Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

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- ...training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero.

How is that any different that in office? In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Remote communication often happens via email, or text, and can naturally document in an informal way. Technical documents are no harder, or easier, to 'train' employees to create when working remotely or in office.

- Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours.

This is really more a problem with dispersing your team, than it is with remote working. You can have a remote work company with everyone in the same time zone.

Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

> In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document.

Exactly, because if everybody is colocated, you can pick up on subtle social cues and figure out what's important and what people are working on just based on what people are talking about. If you spend that much face time with people, unless you're completely socially stunted, you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

> Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

There are tradeoffs to everything, and I think on this board, things have swung too far to the other side. Remote work is not an absolute panacea, and carries with it costs. Just like NoSQL is not the end-all be-all of datastores, remote work isn't the right solution for many teams.

> you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

and then a year later when you have to figure out why something was done a certain way what do you do? or when some of the people that "were there" have left and nobody else remembers?

If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything: even working in an office I always send an email after a meeting or random chat to the person involved to document what we talked about, what was decided and why. I might also cc other people that should be kept in the loop, which is also something you cannot do if you just talk.

> If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything

Remote working enforces discipline, which is good in the long run, but is not very rewarding in the short run and requires the pre-loading of effort.

Humans are really bad at making those sort of trade-offs. That's why many of us still eat fast food, smoke, and don't exercise.

Even though you're "doing the right thing", there are immediate up front costs for theoretical (but very real) benefits down the road. Even though you're doing the right thing, maybe an organization isn't quite prepared to pay the costs to do things that way. Hence, "work tax".

Also, my assertion that remote work is mainly for healthy organizations holds sway. It really magnified and focuses a light on an organization's details and flaws, and many people don't like that.

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