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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

Remote doesn't work.

I know, I work remote with people in 4 continents across 6 timezones. It simply doesn't work.

You can't teach people, you can't train people, you can't show anything over a phone or a chat.

On top of that, as soon as you have different timezones with little to no overlap. You cannot synchronise or work with your colleagues at all.

Remote work and remote teams should be limited to people who are already senior, fully autonomous and experienced. And even there, it's a constant battle and it takes a lot of self discipline.

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The conversation about remote work is often very emotionally charged and filled with false dichotomies.

I can concede that remote work doesn't work for everyone. I'll even concede that remote work is probably not ideal for most software engineers and the companies that employ them, even in "high tech."

But I'm going to draw the line there. The team I work with is entirely distributed, between the east and west coasts. For most of my career across several companies I've worked remotely. It works spectacularly well for us because we are all very motivated and have the self-discipline to complete our work according to deadlines.

I have also worked remotely on a team where one person was across the Atlantic. I admit that was a bit more of a struggle because we were frequently not online at the same time, but it wasn't a deal breaker in the end either.

Remote work probably doesn't work for most teams because the teams are very large and the work process requires a lot of synchronous communication. But it's really disingenuous to use a caricature of remote work (distributed across several time zones where heavy mentoring and synchronous communication is required) to say it simply doesn't work as a concept.

It's all about time zones. US east to US west is 3 hours. It's fine.

When there are people in Europe, Asia, Russia, Australia, it gets a lot harder.

The criticism is more about working across time difference than just remote.

P.S. Mentoring is always required, unless you only hire the most experienced people you can find. Communication is always required, unless you work on trivial problems.

Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

Then saying "remote doesn't work" is unhelpful. How about "remote doesn't work when it's across different continents"?

Even then, there are exceptions. I (in California) am currently working on a small project with a couple guys in Australia. Between the three of us, there are eyes on the servers 24/7 without needing to worry about getting woken up in the middle of the night, and there's always someone available to answer questions from our clients. It's great.

> Remote doesn't work

For you. I work in an office where some team members are remote. If something is urgent, you have to consider what's urgent about it. Is it you feel unable to proceed without discussing a topic face to face? If so, you are the problem , not remote work. I'd argue that 99.9% of things people claim are urgent, aren't urgent and could wait 8-10 hours.

Remote work is diffeeent to office work. If you treat asynchronous programming the same as synchronous programming, you're gonna have a bad time. If you design your work and your environment around remote work, it can and does work.

I never talked about urgent work. I dunno why you are talking about that. You're conflating different topics.

If something isn't urgent, then schedule it.

You can't teach people, you can't train people, you can't show anything over a phone or a chat.

I'm going to challenge that. If you need direct, synchronous, face-to-face communication in order to teach or train, I have to question the quality of your documentation. I would also question whether the people with whom you are engaging in direct face-to-face communication are being trained adequately. For many people, verbal communication isn't the most effective way of teaching. They would rather have a written document that they can refer to, over and over again, as they learn whatever it is they need to do.

Do you have any other proof than your single anectdotal evidence? No?

How about you provide proof that it works instead?

Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake.

Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).

Why are you teaching people at all? If you hire professionals they either know what you need already, or you tell them "We use X. Go and learn X."

There are remote-only outfits, and they do fine - at least as well "We're not getting any work done because we're in an open plan office and we can't hear ourselves think" outfits.

But hiring policy is an issue, and so is PM. It needs people with a compatible attitude, and that includes management.

It's not that remote is a panacea, but it shouldn't be a showstopper either. There are plenty of productivity killers in non-remote work styles too.

How are you supposed to onboard people onto a project? with training and teaching.

What do you professionals do? They work with other professionals and progress with each other.

What do you do with the world class experts you have? Make them work with other world class experts to make the impossible possible. Again, lots of collaboration and interactions needed!

For anything non trivial or not explained by a stack overflow answer, the "go learn X by yourself" could easily take weeks to years, whereas it could be explained in a few days with face to face interactions.

The "can't hear ourselves think in an open plan" are dysfunctional organisation. Of course, a lot of things do better than that, including other dysfunctional organisations. Let's have a better point of comparison than that ;)

You give them a task, point them to the source code that the task involves and let them figure it out. They can ask questions here and there, but they won't learn unless they are ass deep in the code trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

I mean the world was educated through text for over a millennia. It works.

>>I mean the world was educated through text for over a millennia. It works

I would replace text with mentors

You certainly make a good point. I would say hands on mentors are much more valuable in hands on skills, like an electrician or physician. I think programming falls into a less hands on skill like Math, Philosophy, or writing. You can have a Math mentor, but you gain most of your knowledge from reading what your mentors have written down.

To continue on the math example, you will need explanation from the mentor as long as you are facing something unfamiliar, or you're up for a very long struggle.

Yes, but it doesn't have to be in person, it can be in text. Something like electrician or plumbing probably requires hands on mentoring. Many times, the person who wrote the original code is long gone, so there isn't a mentor.

The original point I was trying to make is you don't have to be "in the office" to learn programming stuff.

On top of this there are multiple learning styles (e.g. visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) of which many people are able to harness all or a combination thereof, whereas others learn best by only using one style.

By your reasoning, open source projects should never be able to onboard new contributors or maintainers.

You seem to be suggesting that "collaboration" and "interactions" are things that necessarily can only happen synchronously and via richer media than text. Even if you want to move away from OSS as an example, I'd point towards the centuries of intellectual discussion that took place via hand-written snail mail letters.

Is in-person communication faster? No question. Is it the only way to effectively communicate ideas as part of a two-sided discussion? I should hope not.

> prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who is 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake?

What's the context of the conversation? That's really important. Of course you can't have a conversation with someone who is sleeping.

Equally you can't expect a well thought out response from your colleague when you are sitting over their shoulder asking them questions, wheeeas you will get that if you give them time to respond.

> prove me you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, ...

Again, why? In that case surely it makes sense for: A) you to do the task (as you colleague can't use a profiler)

B) your colleague to learn to use the profiler. If your job is to teach someone to use a tool over the air, then yes you have a very valid point. If it's mot, then you tell them to earn how to use a profiler or you'll do the task and they should tackle something else instead

So basically, everything problem comes down to "I have to do the task myself".

That sounds dysfunctional to me. What's the point in having co-workers, teams, company if I am on my own for everything? What's gonna happen when I get hit by a bus? What's gonna happen when another guy get hit by a bus and noone knew anything he was doing?

> So basically, everything problem comes down to "I have to do the task myself"

No. Every problem comes down to "there's a problem that needs to be solved".

I hope you don't mean a literal phone? And I talk everyday to people who wake up as much as 6 hours sooner than I do (same timezone, but my sleep schedule is a bit off).

Phone, skype, lynq, slack, hipchat, tried them all :D

6 hours is about the limit to still have a bit of overlap. That's London-Houston for me.

Why would you use a phone? Use Skype screen share or something of that nature so you can direct what they are doing. This situation you propose doesn't even make sense.

It sounds like it might be a tooling issue. I probably couldn't do this with someone over the phone, but I do this kind of thing all the time with remote colleagues using a screen share.

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