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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Being individually very productive is not necessarily good for a company. Just wanted to point that out as a lot of HN (and offline) commenters say - well, I get so much more done when I’m not at work. But that misses the point: what matters is the team’s overall progress, which is (1) certainly not equal to the sum of each individual’s perceived productivity and (2) heavily a function of personal relationships and communication. that is why remote might seem like a great idea for the individual coder yet have managers stressed out of their minds.

I’ve spoken to so many managers about remote. Off the record, all of them have said it is a nightmare for them to coordinate the team.

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I'm a manager. My team, and most of the other teams we work with, have been working remotely for over a decade and coordination has never been a problem for us.

We have a 10 minute meeting every morning to catch up on what was done yesterday and what we're going to work on today. Then I can ping individuals after that meeting for followup discussions. On average, I have one of these followups each day. Then I have 1 weekly meeting with the other managers to coordinate our team efforts (and some DMs through the week to adjust/align as things change).

We work on software and hardware. We can operate and run our software against hundreds of remote hardware devices (in our data center). There is no need to be in the office if you have (or develop) remote tooling for your team to work well remotely. At this point, I would consider it very risky for any company to not be working toward at least the capability for full remote in the future. Who knows what lies ahead.

The OP was talking about incompetent managers, which seem to be numerous. A competent manager has no problem managing a remote team and have been doing so very successfully for decades. Remote work and remote teams have existed since the early 90's. The only difference now is so many teams went remote in response to the pandemic and managers are discovering they'e incompetent in managing remote work. Their real fear is getting fired for their new-found incompetence.

It's understandable that managers are worried if they're not fit for the new realities of their jobs.

But I have to wonder what the hell they were doing. What is coordination other than talking to each other and showing each other things? In my opinion this is much easier via calls.

I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.

However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.

For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.

My team has ad-hoc meetings all the time while working remote. We've been throwing ideas around, having design discussions, the whole shebang. Yes, the first six months were difficult - it took us a while to figure out a new way to work. But now it's been 2.5 years since we've been in the office and we've been hiring people who live several hundred miles away or more from what used to be our office. C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

> C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!

It's the law of averages. We're just an average, ordinary dev team producing extraordinary results because we scrutinize every aspect of how we work.

We also scrutinise every aspect of how we work; it doesn't mean that there's a viable remote-only replacement for everything a team might need to do.

Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.

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