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Comment by orangecat | Hacker News Reader

If you’re building software there’s really no reason you have to share working hours with anyone.

When I'm doing UI work, it's far more efficient to have a real-time session with a designer rather than multiple rounds of email/Figma comments.

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And this can still happen under async. But I wouldn’t recommend it all the time. It just feels like a crutch for bad working practice.

Also, kill email use internally. It’s absolutely not needed in 2022 when literally every app you use on a daily basis has an activity feed.

Can't you schedule a meeting at a time that works for both of you when necessary, instead of forcing the whole team to be synchronous by default?

Sure. It was just a counterexample to the claim that there's no reason to have any overlap in working hours.

Then one of you needs to work on your written communication skills.

Writing is always going to be slower, especially if done well. When it comes to UI, tight feedback loops are crucial at virtually every step of the way.

A feedback loop can be tight, or high–bandwidth, without having low latency. You just have to increase the sending window. Either that, or delegate more. If your designer tells you to implement X, and after that is done tells you to do Y, have them increase the sending window by telling you to do X, Y, Z and W up front. Then, when you implement W and it doesn’t feel quite right to you, you can implement W’ instead; that’s delegation.

That is not a solution. You do not get to just decide on whether latency or bandwidth is the bottleneck of your task.

There’s no law of physics saying that a company cannot delegate decision–making authority to individual employees. If your employer doesn’t let you make that kind of decision, then that is a social problem rather than a physical one.

Note that I have not said that an individual employee can decide how their employer does business, only that your development processes can be arranged so that they do not require low–latency in–person meetings between employees. You can do your business with or without any overlap in working hours between employees that interact with each other; the overlap is not required.

I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying it is slower. Maybe that is a worthwhile tradeoff for you, but at least to me, in this particular scenario, it is not. It would be a frustrating process. I do generally hold a favorable view towards remote work, but if I can not get you on the phone at all, that makes your work less valuable to me.

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