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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

Because it's much harder to keep people motivated and it's harder to create an environment with efficient communication.

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EDIT: I actually love the idea of remote work and I would love it to succeed. I believe that if a company is 100% remote and adopts it processes accordingly, it might work.

I still think that for a traditional onsite business, it's very, very hard to include remote people into the process in a way that keeps them happy and included.

PS: You also have to distinguish between "remote" and "async", which do not necessarily need to go hand in hand.

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Having clocked several years with remote-only companies and several years with traditional onsite jobs, I would say that, ironically, remote companies have better communication. On any given 8-hour workday, I would probably clock several hours' worth of communication in various shapes and forms at remote companies. For onsite, many of my days might be spent sitting next to a bunch of people in an open plan office not ever exchanging a word.

Various hours spent per day on communication sounds rather inefficient though.

Not at all: In my experience communication is 50% of the job as a software engineer. It's 100% of the job as a software engineering manager of sorts.

And remote communication is way more efficient. Things like text chat, comments in ticket systems or project management systems like asana etc are "soft interrupts" that I find surprisingly frictionless. I can stay in concentration until I've reached a natural interrupt of sorts, then answer chat messages or read up on tickets, ask clarifying questions or loop in more people (sending out a soft interrupt, but not waiting for replies), get back into concentration, and restart the loop at the next interrupt.

The alternative: It is now 9:35am. You know you have to leave at 9:55 to get to your 10:00 meeting in the meeting room that's 5 minutes away. But 20 minutes is not enough to get into concentration, so you spend that time procrastinating. At 10:00 you're there. At 10:10, the asshole who is always late shows up. The meeting takes 50 minutes, because the only reason to EVER end a meeting is getting kicked out of the meeting room. In this case it was booked for the 10:00-11:00 slot. You spend 5 more minutes walking back to your desk. Within the 50mins of meeting time, you were talking for 5 minutes. 10 minutes of the other speakers' time contained information you actually needed. You arrive at your desk at 11:05. That's 90 minutes flushed down the tube that could have been 15 minutes' worth of text chat, and the timing basically prevents deep work for maybe that first half of that workday.

Totally agree, although sometimes I feel like I might as well work remote when people sitting next to me start talking to me on Slack. Yes, I'm wearing noise-cancelling headphones most of the time, but that's because we have a very noisy open office with support and sales people and music.

Do you actually prefer for people to tap you on the shoulder or wave their hand to get your attention?

Remote and async are definitely two separate concepts. I'm a remote CTO but I'm very much sync. I do afford some async to devs though

I work remote. Have been for 5 years.

> Because it's much harder to keep people motivated...

What? Are the beatings about to commence?

I stay motivated because I enjoy the product I work on. I stay motivated because I'm trusted to complete the work I promise to complete. If a company hires well, they won't have to "keep people motivated."

> ... and it's harder to create an environment with efficient communication.

Not really. Follow up every important conversation with an email. Do that and you're 99% there.

Not every employee has an abundance of intrinsic motivation that pushes them through the day. Many, many people require some extrinsic motivation. In practice, at a reasonably sane workplace, most of this motivation comes from peer pressure of watching your coworkers work hard, not from a manager swinging a hammer.

But the extrinsic motivation of colocated coworkers is still very important for many people.

> I stay motivated because I'm trusted to complete the work I promise to complete.

Part of that is due to peer pressure of not wanting to let my team down. That still exists outside of an office.

I believe more people can be trusted to do the right thing than "butts in seats" managers think.

I can definitely see that in a non remote first company, but what about a company where remote is in their DNA? I spent some time reading through alley.co ‘s manual on this yesterday and it seems like if you put a lot of thought into it you could mitigate some of that.

https://info.alley.co/remote-work

Yes, you need to put in some thought but it's possible, even for a large organization. Here at Cisco it's about half/half and it lets us dogfood our own collab tools (Webex Teams, telepresence gear, etc).

Communication is key. Whenever I need direction on a particular problem or opinions on an approach face to face wins (for me) every time.

I would say it is different, not harder. It requires different styles of leadership and communication, and when you do gather in person, your time needs to be spent differently. It only seems hard if you've never done it and have to learn new habits while losing old ones.

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