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Comment by pishpash | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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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