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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I agree that those robots on wheels seem pretty silly whenever I've seen them but:

>All the tech for remote work is here already

I'm not sure collaboration software/hardware is really there yet. It incrementally improves and at least part of the problem is probably getting widespread adoption of some specific solutions.

But working on something collaboratively in a conference room versus remotely is still a lot better for certain things. Mind you, I don't think tech can ever get all the way there for some purposes but it feels as if we can still do better than we do.

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> But working on something collaboratively in a conference room versus remotely is still a lot better for certain things

Can you please provide examples? Between Zoom, BlueJeans, and other conferencing software, I've yet to run into any collaboration issues that would have been solved by office visits. There's also the fact that most conferences now use screen-sharing as the default means of presenting, with many attendees calling in from their office desks.

The biggest problems I've encountered are usually centered around lazy or ignorant usage of the tools. For example people dialing in from some noisy environment with the mic on by default. This is becoming less of a problem though as it's no longer taboo to call them out for their negligence.

Do they have a replacement for whiteboards and sticky notes? Those are one of the biggest things that I haven't seen a solution for yet.

You can whiteboard in zoom.

You can sketch on a touch-enabled device which is not quite the same thing as people working things out on big conference room whiteboards.

That said, people could probably use tablets more systematically for sharing hand-drawn/written stuff in real time. Some of it is about adjusting to the realistically available tools as well. For large meetings where some people have to be remote, for example, we've switched things that we would have historically probably written on a whiteboard to shared docs online.

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