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Comment by theK | Hacker News Reader

All in all I think the article starts by meaning well but hinges its position on flawed premises. From the article

> There, among the scrolls and codices they copied, religious professionals sat at desks and performed skilled labor that couldn’t be done elsewhere.

That is correct, the office as an institution was created to

1. cluster work and

2. enable work to be done that could not be done elsewhere (because of machinery/materials, etc)

The first cause, clustering and organizing work has been disolved by the organizing capabilities of the modern web.

The second cause has (at least in knowledge work) lost importance due to digitalization.

I think all in all the office as an optimized for work space will endure, companies will still have them and nippy small startups will still share them somehow in the future but I do not think our usage of them will ever return any where near what it was pre 2020, especially not with the commuting lifestyle

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I disagree that point number 1 has been resolved by technology. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, following some mid-pandemic soul searching, I decided that digital communication isn't a substitute for personal presence. In-person meetings allow much richer and higher bandwith inter-personal information transfer. You don't always need it, but when you do (for example, during whiteboarding), it's a huge boon.

I agree it isn't a substitute but for software dev you really don't need it.

Plenty of stuff gets built with just email and IRC. My team never turns on their camera because it's just an extra hassle and we get plenty done. Most of our collaboration happens over IM and PRs along with a short scrum at the beginning of the day. We used cameras for a few months and it added nothing to the meetings.

A lot of people mention whiteboards. I only do white boarding a few times a year but IME the best is to get a cheap (under $50) drawing tablet and use a whiteboard app (webex even has one built in, I use whiteboard.com for my side projects and tutoring.) One of my coworkers tried pointing a camera at a physical whiteboard and it was super hard to see much of anything.

I've found having camera on full-time during meetings and making use of a $50 usb drawing pad has been a very acceptable substitute for in-person meetings and whiteboarding.

Being able to see the faces and body-language of your colleagues by being on-camera during the meetings solves most of that higher-bandwidth comms that in-person brings, and using either a simple drawing app or even something like MS Teams' Whiteboard app lets you get that whiteboard like experience.

Furthermore, while not a substitute for whiteboarding in all circumstances, shared documents have actually replaced a lot of what we used to write on whiteboards--and are better for it in many cases.

I suspect if companies just standardized on some tablet/drawing pad hardware and software--and gave it to employees--a lot of the complaints would go away. I'm not sure it's mostly a technology problem at this point.

Zoom fatigue is real. If I still had to attend days full of 3+ hours worth of meetings on the regular, I'd just shut off the camera in self-defense no matter what people say.

Oh yeah, I totally get that. I'm lucky enough that my team really averages less than an hour of meetings daily. Usually under 30min, most of that being a daily standup.

Our larger scoping/planning/brainstorming meetings are spread out enough that an hour-long planning call isn't that much of a burden, rarely more than once a sprint if even that frequent. We instead try to pre-plan or hash out things in threads and emails ahead of time, then use those as notes/outlines for a condensed call.

Far more common for us is an impromptu 15-20min discussion after standup to help unblock someone on the team, or a huddle when someone is stuck in the middle of the day. That fluidity feels more like the kind of casual interaction you'd get asking for help in-office.

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