt to me".

I think we need to approach this differently. Have the team self organize around rules for availability, communication techniques, etc. Come up with plans for white-boarding and brainstorming when everyone is remote to each other. Or, come up with a plan to allow people in an open space to have some quiet and privacy to get work done. I find it rather silly that a single situation is what any employee needs 100% of the time and that if they think that, they aren't considering the needs of the rest of their team. Mostly everyone just needs a little perspective I think.

See my other reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13464828

But the summary is that it that the communications we have are not really a problem. I think I came off as stronger than I meant. It's more the conversations that don't happen at all because they are too inconsequential individually that I miss.

None of it is horrible. I was wrong to say I thought it is completely inadequate. But it is less than ideal for me.

I think my feeling is that it's of course fine for a team/company to be primarily or significantly remote because that works for a lot of people. Personally I couldn't be as productive as I like in that environment so I wouldn't work there but that is okay.

I think it should also be fine for other teams or companies to insist on being primarily non-remote though because that also works for a lot of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com