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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

Or rather that demonstrates the absolute value of physical meetings.

If all day long Zoom calls and Slack messages could have led to spontaneous discussions/new initiatives like that they already would have, but they didn't, I saw more sparks flying in one afternoon of social event than 3 months of planned video calls.

I firmly believe if Silicon Valley goes fully remote, then it will no longer stay the innovation engine of the entire tech industry. Startups in China will eat us alive. You simply can't replicate the energy of Haidian District or Shenzhen with group messages.

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> I saw more sparks flying in one afternoon of social event than 3 months of planned video calls.

I've seen more sparks fly from random discussions on Slack then I've ever seen in person. The ability to toss out random thoughts/idea at any time, and have others discuss/expand on them at their leisure is... powerful.

Different modes of communication have different tradeoffs. There's nothing magical about in-person communication.

Amen. Company cultures that allow for good online text based chat are great, but what the GP described is basically poison to them.

>There's nothing magical about in-person communication.

Other the fact that the brains of our entire specie has evolved for millions of years for this exact type of communication, there isn't anything magical, I guess...

The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled, even if technology can now match in latency.

Good luck replicating body language, eye contacts, subtle facial cues etc with Slack messages.

>The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled

Not really, if you are not interested in communicating emotions or not interested in playing politics as part of the said communication..

In fact, in technical discussion, not conveying too much emotion is a great advantage..

>In fact, in technical discussion, not conveying too much emotion is a great advantage..

But I'd just like to remind you that even the most hardcore engineering company cannot possibly having only technical discussions.

This really reminds me that how often HN miss the forest for the tree.

>But I'd just like to remind you that even the most hardcore engineering company cannot possibly having only technical discussions.

Your point is not very clear, sorry.

It seems that you have an emotional reaction to this topic, which seems to muddle your argument. May be take sometime to reflect and get back with more clarity?

>Your point is not very clear, sorry.

I honestly don't know how is my point not clear. Being able to have both face to face communication and technology based remote communication is better than being limited to the latter alone. I thought that was a pretty straight forward point.

I was simply reminding you that whatever advantage Slack/Email has over in-person communication for technical discussions, they lose that advantage for non-technical discussions, which are just as quintessential for an organization.

If we were in a group, you would have noticed (or perhaps failed to notice) most people recoiling to your statement or giving you quizzical looks at your odd reaction to a valid point. The conversation would immediately shift away from the poor direction you took it, and towards something the group finds richer for discussion.

Here on the internet, we settle for letting you watch downvotes trickle in over time.

> evolved for millions of years for this exact type of communication

A great many people identify themselves as introverts or antisocial, and would feel much better being excluded from all these neuron triggers.

> The information bandwidth of in-person communication is absolutely unparalleled

Yes, but that bandwidth is not all used productively but wasted on irrelevant bits which do not matter and likely distract from the topic. Implying that more bandwidth helps is suggesting that a book can only be a tiny bit as effective as a video...

> Good luck replicating body language, eye contacts, subtle facial cues etc with Slack messages.

I wouldn't try. Such things are usually unnecessary to the task at hand, and often detrimental. I'm not going to replicate the odor of what my co-workers ate for lunch either, nor other clues about their general hygiene, nor would I want to even if it was easy to do.

>Such things are usually unnecessary to the task at hand, and often detrimental

Have you considered the mere possibility that many people's work have different types of tasks than yours?

It's so hard not to make stereotypical jokes about engineers when reading comments like this XD

But we are talking about engineering work, right? That's what discussed article is about.

A huge portion of an engineer’s job (especially senior level engineers) aren’t strictly technical. This seems to be something people miss.

> an engineer’s job (especially senior level engineers) aren’t strictly technical.

Text is able to convey information that is not entirely technical as well... This seems to be something people miss.

Have you ever read a novel?

Hmmm… I wonder why people make movie adaptation of novels then if text can do everything.

It's damn near impossible. I admire your restraint :)

If you look at how addictive digital communication is you might conclude it makes a great fit for our brains, maybe a better fit than in-person communication with may be tiresome at times.

And body language, eye contacts etc. are not necessarily useful for professional communication, these might as well be distracting and distorting a rational discussion.

>The ability to toss out random thoughts/idea at any time, and have others discuss/expand on them at their leisure is... powerful.

Yes, That is powerful. And I utterly fail to understand how some people appear to NOT see this.

OP for one appear to argue that people are expected to talk about work when they are having lunch ffs! I mean, it is OK if you want to talk about work, but you cannot realistically expect others to share your enthusiasm as well, or may be they do share your enthusiasm, but might want to talk about other things when they eat...

We can draw a comparison with online discussions on websites like hackernews. Pre-internet we could only have conversations with a limited number of people and we had to meet in person to do so. But now we can reach to millions of people via websites such as this one where we're discussing ideas at this very moment.

So the answer might be to bring the company culture online, to encourage discussions in #general #other slacks channels. The number of ideas sparking from a forum like hackernews is many orders of magnitude higher than what it was before the internet. There's no reason it should be different when it comes to conversations between employees.

This is a niche mindset.

From experience spanning 30 years, good initiatives rarely start from spontaneous discussion. In fact most of the ones from that class of communication turn into dead ends or wandering off the path into the woods and burning money and time.

In fact I’d argue most of them come from thorough understanding of a problem and the requirements around it and a hell of a lot of work and research.

We’re not all startups and we’re not all trying to construct new problems to be solved.

I cant speak for the others, but at my last job, the team got closer when the pandemics started and we went remote. The key was having a virtual "water cooler". We did that with Discord, anyone interested in chatting could just hang in a voice channel and people would casually join in at their own will.

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