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Comment by chronic331 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

> 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".

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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