Hacker News Reader

Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been through this multiple times and each time we discover how important communication is in software engineering.

I don’t doubt that some people will be remote - but the ones that get ahead will be local - and that will draw people back.

View on HN

In my experience, the office crowd generally struggles with communication. They rely on conveying the same information in a myriad of ways, over an excruciating amount of time, to get their point across. I'll admit, it is difficult to do that without the bandwidth that face-to-face provides.

When you watch effective communicators, they can write a terse comment and everyone straight up understands without any more fuss. Once you have been on that kind of team, you will never want to communicate about work any other way. Remote work is very efficient under this model.

I think everyone can be an effective communicator, but it is a learned skill. A skill those who have spent their career in an office never had to learn. Those who were recently thrust into remote work without those skills have struggled, but...

What if this forced period of remote work has tipped the scales in favour of the critical mass learning how to communicate effectively? Anecdotally, I have seen significant improvement in the formerly office-going team I have been a part of since March 2020. We have a ways to go before we match what I have witnessed earlier in my career when I was lucky enough to work with some highly effective people, but if this carries on for a sufficient amount of time I think we might just get there.

Would that it were but in my experience long meetings have been replaced with longer zoom meetings. You squeeze in more work because you're already at your desk but the communication has gone down because there's even less focus.

Of course it varies from team to team. I don't see any evidence of widespread improvement in skill. Although I think there's been some value in higher slack adoption so the barrier between offices has lowered while intra-office is worse. At least that's what I've personally seen.

Did the developers of the Linux kernel need to share the same physical space on a continuous basis?

I think open source software is a testament the the idea that software does not require physical collaboration most of the time.

The Linux kernel also doesn't reorganize itself every year, where most companies find this to be a requirement.

And look how far it has gone while those other companies failed.

I love Linux but I can think of two quite popular OSes developed by companies with centralized offices/campuses. Linux also has a lot of contributions that were written in an office, I'm sure.

All this just to say I don't think its all that valid of a argument.

Open source community has been successfully creating high quality and complex products for years without ever meeting, let alone having a shared physical space to work from.

I think you're absolutely right to bring up the importance of communication, but I'm not sure it's as simple as "that will draw people back [to the office]".

I think it will just set up a different selector for who continues to get paid well. I would guess that people who can operate well in all-remote organizations will probably continue to earn high salaries. People who can't get a handle on contributing well, consistently, for an all-remote organization will struggle to take advantage of these changes.

It's one thing to start working with an in-office team, and then continue contributing reasonably well because everyone went remote during the pandemic. It's another thing to get hired for an all-remote team, get your bearings in that organization, start to contribute well, and continue to contribute well.

I think this might go for founders as well. Some people will be able to build and lead an all-remote team. Some people will need the bulk of their people to be in an office in order to build an effective team.

Is that objectively true or do you feel it’s true? Not being snarky, but I see this viewpoint a lot and it’s never backed up with numbers. Companies are quick to cite science when sending people to WFH, but the rigor is not there when claims are made about how being in an office makes for a more effective workforce.

Anecdata, I know, but I've yet to find a solution as good as a whiteboard for brainstorming ideas / events / architecture collaboratively.

I find excalidraw to be vastly superior to a whiteboard

I agree, it's vastly more difficult to do it over call or video due to the talking over each other. Ideally that'll never happen, but it's just natural in conversations and it really kills the flow.

However, I still think we've achieved a "good enough" state and the cons are no longer enough to stop WFH.

Has the experiment of highly skilled, same-city / same time-zone, all-remote (not just some segmented piece of the team) been done before? I think you're understating the novelty (or overstating the similarity of previous experience) significantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com