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Comment by klohto | Hacker News Reader

While this is no doubt great I don't really believe a statement "But most importantly, Frein said, it helps InVision build a better product". Under what metric? I don't believe that people who are forced to cooperate with video and screen sharing options can deliver a better product than these, who can walk up to a colleague and ask them in person or use a whiteboard to explain their problem. In the end, remote workers are logically forced to spent much more time in meetings that their "in-office" counterparts.

EDIT: You're very much all correct, but I still don't believe that I would be effective without any personal contact. Guess the experience is personal!

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I've remote worked for decades, and that isn't my experience.

Video/screensharing meetings are far more productive in my experience, but only if everybody is using the tool. Its frustrating to hold an in-person meeting at the office, and try to add remote folks. The local ones shut out the 'voice on the phone' and start drawing on boards and paper and it breaks down.

I spent 10 years in a company that had all meetings online, even if you were in the office. It was very productive, with all the automation tools at everyone's disposal at every meeting.

Also with our tool, it took an average of 30 seconds to get a meeting started. Vs the 15-minutes-late average starting time of in-person meetings

I agree. The core tools that allow full remote teams to even function can make a remote team more productive than the average team. Things like: documenting everything religiously, ditching physical location-specific security VPNs, recording everything, letting employees observe every meeting, cloud tools, etc.

For centralized teams, it's difficult to get to this point because it requires willpower and discipline to not take the "easy way out" and just talk about it in-person. Remote teams have an advantage here because there is no easy way out.

But, that comes with obvious drawbacks; it's not easy.

You're right that the worst case scenario is "semi-remote", even if that just means two centralized offices trying to collaborate.

One of the ideas I am warming up to is centralizing (say 75% of) hiring around specific cities, and paying for specific coworking space membership in those cities. You can remain a remote company, but employees have the freedom to organize days when they want to work together in those pre-selected locations.

"Also with our tool, it took an average of 30 seconds to get a meeting started."

You must have better phone-meeting tools than my company does.

Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product).

When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or so (depending on how far away folks were and the speed of light).

You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

It was wonderful. Our media node supported up to 100 participants; there was no friction to conversations, meetings, standups etc. I knew who was active (could see them talking/meeting on the map) and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed). It included chat with unlimited history, persistent document sharing and on and on. It took <10% cpu time even in big meetings, <1% when not in a conversation.

I just looked up TeamSpace, this is actually a super solid concept. This kind of tool actually makes me think the casual-conversation problem of remote work could actually be solved.

That's so funny.

I wanted to build exactly this product half a year ago, didn't know it existed.

I am glad to see it exists. But they really have to work on their design.

Edit: Maybe the skeumorphism isn't so bad actually at explaining the concept to outsiders.

> You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

I wouldn’t like it if people distracted me like that. Part of what I like about working remotely is that it forces asynchronous communication on people. Send me a message on slack and I can ignore it if I’m deep in thought. If you need to talk to me over voice chat, send me a message on slack asking me to join you in voice chat.

From the next paragraph:

> I knew who was active... and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed)

But that's also what makes remote working less effective in many cases.

Hey, may I ask why you decided to leave the company eventually? My email is mail@konstantinschubert.com

Sure! New financing meant the old leadership was out and a new group. They were all open-source and WebRTC. First meeting they were "Hey we can use open source and save a lot of effort!" and I instantly replied "We didn't write it ourselves because we weren't 'smart enough' to use open source. We did it because we needed performance guarantees. If we switch to open source, you'll have to tell us what we can give up".

Silence from them. Then a managed exit for me!

That's a bit sad. I wish the company all the best luck. The world needs their product. But just from looking at their website, I am worried about the quality of execution.

Unfortunately my company uses a product that we got in an acquisition that is not very good. (It's actually end-of-life right now but the new product isn't much better.)

There are good meeting solutions that make meeting remotely a lot easier. I happen to work on Webex Teams (full disclosure) but we dogfood our solution and having video meetings call participants in when it starts makes us jump into the meet without the old "wait till quorum is here, can you hear me, etc". Best, that happens by just adding @spark or @webex in the location of the calendar tool (Mail.app, Outlook…).

Phone is good as a backup to poor internet connection but HD video with good audio is so much better.

I think the point was that they're using their PCs, not phones, and that the meeting is PC-native, e.g. the meeting is conducted on the PC, as opposed to having an in-person meeting where someone is on the phone looking at the same thing on a PC.

> start drawing on boards and paper

Sounds like important brainstorming activities. How do you deal with this when you're remote?

For me, Wacom tablets or tablet-with-stylus kinds of devices.

Now it's not only a whiteboard, but I can take screenshots, collaborate with countless others, undo, search, zoom and pan infinitely, etc...

And they can be had for around $100 or less.

Plenty of real-time whiteboarding tools. Something simple like a shared google doc works well for 90% of it.

Which collaborative whiteboard solutions do you like?

We use https://www.notion.so/ for notes, tasks, wiki and project management. Google Docs for quick stuff or formal writeups.

Occasionally we'll use OneNote online or https://awwapp.com/ which has more freeform drawing if we need it, but otherwise it's usually just typing stuff out in lists.

This is all on peoples computers, no fancy video-conferencing setups. Those are almost always a waste of money and never work well.

Hrm. None of these really seem like whiteboarding though.

I'm not sure what you mean then, what is whiteboarding exactly?

Using whiteboard and notepad features of the collaboration tool. Which are legible and visible to everyone all the time, not just if you're looking over somebody's shoulder

I suppose you could point a webcam at the whiteboard, although there are a lot of options out there for online collaboration. We use MS stuff at work and multiple people can live-edit Word, One Note, etc. docs for example.

I wrote a full comment and then deleted it because our blog talks a lot about this. At the risk of being downvoted for pushing my employer's blog, I'll leave you with a blog post:

https://blog.aha.io/remote-workers-vs-office-workers/

Notable bits:

> People get more done when they have autonomy

> the office is filled with distractions. This is especially true for those who are in an open-office space, where they are 15 percent less productive, have more trouble concentrating, and are not too pleased with their sound privacy.

> People are often surprised to learn that remote workers are actually more engaged than in-office counterparts. [0]

> Perhaps the greatest benefit of remote work is that it makes the way for sustainable happiness — giving people the chance to pursue their passions both in work and in life

And this is not said in the article, but happy people produce better work.

Also, there are more sources in the blog post.

We've written a lot about it, if you want to read more: https://blog.aha.io/?s=remote

[0] https://hbr.org/2012/08/are-you-taking-your-people-for

I don't agree that your points can be taken universally. I have employed several people who have performed very poorly with autonomy because they didn't have the motivation to own the things they were working on.

Other people working remotely suffer terribly with emotional problems if they don't have enough contact time with real people. Again, some thrive and enjoy the freedom and lack of commute but plenty of people have ditched remote working.

In terms of distractions, some people don't like "distractions" but plenty of companies rely on what might be seen as noise to cause chance encouters, overhearing of conversations and the banter and energy that is much easier to generate in an office.

In terms of work/life balance, remote working sounds great but plenty of people work in offices and still have work life balance. Some of those people's "life" is their co-workers and the time in the pub after work is their social life (not mine but don't judge).

If you are having “chance encounters” continuously for 8 hours every day (in most open office, there is always a conversation somewhere in earshot), you aren’t doing any work. Most engineers recognize this, and drown them out with headphones.

I agree that these are not universal truths. But I also think that remote workers tend to be self selecting. Those who are successful remote workers do have "the motivation to own the things they're working on" and that fact builds a very strong team.

> terms of distractions, some people don't like "distractions" but plenty of companies rely on what might be seen as noise to cause chance encouters, overhearing of conversations and the banter and energy that is much easier to generate in an office.

I greatly prefer using a corporate message service (Google Hangouts Chat, Slack, etc.) for corporate conversations and banter because the conversations are not ephemeral, and you can catch up on things that are happening. Now, obviously, people can have private conversations too, but I think everyone being able to see the public conversations promotes cohesion and alignment.

my problem is:

my home is filled with distractions.

thus if I work remotely I need to go get an office to be as productive as I might be at my best in an non-remote office.

Being remote helps InVision build better products because it forces us to use our own tools.

You mentioned that it's much easier for people to grab a colleague in person and show them something on a whiteboard versus having a virtual meeting - and use this to conclude that it's easier to build products in person versus remotely. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it isn't true; but as a virtual company InVision is forced to find product solutions to these problems, which leads to innovation. That's how being a remote company helps us build better products.

To continue with the whiteboarding example: We created a tool called Freehand that allows you to have virtual whiteboarding sessions that are more flexible than physical whiteboards. Multiple people can whiteboard at the same time, which is harder in person. You can add comments to the whiteboard, create shapes, use colors, and more. Freehands are saved, so you can look back on them later more easily than a physical whiteboard. I think it's more powerful than an actual physical whiteboard and have seen non-remote companies adapt it. You can try it out yourself at: https://freehand.invisionapp.com/

Obviously, not everything about our product is perfect today, but I hope this explains how being remote leads to product innovation.

Disclosure: Obviously, I work at InVision.

It's subjective but I believe it. If remote work is set up well then there is much less emphasis on meetings and much more focus on good written communication. With remote teams distributed across timezones with their own work schedules, async communication is key and systems get developed to allow that. When it's part of daily work to ensure everything is designed and specced properly, communicated well, and there's mechanisms in place to keep the team in sync then it's much easier for management/product to also stay on top of what's happening without endless meetings.

> much more focus on good written communication

IMO, this is such an underrated benefit of remote work. Pushing people towards chat tools, email, and digital drawing tools automatically documents everything. No more wondering what did Joe say in the meeting 3 weeks ago, now I just search my email and/or chat.

Next on my list to look for is a video chat plugin that will transcribe the entire meeting and email everyone afterwards.

I have worked both remotely and in-office. In-office is good for collaborating on how to architect code, in the early days of a product. But as the organization matures, you have an established architecture, style, etc., and are adding or tweaking features. When you get to that point, remote work is excellent. You are able to slice off work to people who can sit in their corners and execute on those smaller pieces of the vision. They are not interrupted by others, they can both focus and relax as works best for them. It works. (And, FWIW, when we did major architecture work, we did fly into a shared location for a few days to hash things out together.)

That being said, people are all different - specific people may work better in one environment or the other. You may just personally fit in well in an office.

Why can't that case be handled by Slack + a collaborative drawing application?

Sure, with Slack you have the option of being ignored/receiver not noticing the message, but a remote-only company should have methods to discourage that. For example, people could set 'office hours' where they agree to be butt-in-chair for some chunk of time every day and actively monitoring Slack.

Their product is a computer-based design collaboration tool. It's hard to work remotely, but that's the exact challenge they are trying to confront.

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