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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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