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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

If you want to be treated equally you have to join an organization where the majority of workers are remote.

Otherwise you run into crap like "make yourself available all the time".

If you're the only remote employee, the OPs advice is pretty good, but I'd add "look for a real remote company" to it.

Also... video chat? What's it for? In a remote context you get those very useful text based communication tools that come with automatic logging so you can reference stuff later, and you want to do video chats instead?

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This is a really important point. Remote work works only in a fully/majority remote company. In mostly onsite companies you will most likely be the odd man out.

Absolutely. There's also a danger of resentfulness from those that aren't home based.

> Also... video chat? What's it for?

Being able to have a quick discussion, and being able to rely on audio and visual queues to carry on a conversation - as opposed to typing something out and waiting for to other part(y|ies) to respond.

This is work not dating, how about clear written statements instead of cues? :)

Edit: I suppose that if your only socialization is with co workers, you need those video chats and stuff. In that case I suggest going out and meeting friends once in a while.

During my time as a consultant in an agency I learned that human interaction helps a lot in the beginning of a new project. Getting to know all stakeholders and people working on the project fosters better understanding down the line and helps in achieving a way more smoothly running project.

I really like my alone time but I learned that the human element is not to be underestimated.

> This is work not dating, how about clear written statements instead of cues? :)

I think you're really underestimating the value of direct person-to-person communication, and how much it can help - especially if one of the team members isn't as good as written communications as you are.

It's also very helpful when multiple people need to discuss something - there's a lot less dead air, since we can typically speak faster than we can type. If I bring something up, and Bob has a comment on it, he can very obviously indicate that he's about to speak ,and then do so - instead of starting to type out a reasonably long reply only to get interrupted, or for me to wonder whether anyone's replying at all.

Written works great in something like email, but for relatively quick discussions, face-to-(virtual?)-face is still excellent.

While fast internet speeds and more mature tools do make things better, my team still spends most of their time saying "can you hear me?" or "can you repeat that?". Meanwhile, I've never asked another team member to retype their Slack message. We use WebEx when we really have to see people's faces. But Hangouts and Appear.in have left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

"Most of their time"? I highly doubt that.

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