Hacker News Reader

Comment by thiht | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t really work both ways though. Remote fans don’t force everyone to be remote.

They do. They might be able to say that they don't care where their coworkers are (and I believe them), but when enough people are remote, their colleagues are forced into a remote working model too because the team needs to communicate in a different way now.

How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.

Remote fans force everyone to use tools to accommodate their remoteness.

We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.

In exchange, now you have proper record of everything said and done.

I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.

I don’t find any difference in the record-keeping of remote vs. in person meetings. The record button is available to both, but the resulting video files just as unwieldy, and Zoom’s transcripts are garbage.

Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”

So you like the written “proof” so you can face off your colleagues in case of disagreement? You seem to have negative feelings about your work environment. You should consider changing jobs.

No, I want processes, agreements, and ideas, documented. Slack, Zoom and other tools make this easier.

As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.

Much is still being said in person or calls, because talking is much more efficient than writing, so ... no, we don't "have proper record of everything said and done."

Yet we should.

Whether we should have that record or not is completely orthogonal to the conversation about how remote workers force (or not) the others to behave in a certain way to accommodate the remoteness of these workers.

Office fans aren't a homogeneous whole.

Perhaps it's likely at least some managers want more people to come to the office.

It's also likely that some people who aren't managers, regular employees, just prefer the office.

it forces others to "follow their dream" for the sole satisfaction of remote workers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com