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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

Agree that the promise of remote work hasn’t quite panned out, yet.

However, the article is also noting something related: > Today, operators sitting at computers hundreds of miles from the farm can easily steer gigantic harvesters via satellite. Kansas’s agricultural landscape needs fewer and fewer human caretakers.

In a way, they are realizing “telecommuting” for harvester operators and impacting local population. I wouldn’t be surprised if one operator is able to command multiple machines in multiple fields, thereby reducing the total number of operators you need, even concurrently.

As for most “tech work” these days, I feel like we could absolutely do well with remote teams. In some cases I would miss the white boarding sessions, but that’s something you could fly people in for if it’s really needed or use myriad of other tools for.

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The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.

Don’t know if VR/telepresence has given any real benefit to typical tech work.

That said, my team at a prior employer was distributed between our offices in LA, SF, Seattle, Bozeman MT, Toronto. We met in person no more than once a quarter and did everything else via hangouts, conf calls and slack. Even though we were very spread out, the team was one of the most productive in the org. I don’t know if any tech would have made us measurably more productive.

One argument could be made that we worked on an existing system, but we actually rebuilt completely, while also keeping the old one operational. There was a lot of greenfield work done and a lot of ideation. Periodic in-person sessions helped, but it’s really hard to make an argument that these same ideas would not have come to be without those in-person meetings.

Where I think you need the density you described is in searching for new work and/or funding/company creation. It’s pretty hard to sell convince someone to be your first customer when you never met face-to-face in person.

Hiring remotely should be pretty doable, but requires a leap of faith that many are unwilling to take.

I suppose the benefits depends on the knowledge work. A mathematician might benefit from the quiet solace of the country side, the human bandwidth being of marginal benefit, and instead focus on the problem. When they're ready, they transmit the proof, where it will be studied, reviewed and disseminated (if correct).

If you're not considering the information you receive too heavily, then you'd probably want more synchronization and bandwidth to add value. Call center work, sales over VR (currently done over video phone) and the like.

> A mathematician might benefit from the quiet solace of the country side, the human bandwidth being of marginal benefit,

But most of the working (academic) mathematicians I know, while they need some time in "quiet solace" or whatever, absolutely need to spend some time bouncing ideas off other mathematicians. Not unlike computer scientists, actually. And that's easier when the other mathematicians are local-ish.

I'm just a math grad student, no claim to being a pro, and I can concur already that really digging into the meat of something, some new theorem, say, is MUCH easier with peers to throw off the wall ideas at.

Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler.

I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graphics/gamedev/VR work itself. When working on complex graphics-related projects, you still have to download and build someone else's code; nothing yet that's as easy as just going over to someone else's cubicle and looking at their build on their monitor. Maybe one day we'll have a distributed multi-user layer on top of the Unity Editor or its equivalent.

A personal theory of mine is that one reason telecommuting is hard is that is really screen-real-estate bound. I've been remote for 5 years, full time, and in that time I have come to rely on an iPad Pro, 2 laptops and 2 30 inch 4k monitors, all on all the time. I'm on the phone maybe 4 hours a day, sometimes up to 8. (I don't work in coding, FWIW). I have so many documents, projects, collaboration windows, schedules, emails, calendars, and checklists open all the time that it is easily more productive to add more screens.

One thing I have learned is that collaboration and individual productivity are kind of opposing forces. To do one well, I do the other poorly. As a result I split my time between them (I manage a team, so I try to push for more collaboration so that they can work efficiently more of the time). When I am working solo, I prefer the untethered laptop with one screen. When I am collaborating, I would gladly double what I have now.

I say this because I can see a day in (in my mind's eye), when I have augmented reality glasses that provide infinite, location/object-fixed screen real estate around my house and office that I can use to collaborate better, and then simply set aside when I don't need it. I really want to be free to have the room around me be a canvas on which to work and collaborate. I'm interested in VR, but I prefer the experience of the AR solutions I have seen so far since I don't need to contend as much with focus and motion sickness.

Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity.

I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes highly frustrating.

how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?

It's big enough that I manually tile things. The pixels per square cm (or ppi for americans) is about the same as 1920x1200, 16:10 aspect ratio, 24" display from 10 years ago. It's just a lot more real estate to work with. I'm using a fairly recent version of xfce4 and don't need to scale UI elements as would be necessary on a 28" or 30" size 4K display.

This. Once you get to 40” screens it seems like you naturally shift to away from the desire to take windows dull screen and the rest follows easily.

Anecdotal counter point: I've worked remotely for years. I do plenty of brainstorming via Zoom and Slack. It works just fine for me. I never felt productive in the typical tech office space-- open-plan or cubicles. When I was an office worker and really needed to get stuff done, I'd go home. If I can help it, I'm never going back to an office.

I think it’s overrated. I worked for a startup in the 90s where my team was in Sacramento, Upstate NY, Toronto and a Wisconsin.

At the time, Nextel and ICQ were good enough. That was a great team and great time.

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