Comment by jpincheira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpincheira | Hacker News Reader

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I'm totally convinced that video & voice communication –not only chat/text personas– is what will allow any remote organization to be successful, by bringing their teams together, improving culture, team spirit, their sense of belonging and ultimately having more productive and happier teams.

Sync/real-time communication is not needed for all the processes in a remote team, and you should go async by default and only use sync for cases where you _really_ have to get together. This is how companies Gitlab [1] have really become successful in doing remote work.

A remote team can be successful by using async/non-real-time communication, especially when you're pairing it with an async platform like Standups which is built from the ground up to support the async comm style. I wrote a blog article about how async is determinant to make remote work "work" within your team/org [2].

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/

[2] https://standups.io/blog/how-async-communication-can-help-yo...

And a lot of people probably undervalue video specifically. I was probably one of them but I've had a manager who insisted on camera-on for both group and 1:1 calls unless you were in some environment where you couldn't for bandwidth or other reasons. It really does make people more engaged.

I'm a remote dev for 5 years now and I have to say, most of the time synchronous communication didn't help much in terms of engagement. Good projects helped, a reason to do stuff (besides getting paid) helped, nice co-workers and managers helped.

Often synchronous communication is applied by managers because they lost control of their team and now try to monitor them closer so they don't step out of line.

It's like working overtime to compensate for bad planning or dropping home-office work all together because the company does bad.

I'm not saying 1:1 video isn't needed for some situations, but every day and even every week is often overkill. The best projects I had only required 1:1 videos every few months, most of them even only at the beginning.

This seems like a personality thing and reflects the type of culture company leaders want to create. Every other comment in this thread is "I don't like video, not conducive to how I think/work" or "I like video, makes me feel engaged and part of a team". My bet is this is not a better/worse thing but more of a mars/venus thing (I'm definitely, as someone on a remote team myself, in the video camp).

The other strange thing you hear a lot is that any attempt to get people to be on-site or on-video (basically anything other than fully async, text only) is attributed to control-freak tendencies by terrible managers. Again going back to my above point and the fact that so many people here agree that video is better for them, I wish we could dispense with speculatively attributing motives so negatively and give people the benefit of the doubt that, right or wrong, they hold their POV because it is what they actually believe is best.

Yes, probably.

Guess, I'm seeing it like that, because I worked with control freaks.

Yes. I don't think a team leader should be regarded as a control freak for wanting to encourage team cohesion and collaboration even if (or especially if) team members spend a lot of their days working independently.

I get that some people--perhaps especially engineers--would rather just be left in their cave to communicate asynchronously if and when they want to. But I don't blame managers/leaders for considering that a suboptimal practice taken to an extreme.

Personally, I mostly work fairly independently on a day-to-day basis but I also work with both formal and informal broader teams and it definitely helps to know the people I work with as something other than a nickname on chat.

I’m not a fan of 1:1 video, I am full remote for almost a decade and I have a strong preference for chat. I like to think slowly and take a few minutes to respond. Being on a call robs me of that.

I feel the same way. I also like having things written because it acts as documentation that can be referenced later. It's especially important on remote teams because not everyone is in every call or hears every word. My two cents after half of / most of this decade being remote.

This is exactly why I decided to work on building a platform for async video / voice discussions.

You end up getting rid of meetings — people gathering in real-time :)

As someone who just joined a majority on-site company as a remote employee, I've taken great pains to make my audio and video the best it can be within a reasonable budget. Good camera, studio-style lights, and a cheap but surprisingly effective lapel-style mic have all helped.

Do you have links by any chance (to the stuff you bought)?

I use a Logitech Brio camera and a $20 USB lapel mic. I think those are basically interchangeable. The light is a Viltrox panel, not sure what model number off hand.

Not the parent but I use a Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 both for the camera and the mic. I don't do anything special for the lighting but my office is well-lit, both from natural light and overhead track lighting, and my background is on the opposite side of the room from the window. Main thing is not to be backlit.

I just joined a remote team (after 5 years of other remote work) that heavily values video (including budgeting for proper webcams, headsets, and video conference software).

It is honestly so refreshing. I feel like I have teammates (not just text in Slack/Email). I feel like I understand who they are and how they communicate.

Thank you, https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/ - great resource. It seems they have a pretty bold typo there. ~Communciation~ Communication?

Thanks for catching that, I'm a GitLab team member, I'll open a quick merge request to fix that now.

Nice catch @kull.

@samanthalee233 That's great! I tried to log in to suggest the change, but it did not work with my normal Gitlab account.

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