Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

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Yea, the idea that Google simply hadn't thought of allowing WFH is idiotic. IME, they're well-aware of the advantages, but also well-aware of the disadvantages, and their current condonement but not overencouragement of WFH reflects this balance. In every job I've had (including Google), I work from home when I need to get well-defined, focused,independent work done on a fairly rigid timeline, and try and work from the office fairly often to take advantage of 1) easier conversations when complicated coordination is required, 2) maintaining social relationships with coworkers during downtime, and 3) the creative sparks that occasionally fly from casual conversation or even overhearing a conversation.

I was a wfh maximalist like many on this thread at the very beginning of my career, but AFAICT it just comes from some combination of a) being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work and didn't need to communicate cross-team much or b) having work that doesn't require much creative collaboration. As I got more senior and moved towards different types of problems, my appreciation for the value of (though I still do enjoy and make time for WFH).

For those who say that Slack or email or VC are perfect substitutes: there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication. Get good enough at running meetijgs of more than two people and you realize how much of the task of efficiently running a meeting involves reading micro-expressions and pauses to pick up on cues that help you direct the conversation (not to mention having n points of failure in a VC being accessed by n network connections). My team has been remote for a week and I've already noticed good meeting runners have worse meetings and bad meetings runners have even worse meetings.

On top of that, right now people are going to be WFH in a house filled with their kids who are also not going to school, possibly having to make sure they're actually taking the online classes their schools have setup from them.

Not exactly the most productive WFH conditions.

Right, I'm sort of stacking the deck in favor of the WFH maximalist argument by taking for granted that motivation and focus aren't an issue, even though, for many people (or in many circumstances), they are.

Yes this is totally correct. I work in a distributed research lab and basically what has happened is there are two labs. Slack was supposed to connect across the atlantic but all it did was show off that one part of the lab has way more going on than the other part.

In brutal honesty, it is probably highlighting that one lab is underperforming vs the other one.

Well more papers per scientist come out of my side, more chatter comes out of the other side. So from that metric I would say you are probably right.

"being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work"

Most Junior engineers aren't working remotely. I've been working remotely for a decade with different companies and almost all of the developers on my teams have been mid-level to senior. The junior developers always struggled and had so many roadblocks, it made working remotely difficult.

It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.

Our meetings regularly have 10+ people from different departments.

> It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.

This is very much not my experience. I don't know what field you're in or the structure of your company, so I don't want to hazard a guess as to the difference. But the majority of the time I call a meeting, it's to have a fairly complex, dynamic conversation for which the communication bandwidth of Slack/email/GDoc is too low (otherwise we'd stick with async/chat). This means that few meetings consist of conversations that're fairly predictable. Which means the person running the meeting needs to know when to cut a conversation off or let it continue, what direction to take the conversation, pick up on silent hesitancy or disagreement from any of the ten people in the room, etc etc etc. I can go on and on about the techniques I've seen people use to run extremely effective meetings, as well as how poorly-run meetings don't use them. As mentioned, these rely on visual and timing cues that humans use to communicate, sometimes unconsciously. (I'm keenly aware of good and bad meetings because I hate meetings)

> there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication.

Only for people who can't read.

Tone is notoriously hard to communicate in written form. Body language is never conveyed. Intonation is non-existent. At best you get some word choice signaling, but while I think low latency may be over-rated in the "catalogue" above, high-bandwidth is exactly the point vs reading an email/slack/etc.

If you seriously think written text is as communicative as face to face communication, I would consider being evaluated by a professional for a social interaction disorder of some sort.

What you are saying is that written communication is also a lot less noisy.

Of course, you could learn to write better and convey the same information over text.

It’s only noisy if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Watch a professional poker game sometime and you’ll see the lengths people go to avoid non-verbally communicating the strength of their hand. Table talk is completely casual up until someone is involved in a monster hand and suddenly they go catatonic.

Of course there’s still noise. Just like in text. Professional writers struggle just as hard to get their word choice and phrasing -just so-.

For someone with autism (raises hand) body language might not be well conveyed anyway, or gets misinterpreted.

I'm looking forward to AR/VR taking over more cake of the need for physical needs.

There is a huge difference between a conversation over text and a conversation over the phone. And even bigger difference to a conversation in person.

Non-verbal communication is a huge part of social (and this includes work) interactions.

We're working on an always-on voice chat tool for remote teams addressing your point around text v. voice. Testing a private alpha if you want to try it out- https://www.presence.so

Hence my point.

I think you're trying to say that written communication is more efficient, but your responses here just read like "No" without any supporting argument.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_(computing)

Here's some information on terms you're clearly unfamiliar with that I used in the part you quoted. In the future I suggest you try and understand the words you're reading _before_ making a fool of yourself, but you do you. Hope that helps!

Have you never spent a few hours (or even days) on a back and forth over email, only to solve things in two minutes by giving the person a call? Spoken communication is way more efficient for certain things

For certain things, yes. For other things, no. For instance, I find "all hands" meetings at work to be a complete waste of time, except maybe for the possibility of socializing or getting a free lunch. I could learn everything I need to know from these meetings in a few minutes just by reading an email, instead of wasting an hour of my time listening to bosses drone on and on about stuff or show photos of their families and dogs.

Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.

I WFH all the time. I was able to design the product that our company now sells, write the initial code, hire the team that built it and sometimes manage some of them, all remotely. I dunno, the things I read about WFH imply that shouldn't have been possible but it was.

I find almost all meetings to be a waste of time. Maybe 1:1s are the exception, but they're also pretty much optional - good to have a catch up with team members sometimes but if someone can't make it that day no big deal.

The problem with meetings is that a well run meeting needs to have an agenda and ideally written minutes, I don't think anyone disputes that (except for casual 1:1 catch-ups which don't). So you end up writing anyway, or wish someone had. Without the writing aspect meetings are often poorly disciplined, achieve little, run over and end with an agreement to organise another meeting.

In the end, work - the production of useful artifacts customers will buy - gets done alone. It doesn't get done in meetings with colleagues.

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