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Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

However much I like Gitlab, the “disadvantages” section is a joke. Working alone with only video, chat and email is a huge fundamental change in how work is done and I’m pretty sure we as a society don’t really know yet what impact it has on social development, interpersonal skills, empathy, sympathy etc. they should at least acknowledge that.

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I'm a GitLab employee, and before working here always struggled with remote work. There's a tipping point, though, at an all remote company where when everyone is remote, the communication structures of the company adapt to having clear communication through video, chat, and email. We do a lot of video chat here. It's hard to describe what it's like, but it certainly doesn't feel like we're all locked away in little boxes with only awkward or indirect ways to interact with each other.

I'm not discarding your personal experience. It might be great. I just have questions on how easily remote working is glamourized by the Silicon Valley / Tech crowd. If I were really cynical, I'd say it's just a massive cost saving effort by tech corporations of which the long term impact is still very vague. I'm not that cynical, I enjoy working remote too on some days, but you catch my drift.

> what impact it has on social development, interpersonal skills, empathy, sympathy etc.

Why is work supposed to provide for that? It's not kindergarden where, in addition to "activities" (ie. job assignments), you're also told who to play with.

It's not about what it's supposed to do. Any time spent among people and communicating with them affects your interpersonal skills, whether it's work, family outings or kindergarten. And human beings have thousands of years of being predominantly among other human beings.

So go work from a coffee shop or take a walk. I'm not sure if anyone has told you, but it's not been normal for humans to go to an office five days a week for 8 hours a day for most of human history.

> And human beings have thousands of years of being predominantly among other human beings.

When working remote there's still interaction with other people (just through different channels). And then there's that time outside work, which - under normal circumstances - is the majority of the time people are awake.

The alternative to "butt in seat in the office" (which can be pretty non-communicative, for example when in an open plan office where you mustn't disturb anybody) isn't "never interact with anybody ever".

> Working alone with only video, chat and email is a huge fundamental change in how work is done

Is it? Since the dawn of time, plenty of jobs were done solo for most of the time.

There are plenty of existing jobs where people have to spend many hours by themselves. Think about truck drivers, they may spend weeks alone with nothing more than a few minutes chat to a fellow trucker they see at a truck stop.

Those solo jobs are a small minority of the workforce.

Trucking is the single largest job category in the US

That‘s not true. Truckers have radios (at least in Europe) and they they are interacting with other truckers in radius of ~10 miles. I had radio in my car and and it was even entertaining sometimes. I could ask advice, ask for fuel when I was empty, ask for police checkpoints. On private channel one can have virtually private conversation.

We should invent something like that, 'radio', thing for computers

truckers are outside, travelling, visiting places, constantly exposed to different circumstances and people.

I'm a GitLab employee, and I appreciate your concern for the disadvantages section. I think that we could enhance that section a little more to include other common concerns such as yours.

While I'm of course biased towards remote work, I can see the validity of people concerned with feeling isolated by working remotely. GitLab provides an option to pay for a coworking space for people who don't like working at home or by themselves. This is one way that you can mitigate the isolation issue while still maintaining the benefits of remote work.

Thanks for this feedback on the page, particularly the disadvantages section. I recently made iterations to the page with the goal of making it easier to digest -- it was made up of very long, redundant, numbered lists where people had contributed bits here and there over the years. I made sure not to remove any content from the page, but did combine and trim any content that was clearly repeated multiple times, which is why the disadvantages section is the length that it is. We also added new links like this one (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/transition-remote-work-1-mont...) to try to give a more authentic look at what the first month in a remote role can be like — both positive and negative, and there are more on the resources page.

There was no intention of downplaying the disadvantages, but I’m glad to know that’s how it comes across so that we can make it better. To start, I submitted a MR to reformat that section to mirror the advantages section. There will be more to come, but I also want to call out that the page is editable and we want others to contribute to it and make improvements. It’s meant to be an ever-evolving resource. This thread will also be linked on the “Remote-work resources” page for full visibility.

Honestly, people adapt, and they are still social creatures like they ve always been. On the contrary, i find the fact that most people's social life ends after they leave the office to be deeply troubling.

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