Ask HN: Weekend project ideas for remote workers?
Need inspiration/ideas for a new project that can solve a problem that remote workers face.
For example, some great tool for video chat is only applicable if it is adopted as a default means of communication within the company. The remote worker typically cannot drive adoption. To the extent that they can, if it is only used to communicate with remote workers and not within the workplace the remote workers are less integrated into the ordinary flow of the company.
I've worked at 3 employers that allowed some degree of remote work.
At two of them, everybody worked at home at least 1 day a week and some people were 100% remote. Everybody understood that somebody was going to be remote for any given meeting, so web conferences were standard in every meeting. People also called/chatted with each other when needed. Focus on companies like this for a weekend project. These are the places which are open to remote work and are open to addressing the issues with it.
I worked at another company where HR encouraged work from home, but there was no enforced standards and the company had a strong history of butt-in-seat time. The end result was that any work from home (even for a day) was perceived as slacking off and adding a web conference to a meeting was seen as an massive inconvenience for the people who were willing to attend meeting face to face. This company did not need a tool to help them with remote work, they needed an organizational change.
IME, remote work is a situation where people need to have a lot of self discipline and be okay with guiding themselves. With senior employees, they typically have a good framework (from past experience) to guide themselves in the right direction.
Junior employees typically don't have the experience to know the direction they need to take, and they need feedback. They also don't want to look like fools so they are reluctant to ask for help/guidance.
In an office environment a good manager can notice this and provide help without the junior level employee needing to ask explicitly. In remote work, it's easy to have a junior employee basically feel like they are drowning (figuratively) and nobody will notice until it's too late (e.g. person quits, their part of the project has clearly gone off the rails, etc). I think somebody that would allow for greater mentorship between remote employees would be useful to helping juniors get over that initial stage in jobs.
2. Read it for a while, looking out for problems.
3. Implement.
btt, there’s a nice product for that, a screen that goes in your chair adding a white background.
Joining calls when onsite team is in conference room - this sucks big time when you are on speaker and you don't get a word of what is going on. Especially when some folks are away from speaker. This requires a bit of DSP background but interesting problem i think.
De-noising- this is something i am already working on. Background noise from your house can really be annoying or embarrassing. I am trying to use DL for source separation.
Remote workers also lack view of everything thats happening. An automated way of sharing updates with remote team will be helpful. It could be meeting notes, an ability to for team members to scribble and share.
And people holding side conversations in conference rooms, or even people actually trying to talk directly into the microphone on a speakerphone, is always terrible. I always cringe when clients take my calls on a conference speakerphone.
Phones in general are awful. Just awful. They have one purpose: to transmit human voice. And they fail at that spectacularly and constantly. It might not be noticeable when you rarely make calls or if you've had extraordinarily good luck, but if you're on the phone all day with different people who have different phones and are in different environments and natively speak different languages, it's just the worst thing. The fact that it hasn't been solved yet is unacceptable.
I've been working remote for 4 years now and one of the biggest pain points is not being able to just white board a solution or ideas.
I honestly can't believe that's the biggest problem we've had so far, other than that it has actually been a smooth ride.
I’m aware this is a huge breech of privacy but you shouldn’t expect privacy in your workplace. I’m also assuming it’s only on for your assigned work hours.