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Comment by the_gipsy | Hacker News Reader

You're completely twisting the words. Documentation is not pointless and not "paperwork" (a term used to describe bureaucracy e.g. rules and regulations and approvals). Writing documentation is en exercise of efficiency, when information is distilled into concise writing. Others can then process this information or recall it whenever they want. There are great tools to discuss and resolve questions in a collaborative way. It's just much more thoughtful than just blurting out what first comes to mind.

Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.

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They aren't really twisting anything.

A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication. It's not that crazy. My work place has "do what you want policy, but we want to encourage remote work and shrink our leased offices". My team at least has 4 people that come to the office regularly, and 2 that work remotely 100%.

The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh. I'll always do what's more efficient and what reduces red tape. If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.

> Verbal communication is usually a huge time waster and can be outright disrespectful if someone prefers to rob everyone's time and digress and to push the "distilling" part onto everyone else - if the distilling even happens before everyone has tuned out and just agrees to finish yet another meeting.

You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway. A conversation that just needs 3 people will now involve 12 because everyone needs to forward a meeting invite to everyone they think might even be remotely interested.

The "outright disrespectful" is just a people problem. outright disrespectful people will be outright disrespectful in both verbal and non-verbal communication.

> A 20 minute in person chat over a whiteboard can save weeks of back and forth on written communication.

We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.

Try the ones that try to mimic the whiteboard experience, Apple Freeform, Microsoft Whiteboard, Explain Everything, Invision, Milanote, Miro, etc. It really is such a powerful format, as long as some ground rules are established (not creating a totally new board every single time, as there's plenty of space due to digital format, and to prioritize expanding space use rather than wiping each other's notes).

Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time.

I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.

The "animation" part is my biggest problem with these services.

with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated.

in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again."

might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.

You don't have to use any animation software with them either. What you're doing on a physical whiteboard is utilizing symbols. So use symbols on the whiteboard app. Change node colors, change node border, add stickers, whatever is appropriate for the team and the app used.

The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me.

COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!

If you’re a team of 6, and 66% of you can go into a room and without prompting, why can’t you just dial in the people who are working remote (if they’re available). If they’re constantly not available, maybe there are other reasons they can’t come that should be followed up on. I just don’t believe that most of your team is not busy and then all of the remote workers are never available at the same time. Working remotely is a culture. It is very easy to turn your ad-hoc in-person meetings into ad-hoc “here’s a link to an online meeting”. Get your work to buy you an iPad Pro and an Apple Pen and you even get the whiteboard experience. I have worked in many places where teams are located in different states or offices (but still work in the office). Is it okay to not engage a 1/3 of your team because they work at a different office? What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?

It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up.

> What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?

I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.

In reality you're just disrupting everyones work and bully them into putting your problem first.

No. In reality, I'm more able to find times that work for other people where I'm not disrupting them, by using context clues and non-verbal information to determine what the best time to talk to them is.

And yes, sometimes it is important to let other people interrupt you. For example, if someone else needs their code reviewed, they should absolutely always interrupt me to get it reviewed. Unless I'm in an interview with a candidate or something similarly external, unblocking other engineers on my team is always a higher priority and return on investment than anything I could be working on alone.

If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional. There are a few rare scenarios where code reviews are higher priority (high chance of merge conflicts, hotfixes) but code reviews themselves should be asynchronous. But that situation should be rare and clearly signalled as higher priority.

> If code reviews are absolute blockers on your team then your team is dysfunctional

So what am I supposed to work on when I'm waiting for my code to be reviewed? Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important? Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching. In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task). In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.

What about the reviewer's "context-switch" to look at your precious code?

As I said, context-switching and interrupting my work to review code is going to be less of an impact then setting down a task entirely to work on implementing a completely different task. Reviewing already written code just doesn't require as much context as writing the code from scratch, and the other engineer (in theory) has already done the job of putting all the context into the pull request description so you can review it easily.

Then the same applies to you for receiving a review.

But anyway, needing everyone into an office because you struggle isn't the fault of WFH

No, it doesn't. What I'm saying is that context-switching what you're actually coding on to pick up a new task is a more costly endeavor than just context-switching in or out of a review. In the synchronous model, there are only two tasks involved—one per employee. In the asynchronous model, you need to pick up a second task to work on while you're waiting for me to review your code. So you'll need to context-switch fully onto the other task to work on it, and you're probably going to get less work done than if you can devote all of your attention to one task at a time.

This isn't about "me struggling", it's about ways the entire team's productivity can be affected by choosing an asynchronous vs synchronous code review model. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/context-switchin...! has some more info on how certain types of context switches can be more damaging than others. I've been working remote for 3 years now with a synchronous code review system, and I wouldn't give it up for the world.

But to get any real value from a review, the reviewer will need to context switch.

Reviewing code together is reasonable, but having to review it as soon as you say "done it" is an interruption.

If it took you a day to write a branch, do you really want to sit quietly watching me read and think for an hour? Anyway, everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year.

> If it took you a day to write a branch, do you really want to sit quietly watching me read and think for an hour?

Yes, absolutely, if that hour is going to be productive and collaborative in coming up with ways to make the code better (which every in-person code review I've been in has been)

> everything I can’t understand without asking you needs to get written down for the on-call eng next year

No, everything that you can't understand without asking me should be fixed by both of us so that it can be understood by everybody. Approving hard to understand code just because it's been "documented" hurts the entire codebase.

> Am I supposed to context-switch over to another task, losing all of my current built-up state about the current problem and making it take twice as long just because you think your task is more important?

Correct, yes. Your current problem is at a state of being done, beyond any code review feedback you may receive. Expecting people to immediately cancel everything they're doing and review your code is not only absurd but also leads to poor quality code reviews. Because rather than actually think about the code and spend time on it, you want them to approve it as fast as possible so you are unblocked as soon as possible.

> Async reviews slow the whole team down, because juggling more tasks in your head means that you can't retain the high-context information about all of them as easily and you lose a lot of time to context-switching.

The reviewer has to context switch and juggle multiple tasks. They have to understand what your code does, why it does it and why it was necessary in the first place. They have to open the ticket, read what it's about, read any conversations and then figure out any potential concerns.

> In the synchronous review model, only one team member has to do a context switch (and a much lighter one than a full context switch to work on another task).

If you have one person review your code then I question that your code review process even matters. For extensive reworks, redesigns etc you are going to pull in more individuals and there is going to be more time taken.

> In addition, synchronous reviews over a voice/video chat just take significantly less time in general, because being able to ask "Why did you do it this way?" and have an immediate discussion about the trade-offs is strictly superior to having to have that same discussion back and forth over days of async responses.

They take far more time in my experience. I've had review turnaround be a few hours to a day in an async context for major reviews. They review the code, we hop on a call when convenient and go over the issues in 15m and we're done. If it's nothing major or understandable over text, then comments are good enough.

Sure, the same people that absolutely cannot get their remote coworkers into a group chat for five minutes or have an ad-hoc Zoom call without scheduling a meeting, resolving schedule conflicts and sending out an agenda, are suddenly able to pick up "clues".

That depends on the person. If your coworker is someone who requires pre-planed meetings for any type of interruption, you'd know. Oh boy would you know very quickly. I usually only feel bad for the cleaning or mail staff, but you and I would immediately know those people.

Otherwise, most other people are either available, or will tell you when they are not and you can easily say back "no worries, ping all of us when you're done" and everything moves 100% more efficiently.

because 9 out of 10 times I'd ping someone saying "Hey X, got a minute we want to discuss Y and Z" then I'd get a response 40 minutes later of "sorry I was focusing on W. What's up? How can I help?". Then I look around and 2 of the 4 people are not at their desks anymore and it's all just a shitshow.

If I need the 6 of us to be on anything I need to send a meeting invite for a specific time to eliminate that type of bullshit. Then deal with all the bullshit that entails

So let me break something down for you real quick. Higher up you say the following:

> You do far more pointless meeting and verbal communication when everyone is working remotely anyway.

In this situation, you ping someone and are upset that they're focusing on work. You are angry that you didn't interrupt someone in the middle of deep focus to do what someone else might consider a pointless meeting.

The last statement proves my point. You don't actually seem to consider the employees time or work to be important, but rather that you need the six of them NOW, no matter what they're doing. You're exactly the problem you describe. What you describe as avoiding red tape to me sounds controlling and nightmarish.

Even in an office environment if people want to do quick talks, white board stuff etc I vastly prefer setting up quick meetings or something ahead of time so that I don't constantly get interrupted by some jackasses fighting for my attention when I got a problem to solve.

It's a lot easier to look around, see that 1 out of 6 has headphones on, think "they must be busy", let's wait for them to put their headphones down or the next major office interruption or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in vs everything you've mentioned.

You can do the same thing in a remote environment. Schedule a meeting in the morning of the next day as people are logging onto work. Or schedule stuff for after lunch before people get back into focus mode. All of this stuff can be done with proper scheduling rather than just grabbing people as they go and assuming that it's not interrupting their work.

of course. The whole point of OP and that I was responding to is that an organization needs to make a decision. Are you a 100% remote organization or are you a predominately in-office with occasional WFH type allowance. WFH isn't a new thing. Long before the pandemic we had plenty of people who would WFH every Friday or when they had a contractor or a delivery they needed to be home for. Or when they had one part of the project they wanted extra focus on.

An organization should have the balls to say "fuck it, we're 100% remote work" then let employees figure out how that would work for everyone and hoe to organize their meetings and work schedule for everyone. Or they should equally have the same amount of balls to say "we're 100% work from office with the occasional exceptions like we did before and you should figure it out".

I've been wanting a commitment to one of the approaches from management for a long time. I'd also like some form of commitment from other companies when I'm applying for jobs. I have no interest in working in a "hybrid" team. You're either 100% remote or you're not. Just tell me which you are and let me pick.

How on earth do you know when a remote worker takes lunch?

If you're going to wait for me to take my headphones off in an open office, your going to wait till I'm heading out. Your better off sending a meeting invite, I'll make sure I'm available.

What's funny is your solution "or to pull people first thing in the morning next day when we're all are getting in" should be a meeting invite rather than a morning ambush.

> If you're going to wait for me to take my headphones off in an open office, your going to wait till I'm heading out.

That’s fine. I’ll catch you next morning or when you’re grabbing a soda or water or …

And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. A said x to B, B said y to C, C said z to A, and it's all wrong but "we discussed it so it's good, right?" - months of endless meetings and fixing up wrong in-everybody's-head specs.

> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.

This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others.

The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time?

It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.

> And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth.

Luckily in-person communication doesn’t exclude that. Write to your heart content. Go nuts. Who cares. On the other hand, 100% remote communication excludes all other forms of communication

That's a big fat strawman. The same way I can gather some people from the office for a five-minute adhoc whiteboard session, I can start a quick group chat about a topic and turn it into a video conference if necessary. No scheduling or agenda required.

No. PERIOD.

Written communication is inherently significantly more complicated. To "jot down" any idea you need to consider how that record will further be shared with others. If I were to write an .md file with a bunch of terms that only the 6 of us know what that's all about, then make a bunch of assumptions based on that. All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.

In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know. Then add links to the link to those who don't know. Then eventually schedule a meeting to discuss the proposal. then a meeting to discuss the results of discussing the discussion of the proposal.

> In a written communication, I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level.

Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this.

Also, you've moved the goalposts again. The GP suggested video. Not writing a book in Markdown.

> Because ESP, gestures, and pheromones don't work over Zoom? I'm not buying this.

Yes they don't work unless you have a company/team policy of "everyone must turn on their camera 100% of the time". You can say something in a meeting with 14 people, take a quick look and see 10 people nodding and 4 perplexed (or 4 people nodding and 10 perplexed). Can't do that with 14 static avatars.

As far as I know no company has such policy. When a team in my company tried to enforce it, their manager got a quick call from HR saying they can't do that.

What the hell do you want with 14 people in a meeting? I thought you wanted to solve a problem, not found an Union?

Can’t control who forwards the meeting invite to who. At the end of the day a 1 second scan for 14 people can tell you, those are agreeing, those are disagreeing, those are confused, those have no skin in the game and are on their phones and I don’t need to worry about them.

You're just making your job easier and everybody else's harder or outright miserable.

I get your point, less work for you and job security, but don't be surprised if you're not met with sympathy or not taken seriously.

On a team of ICs, making your job easier is making everybody else's job easier, because you're all doing the same kind of work. If you're on a team where everyone insists on having everything documented down to the T before any code actually gets written, then you're on a team that's going to ship features slower and have less flexibility. That's what's making everybody's job harder.

> everyone insists on having everything documented down to the T

"Documenting" is not "documenting everything down to the T". You can have that attitude with verbal communication too.

"PERIOD"? Really? Is that supposed to somehow convince me?

Your problem is not remote work, your problem is that you seem to work in a toxic environment. And judging by the discussion style you employ here, it could also be that you're used to rely more on intimidation than arguments. That indeed doesn't work nearly as well in an e-mail.

Now, I have worked in remote-first teams, in an office-first team that during Covid was suddenly forced to become a remote-first team and in one of those oh-so-dreaded "mixed" teams. The latter has some challenges but nothing that cannot be worked out. And you will find assholes, that report their own account of events to the boss all the time, in the office as well.

What I never encountered was, that quickly getting a few colleagues together to exchange ideas about a problem would be some kind of challenge. You post to the group channel, quickly explain the problem and ask people to join a short call. Done.

> All it takes is one of the team members who doesn't agree to forward that written record to a management person then adding their own context (which I never got to add my own context) and get the whole thing vetoed from a much high authority than I care to argue with.

There seem to be trust issues between you and your team. No wonder.

"I need to elaborate and explain every single thing to everyone regardless of their knowledge level. Then add links to those who don't know."

You just described why written communication is vastly better.

> The #1 complaint of full time remote workers is they feel we all agree on designs and decisions and they just get to see a doc that 4/6 have already signed off on verbally and they feel not involved. I have no idea how to "make them feel involved" nor do I care tbh.

Suppose instead of just two people who are 100% remote, you have 8 people who are remote out of a team of 12 (the rest come into the office regularly). The 8 people who are remote find a problem, hash out the design in chat/video, write up a document and the 4 people in the office get to see a document that 8 out of 12 have signed off on. The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.

The problem is that this just doesn't happen like that. Instead, 1 person of 8 will write a document, 1 or 2 people will review it, and then either 1) you'll have to schedule a meeting to finish the review with everybody else (in which case you're paying a high synchronization tax), 2) you just give up and go ahead with no review or 3) you'll have to keep bugging people to review it async and it won't get done. What we're saying is just "remote work pays a higher coordination tax". That's a tax you can maybe decide is worth paying for various reasons (talent pool, work-life balance, etc), but acting like the tradeoffs don't exist is just wishful thinking.

> The remote people have no idea how to get the in office people feel involved, nor do they honestly care.

This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email? Remote workers have only one style of communication available (digital) whereas in-house have two styles (in-person & digital). There is no functional difference for the remote workers in communicating with all other workers but for the office workers there is.

Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office.

Long before the pandemic, we were 100% in office but we had one 100% remote team member. We never had any problems because Robert understood that he was the only remote person. There was a distinct section of "Robert update" in the team weekly meetings just to recap what we all agreed on and to update Robert. Robert knew that and worked around it. We also knew that any decision we made didn't involve Robert and that we had to minimize impact on him whenever possible. If it wasn't possible, then we needed to update him as soon as possible. Luckily Robert never worked on core components with many fuzzy interfaces to other component. Both him and us agreed long ago that it wasn't feasible.

If we all decided the whole team is remote, we could work with that. If we all decided the whole team is in-office, we too can work with that. Having a split team inherently dictated split responsibilities.

> Exactly. Pick a lane. 100% remote or 100% in office.

I don't entirely agree, I think hybrid can work well. It's just that like your colleague Robert the remote workers need to realise that there is a trade-off. You might save on commute etc but the price you pay is that in-office staff might make more decisions etc without you especially if there is a critical mass of workers in-office.

People who prefer the office shouldn't force their preferences on those who prefer remote but remote workers shouldn't try and force the company to be structured around them. Life is all about trade-offs and so long as people go in with eyes wide open it can work well for everyone (in that more people get to work in ways more closely aligned with their preferences).

The parent comment is essentially that if we have small remote contingent we'll treat them as outliers/second-class citizens and so long as everyone is fine with that we'll get along. I guess. Doesn't sound great for the remote person but as long as it works for them, OK? As you say, tradeoffs. I'll take being sort out of the workflow a lot of the time for not commuting/living in a cheaper area.

I've also known teams that basically had a rule that as long as anyone was remote you worked from a work perspective as if everyone were. But it sounds as if that wasn't acceptable in this case to the majority.

If you read the parent comment as being an example of treating people as "second-class citizens" I'd suggest you need a hard look at your own biases.

It is getting increasingly tiresome to have some people who prefer remote behaving as if the world revolves around them. It isn't enough that they get to work remote, they also need to have everyone and everything else change so that there own lifestyles choice doesn't lead to any downsides for them.

> This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email?

It's possible if all team members in the office went out for lunch and didn't see the messages and emails in time. The remote members wouldn't exclude them, but the in person team members wouldn't be able to provide their input in a timely manner.

> This is a strange example because for a remote worker every other worker is "remote" so why would they ever exclude other workers from a group email?

That's the point. Remote workers normally don't exclude the ones who go to the office, and office workers should not exclude remote workers either. That's how inclusivity works in many other cases too - you don't rely on spoken communication if you have a deaf colleague, you don't send your blind colleague architecture diagram in PNG, you don't require attendance to after-work beers, because people have all the kind of circumstances that require them to be present for their families etc.

There is a small price of convenience for in-office workers, but the total result is better documentation of decision making, less influence from office politics, decisions being taken more rationally - and that is not even considering that you can employ people from different cities, countries and timezones.

Yep. At least the people I work with have generally been pretty good about it for a while but written documentation generally, meetings agenda, minutes to at least some level of detail, etc. all seem pretty useful especially in situations where at least some people are going to miss the meeting for whatever reason.

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