Hacker News Reader

Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

People say that, yet in my experience it's not actually true. We just need to communicate enough to coordinate. I'm not a great communicator, I don't think most people at my work are great communicators, yet we work just fine as a remote company. I feel people exaggerate this belief.

Regular chatter in public chat channels seems sufficient. What really seems to matter is work ethics.

View on HN

Maybe the bar is lower than you think. As your comment demonstrates, you are able to form complete sentences that are either correct in terms of spelling and grammar, or so close that I can't tell the difference.

I don't know where exactly the bar is, but a sentence is certainly below it if I can't figure out whether someone told me they did X or they are asking me to do X.

I think it also makes a difference if you work with people across different timezones or not.

Regular chatter might be good enough to communicate between people in roughly the same timezone. However, If I send an unclear chat (or email) to a colleague who's starting her day when mine has already ended, she can't act on my message and we'll have to waste another day clearing up that miscommunication.

I’m on my second remote job, and I find all HN threads on the subject contain this bizarre exaggeration about how different it is, and how you need to be a certain kind of person, and have stellar communication skills. I feel like it’s the same as people warning others off living in Seattle - i.e. gate keeping.

And how are these hypothetical poor communicators performing at non-remote jobs, anyway?

I don't think you have to be an experienced essayist or something. If you can read HN and make comments I think you've probably met the bar. I've worked with people who really struggle to convey or understand technical discussions in text, such that I usually had to talk with them face to face to communicate anything non trivial.

I don't work remotely as such, but usually with distributed teams. Personally I find skype chats or similar the best way. Writing emails is quite a long winded way to get to where you want and takes me a while. Chats are more two way so you can judge where the other person is with understanding the problem, and has the benefit of being written down for future reference.

Yeah, I find Skype or Slack or some other form of IM to be absolutely invaluable in making remote work effective. But it's also semi-synchronous and interruptive, relative to email.

> Regular chatter in public chat channels seems sufficient.

That means your teammates' communication skills are sufficient! Congratulations.

> What really seems to matter is work ethics.

I disagree. Work ethics mean nothing if you don't understand the work that needs to be done, because the problem or the approach is not communicated clearly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com