Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

How would you demonstrate this?

I’m with a funded SV startup that’s been remote-only since its founding, a few years before covid. We have staff in at least five countries, and in the US, in at least five states (just based on the people I can think of offhand.)

The company is the leader in its field, which involves significant real innovation, and has many major enterprise customers.

I’ve helped onboard many employees, and I’ve managed one of the key product teams.

When I hear people talk about all the disadvantages of remote work, I just internally roll my eyes. As you say, they’re plugging their own personal preference. But that seems to be exactly what you’re doing with the quote above.

View on HN

I am just plugging my preference. Tried to emphasize "me personally". I'm sure many companies work much better without an office, though I think at a certain size it almost certainly becomes beneficial to have at least some office space. My main point was that neckties are not an apt comparison, and that we don't really know yet how valuable offices are under various circumstances.

Remote work definitely works for some companies and not for others. If football player X never lifts weights and player Y lifts weights a lot, and they have similar levels of performance, it does not follow that lifting weights is unnecessary for a successful football career. It just means that it's unnecessary for player X.

I was hired into a senior role (architect level) by a company that was compelled to go remote because of the pandemic. Remotely building working relationships at that level was hard AF since most people I had to work with already knew each other from the pre-pandemic days and were happy to have sidebar conversations to keep moving.

We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.

My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.

This is about being "remote first". All discussions should happen in the shared chat or at the weekly group video call except if there's some specific reason not to (eg. disclosure of non-public corporate financials, personal 1-1s, or similar). It sounds like that company transferred some bad office habits to online.

This is the thing right here

Remote requires personal responsibility as well. From everybody

This sounds suspiciously like a “no true Scotsman” argument to me.

Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.

What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?

Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.

After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.

I joined a remote only company 5 months ago and saw people face to face for the first time earlier this week. It takes more conscious effort, sure. But that's also all. It will be a hard adjustment for companies whose staff is not used to remote work, but it's just a skill people will acquire.

I'm in a similar situation now, but the new company has been more than happy to have company days where we fly in from around the world and get to know each other and it works pretty well. Also, having zoom/teams/slack video channels permanently open works surprisingly well too (you don't have to have your camera on).

Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.

Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.

We saw immediate changes in productivity when people moved home 2 years before covid, less meetings, things got done and people where in generel more happy, but that might not be for everyone but onboarding wasnt made harder, what was harder is the comradery you get at the office, but that was also what swallowed alot of time in the first place i suspect..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com