Hacker News Reader

Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Even with Zoom, Slack, BlueJeans, etc., there's an incredible amount of communication fidelity lost compared to in-person meetings. Running effective and productive in-person meetings is already hard enough and something that many companies struggle or fail at; adding in all this other imperfect technology to facilitate remote meetings makes it even harder. And this is assuming you've got the logistics of using the software down perfectly. If you're fumbling around with the software even once or twice a week to get a meeting off the ground, you're even further behind in-person teams.

View on HN

Having worked at half a dozen remote companies and a bunch of companies where I'm on site in the office I can tell you this from experience.

People in general suck at communication.

Those teams that are the most productive and produce the most - those that produce 10, 20 or 100 times more value than average teams do one thing really well that all the others suck at. Communication. They gel together well and produce a lot because they communicate well.

I've had a handful of experiences of working on teams that have 10X-100X productivity and I've loved working on every single one of them. They all had flawless and free flowing communication, whether you were in the office or remote, you were always kept in the loop. Their infrastructure was designed to facilitate ease of communication whether you were at your desk, in a meeting room, at home or on a beach 1,000 miles away.

Every single one of them, without exception designed their businesses to facilitate communication before they thought about anything else and every single one of them didn't skip a beat if everyone was in the office or the whole team was working from home, or even in the same time zone... and they don't need telepresence robots to assist with that.

Those that don't communicate well don't produce even when everyone's together in the office. Telepresence robots aren't going to help them communicate. We tried a device that was like an iPad on a Segway when I was at Kobo. It was a hilarious gimmick for a couple of weeks before we all decided it was stupid and went back to Bluejeans/Slack which was more than sufficient to communicate effectively.

I don't buy that, I have full time remote staff and our meetings are the same irrespective of if everyone is on location or all remote. Workout your process if it's not working. I can agree that meeting with someone you have never met before would be more effective in-person over remote. However a team that meets often can easily iron out the kinks and figure out what works for them.

Okay, sure. But this doesn't solve any of those issues. If anything it compounds them.

> incredible amount of communication fidelity lost compared to in-person meetings.

Yes, but is it critical ?

Do you really need that high fidelity interaction everyday of the week, all month ?

I feel a lot of strategies can be used to mitigate the need for that much bandwidth and hi-fi interactions. There’s orgs where some people working together only meet once a week or once a month.

If I remember well github teams only physically meet once every many months.

There are of course downsides to that, but the upsides (e.g. living a healthy life) can compensate them largely enough.

It's critical for politicking with people that don't internet so good. As a remote worker, that's the main thing I can't do. Some people can only form connections in person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com