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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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