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Comment by kevinventullo | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, the conference call linked lower in the thread has increased my skepticism for remote work. Another commenter pointed out how much smoother everything would have gone if everyone had been in the same room.

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I love such comments. The guy has a multimillion dollar private business which is at the same time his hobby and a dream, and does it in the way he likes. And someone comes and says his meetings can be more efficient..

Yeah that is HN!

But commenters are taking evidence of how this guy runs his business as evidence that that method is effective. Shouldn't there be comments pointing out if this isn't effective?

Not really. It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better. The systems and people involved are usually much more complicated.

The world also owes itself more compassion. “Thousand foot” criticism lacks compassion.

You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.

That’s a bit far. From my perspective, the point is that looking at inefficiencies in isolation is as bad as looking at benefits in isolation.

Making a frank assessment about the efficiency of meetings is probably of limited value in and of itself in abstractly assessing the overall equation of trade-offs in running a distributed vs collocated business. Even more so when concretely assessing this particular company.

There's an asymmetry between the strong negative reaction to criticism but not to praise, even though criticism is more likely to offer substantive points. This suggests to me that people are mostly offended at the arrogance of the commenter rather than working about the risk that we could all become mistaken through reading overconfident criticism.

Every bully I remember tried to mask their bullying as “helpful” or positive in some way.

Every dictator promised to make the nation better. This is not a good reason to reject politicians trying to make the nation better.

More like a policy of avoiding drive-by commentary on businesses with which one has little knowledge or investment.

> It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better.

People pay me to do exactly that. Come in with a fresh, unbiased view on things, look at how stuff works and what could be improved.

It's not about telling people that everything they've done before is BS but if there are things that are not working well, just tell them.

It's easy to look at a something in isolation and assume you are qualified to cast judgement on where it can be improved but often a decision might have both a negative consequence and also a much further reaching positive consequences too. The sort of people who like to judge things in isolation miss those kinds of complexities.

This kind of arm-chair critic seems to be on the rise on HN as well. People making short, sharp judgements based off very little evidence yet they still feel justified as an expert by their self assessment.

If you think they are overconfident, then say so. If you think their analysis misses something, then say so. But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

> If you think they are overconfident, then say so.

I thought I literally did just that?

> If you think their analysis misses something, then say so.

I've done that in the past and it usually just descends into stupid augments where the ill-informed only dig their heals in deeper rather than acknowledging their mistake. I mean if they weren't someone who was over confident about their own opinion then they wouldn't be the sort to make those kind of remarks to begin with.

> But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

I'm not against assessments in general. I'm against specific types of non-constructive assessments from people who are just blatant armchair critics.

If someone has a the experience to offer a constructive assessment then odds are they wouldn't delivery it as a passive-aggressive one liner.

> I thought I literally did just that?

The point of my comment is that the discussion should take place on the merits of the criticism, not the arrogance of the person who would dare criticize. The fact that you mixed together the two is not a good rebuttal.

> I've done that in the past...

Bad arguments in the past are not a good reason to abandon the structure of good arguments in the future. Get better debating partners rather than trying to avoid the structure of healthy debate.

> blatant armchair critics

If some people praise "this is a good business practice" and others point out that, on the face of the evidence, it appears to be exact the opposite (i.e., that the conference calls are disorganized/confused), it is not unreasonable to point this out. It does not require special insight.

It's got nothing to do with the competency of the arguments presented and everything to do with the futility of arguing with someone who has already made their mind up. This very conversation is a demonstration to that fact.

wolfram admits in the article that his company can and should be bigger. fwiw.

I can't add anything to that comment except: , I know that's right.

Well there's always a trade-off, isn't there?

For me it does not look like a criticism. He simply is not convinced to the idea of remote work, which means that he does not see it fit for his way of working.

> how much smoother everything would have gone if everyone had been in the same room.

Definitely true, but you'd also have to watch the livestream of everyone prepping for and commuting to work for a fair comparison.

I tend to agree. Unless there are genuine reasons to work permanently remote, an face to face interaction is always better. I also worry about the loneliness aspect of remote work. For all its downsides, the Office provides a real life socially active environment. It's pleasant to have people around, and to have water cooler conversations, or share a coffee with an employee from a totally different department. It's feels pretty good. I may be wrong, but I also feel that work is more than producing code. It's also about interactions with people.

That's all very nice but it's all not work related. Water cooler conversation may be great for incubating the very very beginning ideation of some 20% project, but come on, how often does a 20% project really happen. When it comes to real work (well defined work), where what you need is a mix of concentration time and focused interactions to address questions, remote call could be much more efficient than face-to-face meetings that end up engulfing a dozen people just because "it's possible, everyone's here."

Humans aren't robots. If you want to keep them productive you should treat them as humans.

I think you're confusing "comfortable" with "productive". At some point in life a job is just a job and the job of the job is to get the job done. I'm happiest when I get it done, when everyone around me gets it done, together, on time and well.

Efficiency isn't everything. In my experience the problems with remote work are often more trust-related. If course this depends on the industry. We had a case in a fintech company where remote employee ended up doing some quite bad things for the company for financial gains. I think it is much more difficult to do that kind of deeds if you actually interact face to face with the people affected.

It's not always about projects. In order to be productive at a company, there is much more to do. In water cooler conversations, you learn who you have to talk with for this or that, you learn about meetings you may attend to learn new things, you learn that little trick that makes your work more efficient or about that colleague who is really weird, or about how to solve administrative matters. Not everything is in a manual or in a web site.

To give a very appropriate example, I think that if I was working in the same office as Wolfram, I may learn about his cool setup in water cooler conversations. In fact, I think it would make me a better engineer having water cooler conversations with Stephen Wolfram. I am not sure I would get the same benefit from interacting with him through screen sharing or phone calls.

I work in research, surrounded by PhD students. These students learn from the interaction with more experienced people, and I have to admit I also learn many things from them. Remote working would in theory be possible for most of us, but it would not achieve the same result.

I don't understand your point. I worked remotely for ten years and there was constant banter in the slack (skype before that) channels. We would spend as much time socializing as we would if we were in the office. I won't make any assumptions about your work experience but I believe most of these criticisms tend to come from people that have never worked at a remote-first company. If anything, remote is slightly more effective since you can have watercooler chats and go back to them months later to remember what Steve said about his cool personal infrastructure projects. :)

You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel?

You can like your remote job. I agree there are ways to make it work, for certain people and certain jobs, and it can even be better than a workplace in some cases. I am not criticizing it, just explaining the advantages I find from working in an office with other people (btw, I have done remote work too, though never in a remote-first company).

I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot.

> You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel?

> I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot.

Your point would be a lot more effective without the insults. I also wonder if you are unable to see the irony of your assertion that different people have different preferences and then telling me I must be a robot if I don't share your preference.

It's even more ironic given this person (or an ironic robot?) is socializing via a computer with someone else not even at work and learning about Wolfram's setup, something that'd be antisocial, uncomfortable, or seen as slacking off in many offices...

Why should it be antisocial or uncomfortable? I also prefer to see my family in real life than by telephone, but that does not mean I find phones antisocial.

To repeat my point: I understand there are advantages in working from home, and that for some people the way of socializing may be one of these advantages. What I found surprising was that pault did not understand that I prefer personal interactions when there are slack channels.

Your original comment did not say that you prefer personal interactions. You presented a bunch of your opinions about the effectiveness of in-person communication as if they were facts. Several more times in this thread you've written that it's just a preference then immediately asserted that in person communication is superior. That's what I didn't understand.

Also, you mentioned that you never worked at a remote first company, and I can say from experience that working for a company that has most of its employees in an office and a few remotes is the worst of both worlds. You get left out of all the decisions and social banter and all you get is a few crumbs when someone remembers to check the slack channel and see what you're up to. It's possible that if you worked for a company where everything happens online you would feel differently.

This is an interesting perspective. I guess having the company set up in a remote-first manner vs. just having a few employees working remote are indeed very different scenarios then, and if one is ever to work remotely, they should only aim for a remote-first company.

I did not know robot was considered an insult. It was just a lame joke. I apologize if it hurt you so much (ironically, this is the kind of misunderstanding that happens much less often in real life).

You may have different preferences, I did not say anywhere you should share mine. What I said was precisely that you should be able to understand that other people prefer to interact with their coworkers in the real world, not that you should do the same.

I feel like some people get a lot out of it, and others not so much. As in, if someone has the type of personality where they work best with lots of "heads-down" time on projects (and frankly many of the best engineers I know are like this), give them that space to do their best work without being interrupted by That One Person Who Always Comes Over to Chat. Most offices and even most orgs / teams have THAT DUDE. If you can't think of who it is, it might be you. Sometimes Dude has good ideas, but a lot of the time Dude just wastes time, and worst of all, wastes the time of others. Time that those other people could be spending Doing Work, but because Dude doesn't know when to can it, and because they're obligated to have their butts in their seats, they just make small talk while dying a little inside each day.

I've also seen people be incredibly productive because they can just walk over with a few people to another person and settle something in real-time. Doing that over email might take a day or two. Doing that over Slack could also probably work, and given how many people are in a meeting / out at lunch / OoO / whatever not at their desk, I'd say it's about a 50/50 chance that the unannounced walk-up actually works in person anyway.

Sometimes Dude is also one of the best engineers you know when he can just get some “heads down” time to himself, but when forced to be in an environment with many easy distractions, he acts like a kid on the playground. Or something.

I’ve been Dude in the past. Yesterday I was probably in danger of becoming Dude but for my general introversion and maturity. I walked around listening to James Brown instead. I think flexibility and a culture demonstrating proper time management and production would help. It’s important to socialize but without detracting from others. Yesterday, I just couldn’t sit or stay at my desk - I needed some air. In hindsight, I was pretty amped up from a meeting.

Absolutely. You could argue that a water cooler/coffee machine conversation is unlikely to be distracting as compared to interrupting people at their desk. If people are by the water cooler, kitchen, canteen, etc chances are they wanted to get away from their desks and would be open to engaging with others (even if bery briefly)

For what it's worth, I seem to recall reading that the most effective engineers are not necessarily the ones that (heads down) create the best solutions for some specific challenges, but those that know who is the best person to ask about (or task with) a specific problem. So, the Dude might be contributing quite a bit.

There's also the person who seems to not be contributing but who gently steers others towards a solution. Without this person, the team wouldn't work well, but looking in from the outside (or even from the inside sometimes), the person looks like they're doing very little.

You may find it pleasant to have people around and water cooler conversations, but many others do not and have no need or desire for work to double as a social outlet.

It's not (just) about social outlet, it's about growing and learning professionally. Unless your job is to blindly implement features someone else adds to a spec sheet it's always worthwhile to get professional input from people from different fields. Often they'll have unique ideas and insights that comes from having a different background and different experiences.

To add to this, in no circumstance have I ever seen developers spending 100% or even close to 90% of their time actively writing code or thinking about code and working. Heck, for most of the ones I’ve worked with, it’s probably closer to 60% productive time during office hours, with the most productive being somewhere between 80-100% busy.

Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, doesn’t mean everyone else also hates people and chitchat.

> Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, doesn’t mean everyone else also hates people and chitchat.

Downvoted for tone. You do not need to name call here on HN.

Yeah but the difference is when you work remote, you can use that other 40% of your time to:

- run errands

- do the laundry

- hit the gym for a while

- cook a tasty lunch or even dinner for later.

Whereas in the office, you just use that time for chitchat, HN/reddit, wondering around etc.

And I'm not a reclusive jerk, I like my coworkers and I do enjoy it when we meet up in person, but I don't need to see them every day. We have a short voice call most days, and we catch up irl possibly 6-12 times a year which is already more than I see some of my friends who live further away.

Honestly there's just so much more time in the day for my personal hobbies and activities that I don't think I could ever go back to on site, or even full-time/more than 4 days/week for that matter.

I also do a lot of "watercooler chit chat" over slack and, to a lesser extent, voice chat. I don't need to be in the same physical space as my coworkers to do that. I mean, before starting my career, most of my tech chit chat was online, since my offline friends at the time were typically not too interested in tech.

What I do find problematic is when the majority of a company is in the same physical space and only a few are remote, as then the remote people tend to lose out.

Software engineering is only part writing code. A lot of time is thinking, understanding, collaborating and designing. Also a lot of testing.

But that's more than possible when working remotely.

Emphasizing public-first communication methods is a big one. Don't just send a slack message to Bob asking about that thing, tag Bob in the #thing channel so others can see and weigh in if needed. Don't just do a code review over a call and leave, write up a quick summary and post it somewhere. Have meetings where people who might not technically be related to the project are involved somewhat.

Sure, it's work, but it's not more work in my opinion, just different. There are absolutely downsides to remote work, but I really truly believe in and have experienced the benefits too.

There's a hybrid approach we use here at Wolfram where a lot of employees work remotely 99% of the time, but at least 2-3 times a year are in town for our conference, picnic, etc... We also have virtual 'meet-ups' where remote workers can interact with the corporate or regional offices for video games, activities, etc. It's not a perfect solution, but does help keep interactions and idea sharing greater than zero.

I've been working remote for decades and my observation is that whats standing inbetween great communication in remote teams are often trival, easily fixable things like poor software and hardware.

When it comes to hardware, people use whatever headset and camera they have, connected to wifi served by the a cheap SOHO router. More or less the stuff you use to call your parents over skype once a week.

Just curious: In your opinion, what are proper tools / setup in hard- and software terms that makes remote collaboration as efficient as on-site interaction?

That depends on what you work with. My productivity as programmer got higher but my ability to help with hardware issues went down a lot. Helping over phone or chat to replace a PSU is tricky.

I've worked remote for the past 4 years so I think I can weigh in on this.

If there are meetings in person you really need to have a good conference call phone, preferably with an external mic.

Like this: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/images/i/000/016/072/origi...

For things like screen sharing, the conference room must have a very solid connection as screen sharing typically uses a lot of bandwidth.

For the remote employee, you need:

* Solid headset. I've tried using a USB one but it had interference at terrible times. Once I was on a call presenting to the client when interference started making odd noises. Now I use a USB headset with noise canceling mic.

* Good fast reliable internet!

* Solid voice-over-ip phone if you need to talk on the "phone" a lot. I use DialPad which are the makers of UberConfrence. The quality is _way_ better than using Google Voice, skype, etc.

If you want what they use in places like the Senate and other Big Boy meetings, get a Shure MX418D/C and a real external audio interface with phantom power. I use mine for gaming, and while it's totally overkill, it's a purpose-made professional quality desktop voice mic. They're tanks and will last 20 years. You can buy replacement parts for them. They're also on eBay for ~$120 if you keep an eye out. Pair that mic with something like a Focusrite Scarlett Solo (~$110), Zoom UAC-2 ($250), Universal Audio Arrow ($500, has built-in DSP accelerator [offload]), or something crazy overkill like a RME ADI-2 Pro ($2000), Antelope Zen Studio+ ($2500), or an Avid HDX system (~$5k with Pro Tools) with external Neve preamp (~$3500) and a Neumann U87 Ai ($3600) mic. That's if you're trying to record the next Grammy Award-winning track and have an unlimited budget to get world-class audio. For reference, something like a $400 Shure SM7B is what you'd hear on most broadcast radio stations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpU6H2EtjLI has a comparison of the $3600 Neumann U87 vs the $230 Rode NT1-A for comparison. You won't be able to hear the difference over a conference call.

If only the mic was my problem and not the network! On cable here (Virgin, UK) and impossible to get VoIP to work well (lack of delay, crisp audio etc). Have tried half a dozen service providers and a range of codecs (including Opus).

When my mobile phone has less latency and better sound, I know my VoIP is screwed.

RME user here with plenty of nice microphones and preamps to choose from.

It’s been years since I went through the trouble of setting one up for a conference call. These days I just use my Sony Bluetooth headphones. IIRC, the difficulty with most (not DAW or professional audio) software on Mac and any external audio interface, is that it doesn’t actually allow selecting which input to use, only the device. So while I might select “RME Fireface 802” in Chrome as the input device, I can’t select Input 1, 9, or 12 as the input channel to use for microphone. This used to be possible with apps like Soundflower, though, I’m not sure what the best solution is nowadays.

UA DSP for conference calls, now wouldn’t that be something. Ha-ha.

> You won't be able to hear the difference over a conference call.

The difference between the microphones is stunning, I thought I was not going to be able to tell the difference, but the Neumann is extremely more, should I say, articulate? the Rode sounds "stiff." But nobody is going to be singing over a conference call, true.

Full commerical network hardware. Netgate makes the pfsense firewall and they make hardware for remote workers. You can traffic shape and have a VPN to your company and ensure that voice and your workstation have the bandwidth they need and your home gets the rest. A good firewall at your home can make all the difference and once that doesnt have yearly subscriptions is a good route to go.

I used to be a big pfsense fan, but Ubiquiti's UniFi is my jam now. If you get their gateway, PoE switches, and a couple of APs, it's by far the best SoHo system I've ever used. Enterprise features that are easy enough for non-network admin technical users to figure out, auto firmware updates, rock-solid reliability, all for around the cost of a high-end "gaming router" that will crash weekly.

Unifi WiFi + edgerouter lite isn’t bad either, software isn’t as cohesive but the ERL is solid and hasn’t been an issue for me at all over 4 years on gigabit internet. WiFi is rock solid after initial setup in a VM (does not need to be running controller continuously).

Have you noticed how incredibly resistant people are to doing a thing about it? Just getting anyone to put on a headset is like pulling teeth.

Maybe if companies paid for it it wouldn't be a problem, you know, like equipment at an office.

One source of resistance I've seen is that people don't like being forced to add cameras pointing at them to their set up.

> ... whats standing inbetween great communication in remote teams are often trival, easily fixable things like poor software and hardware.

Ironically for a big chunk of the time I've been working as an engineer, people have been falling back to consumer software instead of using broken entreprise videoconferencing.

> When it comes to hardware, people use whatever headset and camera they have, connected to wifi served by the a cheap SOHO router.

I mostly haven't noticed any huge problems here, but maybe I've just been lucky.

Now that I think of it my home WiFi has been getting worse over the years, and getting new top rated gear didn't help.

(I have seen some thread here lately about advanced troubleshooting of wireless networks and I consider getting the spectrum analyzed somehow.)

I may have formulated this a bit poorly, by exemplifying my experience, what I meant was that people that work remote and uses voice, video, chat, should spend more time making sure their setup works really well, with good audio and video quality.

Any resources you could share along these lines? I'm definitely interested in improving my setup.

Don't kid yourself, it's not going to be as efficient. Audio and delay are big issues, as not everybody can talk at the same time. But the point is that it is doable, and some companies have good success with that. They are usually small-medium companies though, my guess is we won't be seeing any 100% remote unicorns popping up.

elastic?

You mean like github?

It continues to amaze me that most businesses use worse conferencing tools than the average e-sports clan. High-quality, low-latency conferencing and screen sharing is essentially a solved problem if you don't use completely crappy tools.

Which tools should you use?

Zoom.

Most businesses have far more requirements than a e-sports clan, namely security, standardization, and dealing with large numbers of people. An e-sports clan can change their service in a day with one email. A large organization can't move that nimbly.

We changed our voice conferencing to Discord since it worked better than anything else we had tried

Wolfram has 800 employees, most of them tech, which puts payroll at ~160m. Suppose 30% margin, thats about $50m earnings, at 20p/e thats about $1b/unicorn.

Both GitLab and InVision are 100% remote unicorns, last valued at $1.1B [1] and $1.9B [2] respectively.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/invision-valued-at-1-9-bil...

Haha I did set up the stage for the multiple slam dunks I received as replies. This is really amazing.

Seems to me like the biggest benefit of a solid remote working culture would be the vastly larger hiring pool. That should be weighed against the downsides.

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