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Comment by as1mov | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched jobs and the new company onboarded me remotely. It's difficult for someone who's new to get acquainted with the new job remotely.

Simple things like a small question regarding the codebase turns into a video call with a colleague where you first ping them on chat and ask them if they are free and then schedule the call. Even if the whole thing takes 10 minutes, it's too much compared to just turning sideways, asking them something if I was in office.

OTOH, I was much more comfortable working remotely in my previous job where I was already familiar with the code and the job on the whole.

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It seems like a communication issue. Why would you need a video call to ask a question? Problem is that people are used to verbal communication and lack skills to convey a message in writing. When worked in remote first company it was a non issue, rarely had to go on a video call. We had social calls often, but work stuff easily worked out over text. It is also about culture - we had a codebase very well documented and if a starter had questions their task was to improve the documentation together with the dev assigned to onboarding.

It's not quite entirely about culture - I do think that a synchronous call with someone provides better opportunities to detect their unknown unknowns, because you get to see their thought process as they formulate the question. Obviously one can get by without it, but I think this is one of the places where the lack of serendipity actually does hit a little.

Once someone has fewer unknown unknowns, though, the act of asking a question by text can often be enough of a rubber duck that they don't need to hit "send" at all.

Now that you mention it, most of the video calls could have been replaced by a rubber duck. We would do calls for junior devs so they could watch a senior working on a problem and ask questions then to learn their thought process. They found it helpful.

My team currently does half hour coffee mornings and has an open office hour once every two weeks; often we're all just working silently through them, but everyone's on the same call throughout.

Is that something you can do - just sit on a call with your assigned mentor for most of the day?

Before my current job I worked from home for 8 of 9 years. Right in the middle I worked in an office in a small start up. We were about 10 people squeezed into a space the size of my living room. I spent more time chatting with them over some form of messenger than I did in my remote jobs! And no, I feel like I get more done, because I don't have someone just turning sideways and interupting me. While it may be quicker for you it may not be for the person got are interupting.

That may be the case for you, but for many people, their job requires them to communicate with a lot of people. For these kinds of jobs, being in the office is a lot more efficient.

If I was a regular developer, working on a single part of a larger application, I would have zero problems working from home. Once you're in a position where you have to coordinate work with several other people, things are very different.

I can imaging that people who manages large teams have a lot of problems dealing with that remotely.

I’ve been the principal engineer for my company, remotely for the past 4 years. I’ve never had a problem with it.

There are tradeoffs, but just the fact that nearly every single one of our conversations are documented and searchable is worth it alone.

You can’t just walk over to talk to someone anytime the notion strikes you, but you shouldn’t have been doing that anyway. I love to talk, and I love to think out loud. But every time I do that, I’m asking someone else to divert there attention to me.

Being remote allows people to turn off the majority of the interruptions and get work done when they need to.

And it forces me to spend more time thinking about my communications. Instead of just constantly walking over to people the moment an idea pops into my head.

I hope remote teams will start to invest more heavily in keeping up to date knowledge bases to help with exactly these kinds of issues. Tools like Confluence/Notion/whatever should really be solving this problem.

Video calls really grind productivity down to a halt. It's a strange phenomenon - when I have a call scheduled, it's really hard to get work done in a half hour neighborhood of the call.

We have a permanent open chat in slack, so you just make a quick comment.

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