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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

You can’t shoot the shit over zoom. Ever tried? It is super awkward.

Slack is good for easy questions where you already know how to convert your thoughts into words. If you don’t because your thoughts are currently encoded visually… slack (or any online medium) doesn’t work. In the real world I would almost always abandon the slack conversation and go visit the person / people.

Email is crap for communication, at least for my working style.

The rest are okay when you’ve got a lot of clarity already but not so hot when you are very early in the ideation phases.

All of your substitutes are significantly lower bandwidth, much more latent mediums.

You can’t replace face time with online. You just can’t.

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I’d take zoom over a hallway conversation any day. I’m at home and comfortable with Zoom. I’ve had to dress up and commute to have that hallway conversation. In an office you’ll also be pressured for your reserved room or you’re literally in a hallway next to the bathrooms while you’re talking. Not good environments for communication.

All the arguments I hear for remote work revolve around the comfort of the individual developer. That’s great but companies are more than just individual developers. They are teams working together to build things that individuals couldn’t build alone.

I’ve long held that the secret to FAANG company success wasn’t their technical prowess or even their products. Is that they have superior software development processes. Their secret sauce is their process. Companies with shitty offices, crappy untrusting management, and heavyweight processes get beat by those with processes similar to FB or Google.

You’ll note that all the companies in FAANG invest a shit ton into their office experiences… well except Amazon.

Give it a year and life will look much as it did back in 2019.

Companies need individual developers because without them no one would write the code. We’ve seen a million articles about the developer shortage. It’s not about what the company wants, it’s about what the developer wants.

For instance, I would never work in an office again and because there is a developer shortage, that requirement hasn’t impacted my market rate, which is on par for the valley.

Having worked at one of the FAANGs I would definitely not say they have a superior development process. Waaaaay too much middle management baggage and drag. They are successful due to first mover advantages, network effects, regulatory capture and in some cases a literal monopoly.

> They are successful due to first mover advantages

Zero of the FAANG companies had a first mover advantage.

* Facebook replaced MySpace within the course of like a year. Today TikTok and other things threaten them.

* Apple... well... it was for a long time a huge underdog.

* Amazon... born in the dot com era. At the time lots of people thought the company was gonna implode any day. It took like a decade before they even remotely generated something other than a loss.

* Netflix... was DVD's, competed against brick & mortor and companies like Kozmo. Today it competes with media companies offering their own streaming service.

* Google... plenty of search engines came before google.

Not sure how any of these companies became successful because of regulatory capture, network effects or even literal monopolies. None of these companies could be successful in the long haul if their products sucked. Building non-sucky products involves a hell of a lot more than just developers sitting at home writing code 24/7. Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.

Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage. As does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps…

Network effects are all over the place, mainly FB and Google.

> Success involves building successful processes that encourage innovation.

For the most part, large companies “innovate” via acquisition.

> Netflix and Amazon clearly have first mover advantage. As does Apple with the iPhone, Google with Maps…

The Hiptop/Sidekick and Palm Pilots were already popular long before the iPhone came out. They just weren't nearly as good and the companies couldn't overcome the carriers' poor business plans.

Apple were first movers with capacitive touch screens.

Sounds like you are not capable of distilling or synthesising your ideas.

If you can’t take a step back and make a paragraph, and instead attempt to just bombard others with your thought-stream and let them sort it out, then maybe YOU are the problem - face-to-face or not.

You admitted previously that there's companies with remote cultures that are tremendously successful. By definition of their very existence, they have replaced "face time with online" - which you claim can't happen.

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