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Comment by house9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Working remotely does not stop collaboration. I have been working primarily remote for the past 12 years. I meet with my team every day for standup and am in constant contact with team members throughout the day, sometimes pair programming or helping to debug issues.

This is not much different than working in a colocated situation, except my coworkers don't have to smell my B.O.

The tooling available these days makes remote work better than in person IMO.

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As another person remote for 12 years exactly, I agree that nowadays we have nice tools, but some things are still better in person.

For example, walking to a whiteboard and sketching something is easier than doing the same in zoom, unless everyone in the team owns a wacom tablet, and even then, physical "big visible charts" generally work better than online ones.

I think the trade off is in favour of remote, for me, but it is highly dependent on job, person, team.

I've come around to thinking that regular shared docs work fine for most purposes (or even better than whiteboards). But to the degree that whiteboards really do matter, just give everyone whatever is the appropriate tablet and set up the software. The cost is trivial in the scheme of things. (I actually don't care for tablets that aren't an LCD screen. You don't get the direct feedback.)

Even back in 2000 we were using ICQ to chat with other developers sitting nearby. It was faster and less intrusive.

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