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Comment by iSloth | Hacker News Reader

Whiteboards - I still find that no software can beat a room of people and a shared whiteboard for talking through certain things. It’s such a simple yet effective tool for so many things.

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Unpopular opinion: I think whiteboards are overrated. I have been software engineer my whole life and never needed a whiteboard to do my job.

That doesn't help. What do you use instead? For multiple people designing a system with many related components at the same time, I've never encountered something that works as well. There are probably other ways possible, but I haven't seen one as effective. I also use the to explain such systems to other people interactively.

I don’t particularly disagree for a developer, however networking/infra engineers I don’t think would say the same

I think it depends. That's similar to someone saying that cabs are overrated because they've never used them and omitting to say they live in Paris.

Could you give more context? Type of work, projects, process and workflow, team size, etc. The "making of things" interests me.

A lot of times people don't understand something so someone puts it on the whiteboard. Now that person thinks everyone understands but they don't.

I've found that there are certain types of engineers who take the chance to hijack a shared whiteboard situation in order to publicly display their solo thought process. Seems like maybe an ego thing or at the very least a mildly autistic inability to share the board and collaborate.

Just like pair programming, whiteboards can work really well for certain personality matches or really poorly for others.

Easily solved by having every team member mount a whiteboard behind their work area. I do that and often whiteboard solutions on video chat.

I’ve done that too, but handing the pen over to someone else is troublesome

Doesn't that require that everybody have a fairly large and dedicated room they can use as a private home office.

Doesn’t need to be large or a dedicated room.

Over the years I’ve done it a variety of ways. Currently using a small 3 foot by 2 foot wall mounted ikea whiteboard. In college I bought whiteboard tiles and double sided taped them to the wall to make a whole wall a whiteboard... I’ve had tiny 2x1s... never had a room, apartment or house since high school without a whiteboard...

We’re engineers and designers... we can do hard things.

I was playing with Zoom, they have a shared whiteboard on the screen. Yeah its not a traditional white board, but its something.

Has anyone made a VR lounge with a whiteboard? The whiteboard in Valve labs feels very natural to write on.

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