Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

IMO one of the least-solved problems is communication. Two areas in particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality.

These are two areas where good solutions may exist at reasonable price-points, but if so that information isn't widely known.

Not sure if it fits with your business model, but it would be extremely helpful for someone to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of various technologies / products / services for those areas, and provide recipes for known-good setups.

I.e., if one of your clients can tell you their current and upcoming team sizes, network connectivities, etc., you can tell them what products and services give them good video / whiteboard quality at various price points.

IME companies with remote workers tend to be "penny wise, pound foolish" regarding these things.

EDIT: To be more specific: For call quality, having good data on what setups result in good call quality in Skype vs. Slack vs. Google Hangouts etc. And for shared whiteboards, having good information on how effective / sufficient teams find various approaches such as (some website + iPads), (some website + a particular Wacom tablet), (everyone on the team having a particular model of interactive whiteboard such as this one [0]), etc.

[0] https://www.cdwg.com/product/SMART-Board-6075-75in-LED-displ...

Anecdotally I can say that Zoom has worked the best for us.

But no software can fix variances in bandwidth or latency. I wish there was a way to test a remote hire's internet connection quality. Lack of access to a good internet connection would be a deal breaker for a remote hire for us.

I believe you about Zoom. Unfortunately that's the only kind of information I'm ever able to get on the topic: anecdotal.

I suspect the reality is that, amongst the best-performing services, which one works best depends on network QoS details, network topology, particular client hardware / OS, etc.

For example: some conferencing software seems to have a real problem with echo cancelation, so either (a) everyone needs mic/speaker hardware that sidesteps the issue, or (b) you accept that everyone will go insane.

Similarly, difference conferencing software has different solutions to people talking over each other accidentally due to latency. One product (Cisco's maybe?) has an icon for metaphorically raising one's hand to request a turn speaking.

You know, I might have an idea for you. A few years ago, I built a diagnostics tool for a product whose primary users were using some absolutely horrible internet connections.

One of the most useful parts of it was timing http requests and tracking response times. We solved some very complicated technical support issues using this tool. Do you think it would be useful to adapt something like this to remote workers? It's weird because I've struggled with internet connections when I've worked with remote workers, but never thought of actually testing it until I read this comment...

We've been trying Zoom lately. Seems pretty good, though we always seem to have issues with everyone logging in to a call. Inevitably we have everyone slacking/texting/skyping out the call ID to just get up and running. After we're up though it all works smoothly

A very important contributor to good call quality is good audio hardware.

Yes relying on the cheap 5-10$ pos mic built into a lap top wont work you need a proper soundcard and better microphones and turn off the auto level/compression on skype.

Doing it more seriously you might even want to use a separate older machine as a skype drone (ie only runs skype) and feed your audio out from your main machines sound card into that.

I had an initial phone call with a firm and it was obvious that they where clustered round a mac laptop - inaudible and very low quality sound.

And also improve the acoustics of the room from which you are calling, put some foam on the walls, etc...

>Two areas in particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality.

Amen to that. I recently was interviewed remotely, and the voice call quality was unacceptably low- I could barely even understand the questions being asked!

I made a quick colloboration app with video chat and more features including a simple whiteboard. Check it out https://oorja.io

I don't understand the downvotes. I just felt excited sharing an app I built that also has a simple whiteboard. :(

I assume you were downvoted thinking you are "marketing" your app "without context", like SPAM

Don't be discouraged. I checked out your site (and github) Looks nice. I'll use the tool next time I need remote collaboration

Keep up the good work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com