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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

I am curious about the sustainability of work from home for truly team-based work.

I get to develop features independently, so if I am given the spec, I have no need to speak to anyone for the rest of the day except for a couple messages with QA. For me, it is great.

But I am essentially a microservice with defined inputs and outputs. For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.

Anecdotally, while productivity seems to remain at a high level, a lot of that seems to be enabled by employees working more hours and being always available.

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The things you're describing don't go away with a remote team. It's not like going remote means all your employees just never talk to eachother in favor of working independently. It just means you use technology to solve in-person problems rather than being in person.

I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.

But your description of (C) reflects a presumption of what I would call working independently. In many work cultures, and on many kinds of projects, that freedom is important and mostly unavailable in a culture where people have to stop to put on pants and hop on a call.

I'm confused by your wording. Are you saying that working independently is important but also unavailable because you're working from home? How?

Sorry, no, I meant the opposite. Being available for essentially arbitrary interruptions is part of how some people naturally work.

Ahhh gotcha. I think it's just a different way of thinking. "I'll pop over to Alex's desk" vs. "I'll ping Alex to see when he's able to chat"

> Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.

If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.

I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.

Can you describe why you couldn't spend a day in a boardroom _virtually_? Or how developers involved in "requirement analysis" need to be in the same room?

It isn't impossible, just more difficult, mostly based on human factors.

Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.

On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.

I think that blaming remote work to mask people/team problems that existed in person is unwise. If your team isn't comfortable being legitimate and honest during requirement analysis, is it worth having? If, in person, the process breaks down into "What the team lead can notice about the team's body language/behavior during requirement analysis", I would probably suggest that there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of that meeting. And this is why, I think, the problems being blamed on remote work are usually much larger/harder problems that can get swept under the in person rug.

I don't see it as a fundamental problem with remote work, but remote work requires that many things work a lot better than they on average do. You can try and fix everything from team dynamics and documentation or drag everyone into the office and have the problems kind of be fixed by default.

You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.

Yeah, I guess the whole point of this whole conversation is that in the pandemic-world, you can't "just" do what you're describing.

I think about (and struggle to value) point C often. The disruption can be very annoying but the knowledge transfer often has a huge multiplier attached to it. One person's small piece of knowledge can give an entire team major traction. This model also promotes tribal knowledge and weak documentation...which is acceptable for a small company, not so much for larger companies where people are spread out across geographies.

I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?

I think that it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking. Having a distributed team means you have to remove the "I'll just walk over and ask" mentality from everyone involved. You must resist the temptation to use slack as an alternative to in-person communication. Communication must be frequent, documented and public - someone else needs to be able to see the decisions you made.

> For the people who actually work in teams (rather than me who is part of a team but works independently), this seems to be a miserable experience.

I work in a Support Engineering group, where we often need to collaboratively debug. Remote forces us to clarify our thinking (you get better over time at writing your thoughts that way) and video calls work solidly well for most of the world. We have new hires that have come in and have said "people are surprised I work here remotely, because I like to talk to people but actually I talk to people ALL DAY."

The style changes a bit due to the technology, but you can choose the fidelity as needed. It's not for everyone, and sometimes remote slows things down, but even then, you get ruthless at prioritizing, because sync time becomes valuable.

Exactly what alexbanks said, at least in my experience my team does a lot of team work that you mentioned that requires us to be in sync. For that we use remote conference tools to discuss and sometimes pair program and it has been working really well.

It also removed a lot of distractions that we had in the office yet we miss the "coffee breaks" we had to discuss and unofficial align what tasks we should address next and the best way to approach these. We are quickly adapting to these.

Also our team has been working together for a while so can work from home without too much interruption. But its changing, we have some new guys on the team and no one wants to train them. People are trying out new things but coordination is a mess. Morale is bad but maybe that is just virus and economic related.

This too. We have a new guy and he is having trouble getting up to speed. Normally they would just hover our someone's shoulder for a while. That can no longer be done.

I advocate for remote pair programming where the less experienced person is in control of the keyboard and sharing the screen and the more experienced person just explains what he has to do and watches him learn and apply that knowledge.

My team and I have been doing this, I have been in calls with a more senior team member that was helping me (I even got some Vim tips alongside with the explanations I was getting for completing the task).

I also recommend doing pair programming with people on somewhat the same level as yours as you can help each. You can divide a task in two and work in half the task yourself while the other person just watches and comments and then the other way where you watch and comment and the other person has all the keyboard and mouse control. This helps with reducing distractions and it offers the same advantages of Code Reviews but in real time.

Do not do this every hour or even everyday as this is more mentally intense then focusing alone and I think focusing alone also offers great improvements in learning. A balance of the two is key!

I've never really done it, but kinda wish as its a great way to fight procrastination too.

I'm hopefully that remote presence tech (VR, etc) will really step up to make up for all the subtle things we lose when we work across the digital divide <3

Right now, I find WFH pretty tough, and in my experience so far, I get markedly depressed and collaboration challenging without all thes social cues of meatspace

Yeah, after going through forced WFH for extended period of time, I think I see the point that Nadella is making on the impact that this may have on mental health.

Work from home could be harmful for employees, warns Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/work-from-home-could...

But what about the mental health of people sitting in traffic hours a day, in a loud open floor plan office? Seems like a pretty terrible excuse to me.

Really big companies like Microsoft use their massive campuses as a recruiting tool - which obviously means nothing if you're remote-first.

But back to mental health: I've been doing MUCH better since I started WFH years ago. Going to an office every day was just too draining. Everyone would walk to hang out after hours, take extended lunches, etc.

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