Comment by settsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by settsu | Hacker News Reader

The issue I often have with discussions of remote work vs. on-site, is how much confirmation bias tends to be incorporated into the conclusions made.

After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in-office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn’t.)

And, frankly, I find neither inherently, categorically superior. It has far more to do with a number of unique variables, among them: culture, software tools, and the people themselves.

So while I do largely agree with the core argument of the linked post (roughly summarized: asynchronous communication helps facilitate productivity for knowledge workers), I also feel too much emphasis is placed on working remotely as inherent in part of the solution.

How about we just teach and incentivize people to, for example, not interrupt others unnecessarily, how to recognize when someone may be deeply focused on a task, how to indicate such an effort is currently underway, plus to recognize when it may be appropriate, necessary, and healthy to stop the “deep work“ and address communal, biological, and psychological needs? All regardless of the exact mode of the work.

While "remote workers are more productive" is in the article's title, I disagree that the author is suggesting that working remotely is a necessary part of the solution. The article's subtitle is "Async isn’t just for remote teams".

I think the post makes it clear to that office workers could benefit a ton from async communication. And I agree completely. Sync communication at my previous job was such a drain on my productivity. For me, Slack made communication easier, but it made focus more difficult and work more stressful.

I think you're right that software tools can make a big difference. The author seems to be promoting its product - Twist - as a great Slack alternative. And I think it looks solid.

Yup, the article is advertising Async, not remote. This is a company blog post, so it's always about advertising, even when it's not explicit.

They promote Async, because they also claim that their coloboration tool (email/slack alternative) is the right option for async.

Slack can be used as a asynchronous mechanism - but too many teams develop into using direct IMs/convos as a preferred communications style.

It can be but nothing about it makes that the default or even easy.

I’d love to see companies abandon chat in favor of discussion threads.

For “water cooler” conversations video is almost always better.

Yeah, cultural norms are what matter here (vs the tool per se).

Slack usage covers the whole gamut, from one extreme [proper (ie, consistent) use of channels, status / DND, and notification settings, making it a very effective, developer-friendly and management-helping async-oriented system] to the other [flowstate-killing, nonsense-generating chaos of interrupts and noise].

Slack is entirely designed to encourage casual chat-like conversation with emoticons, reactions & so on.

Want meaningful async communication? Think of the UIs of usenet clients or even email clients.

Switched from Slack to Twist six months ago and have not looked back. Slack is great if you need your focus to be online and immediate response. However, as a developer, I found Slack to be nothing but constant interruptions and needing to dig back through long threads wondering if I missed something important. Life is much saner (and productive) after switching to Twist.

I agree with you that neither is inherently superior. However, I think this with regards to the business and generating business value. If you consider the quality of love improvements, they are phenomenal for the employee.

Personally, I believe in a hybrid solution. You work remotely say 2 days of the week, and you spend rest of the time in the office. This makes sure that you get your dose of water-cooler talk, as well as having time to yourself to get things done.

I would like to see an improvement in the culture, too, and I've seen organisations experiment with "Do Not Disturb" desks, with very limited success.

Every office I've been in has been open-plan. If it's full of developers it will mainly be quiet and conducive to work. Put just one person in there who needs to talk, especially Sales and Marketing, and it's all going to fall apart.

^ This, 100%. It's all about decoupling physical presence from notions of "working" or "interruptible".

I find async comm tools like Slack invaluable for allowing ppl to display their status (eg "DND"), as well as the ability to control notifications -- and to catch up on topics when unable to participate in realtime. These things have immense value, whether you're remote or not.

I'll never forget the experience, some 20 years ago, being on the critical path for an imminent major release, heads-down, working furiously to deliver a mission-critical feature, and enduring a steady stream of shoulder-taps (despite headphones and body language) that made it ~impossible to do my job. Silver lining was, it made it crystal clear to me that I needed to carve out time for "deep work", and empowered me to push for and receive permission to work remotely at a time and in an org where that was a nearly unique exception. I chose to spend about half my working days remote, and across various jobs and companies and industries since, have sought and pushed for and mostly maintained this balance. I'm convinced we'd all be happier and more effective if such a balance were available more broadly.

I find that acceptance of remote work (or conversely, aversion to remote work / working from home) is an excellent signal of whether or not a company will be a good cultural fit for me and a satisfying place to work.

Actually I think you kinda nailed it earlier with “among them: ...the people themselves”. A company’s / managers job should be to maximize each workers productivity and comfort (because comfort will lead to longer service, and longer service means increased productivity). Given that studies show that remote work isn’t destroying productivity, the rational thing to do is to allow workers who find remote work beneficial to work that way without stigmatizing them.

Great points, the pendulum is still swinging so I expect more and more pro-remote content in the coming years.

I personally prefer mostly remote work, but I think it's much harder to pull off - there are no play books on how to do it and if you don't do it from the start it becomes exponentially more difficulty to execute correctly.

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