The sad, sick life of the business traveller | Hacker News Reader

The sad, sick life of the business traveller

economist.com

23 pointstosh6 comments

I am always shocked at the amount of travel that companies assume needs to happen. (Hell, I'm still shocked that the majority of job posts of HN are for local employees only, often in the most expensive city in the United States).

Async communication has its problems, and it's nice to be in the same room now and then, but good video conferencing software/hardware is a hell of a lot cheaper than flying people all over the world for one or two day meetings all the time.

Unfortunately I've found that there is no remote replacement for real face to face interaction. Once people have good relationships, remote communication via video conference works well. Until these relationships exist, a few hours face to face can save weeks of email.

Edit: Remote working can work well - provided that there are regular face to face discussions.

Agree with using synchronous communication with video to solve things in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours of Slac back and forth, as an example, but not convinced about the utility of in-person meetings as a regular matter of course.

Even if you want to start things off with some face to face meeting time, I know a bunch of people who essentially fly across the country and back every week to sit down at a conference room table for a few hours with the same people - some of them love the frequent flyer miles and the nights in a hotel away from family pressure, some hate the constant airport drudgery, but none of them think it's useful. Just what management wants them to do.

I worked remotely for IBM for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 years. Although I was effective and consistently a top performer, that's mainly because I could do a lot of my work autonomously. IBM's conference call mentality made meetings truly unproductive. Teaming on the phone is very hard.

I'm now with a startup and we use Zoom all the time, around the globe. Almost like being there.

Flying for meetings? fuggedaboutit! Totally unnecessary in my opinion.

Isn't working face-to-face simply more productive?

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