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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

This conversation, when I've had it with people, usually ends up with the same conclusions: people would like to see their coworkers face-to-face like.... a couple times a month. People have deep relationships with others without needing to see them 5 times a day, after all!

I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.

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It is an interesting question. I have two new team members we added 2 months ago. Neither is very technical and, admittedly, it can get challenging sometimes, because pre-WFH, I could have just showed them what to do instead of spending 20 minutes trying to explain what I want them to do. I could technically grab a screen, but.. apparently, neither learns well that way and just yesterday I had some really odd issues with sound and MS Teams screen sharing.

Anyway, as much as I love remote, in person has its benefits.. like being able to strangle someone when needed.

Unrelated: how do you remember your username?

That's the sound his co-workers make when he strangles them!

My guess would be that that's a phrase.

Not OP, but as someone who's used such handles in the past, using a password manager.

or you never log out

I'm not OP but it almost looks like they got the username and password fields mixed-up when they were creating their account.

For all we know, their password might be something like "remote_worker"!

Videoconferencing tooling is still awful.

Bad latency, pixelated screensharing, frequent issues with sound and video. On top of that hardware problems with bad microphone setups, cross talk, etc.

I hope that at some point someone is going to show up and take this seriously. Treat it like a medical service, or a least close to. But I'm not holding my breath. I believe it was least year that I read that John Carmack had measured the latency of his cell phone and found it to in the vicinity of 700 ms.

I've found the opposite.

As a developer, WFH actually facilitates things like pair programming and peer review. Especially for introverts like myself, it is much easier to do a screenshare of your IDE and review code in a group than try to sit next to each other or review code on a big screen in a meeting room. This has become a thing for us now (let's jump on a zoom and i'll show you quickly), for anything that's too complex to slack.

The ability to easily screen share and record sessions as needed means I can get the big picture in the initial live session and review the details later via recording as needed (especially those nitpicky code details nobody remembers the first time around).

I will miss this when we have to go back to the office.

Hm I hadn’t thought about this in that way - this is very true - we maintain a lot of close relationships with people we don’t spend nearly 40 hours a week with.

And fwiw, I think I fall within this line of thinking - for me going to the office would be productive if it were at its absolute most once per week.

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