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Comment by hotnfresh | Hacker News Reader

Chat’s my favorite. Leaves a record so you don’t have to take notes or immediately record whatever you talked about so you don’t forget.

Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person.

In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing.

> In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.

One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.

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This a 1000%. Electronic communication means instant "paper trail" for free. Talking face to face is by its very nature ephemeral, OP seems to have missed that point.

You seem to have missed my point that all of those options require someone to actually be at their workstation and available. With WFH, half the time people aren't. In the office they are.

If WFH is going to be the future, then there should be uptime requirements with associated penalties so that someone is as available as they would be in the office. Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.

> require someone to actually be at their workstation and available.

No guarantee people will be at their office desk either to be frank. They could be hiding in the toilet, loitering at the water cooler, out on smoke break, getting coffee, ... etc.

Sure, but those activities typically won't last for hours. I've had to put tasks on hold because the SME wasn't available for several hours, without explanation or any communication whatsoever, to make a fundamental design decision in their area of expertise. And it wasn't a one-off or just one SME. People, at least my team, were getting constantly distracted. They essentially imposed their irregular and unpredictable schedules on the rest of us, despite being in positions of relative authority. I had to work nights I didn't plan to work because someone decided to respond at 8pm to a question asked at 1pm. That kind of delay would never happen at the office even if someone was slacking off.

Which goes back to the principle that WFH is more beneficial for senior devs than juniors. If you lack the knowledge or authority to work independently for extended periods, then instead of everyone being on the same objective schedule the junior people are forced onto whenever the senior people want to work, and more specifically when they want to be available to answer questions that only they can answer. It's like only being able to do homework during a professor's office hours.

Seems like you're associating characteristics found with specifically bad employees as universally true for all WFH employees.

Surely you’re capable of scheduling a meeting if you need to talk to someone or share a screen. Scheduling a meeting is far preferable to interrupting someone who is busy, in the office or not.

If the company needs you, you get to do it your way.

Also, software dev doesn't actually need a team, and, as the "key players" tend to go WFH more and more, the teams become worse and worse value.

This ends with the decline of "team managers" and "filler players".

Did you mean "team managers" in-metaphor? As in non-players, non-coach excess staff? Totally agreed if so, didn't want to rebut unless you actually meant 1st-line managers of teams of players (which I'd place as "coach" in this metaphor).

> In the office they are.

lol what are they doing? Staring at the ceiling? What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home? How is this still a thing being discussed? Perhaps, at home, they are actually able to get some work done.

Again, this is my office. I'm sure there are some offices where people legitimately aren't doing much of anything at home. Statistically, that just has to be true. Maybe this is the wrong company?

> What makes them always available in the office and not always available at home?

I remember, way back in like 2012? 2015? Not sure when exactly, but we visited the office of a contractor we were working with, and they had a flatscreen on a stand in a public area with their lead developer on webcam, working from home. I don't know how everyone gets so utterly myopic that they forget you can just login to a videoconference (or IRC in the olden days) and just be available for these "quick chats" Bonus, if you need uninterrupted deep focus time, you can turn it off at your end.

And email, did we suddenly conveniently forget about that? LKML and countless other FLOSS mailing lists are proof positive that 100% remote can indeed build any scale of software.

I think you're the one who missed the point. Yes they are at their workstation, but they don't want to be available for constant interruption. To turn your story around. You don't get to interrupt my work whenever you feel like it just because we're at the office.

Maybe when we walk off the field and we're home, we can focus in peace on our work and be more productive?

> Software development is a team sport, you don't get to walk off the field whenever you feel like it just because you're home.

Some of the most widely used software in the world (e.g. Linux) was developed without any such developer “uptime” requirements, with developers scattered around the planet, working on what they wanted, when they wanted.

This is obviously a very different thing than running a for-profit business. But there are countless examples of companies embracing the necessities of remote work to great success: GitHub, Automattic, Kinsta, Namecheap, Basecamp, GitLab, YNAB, Zapier, etc.

I am hearing a ton of issues with your company’s culture that have nothing to do with WFH. I genuinely hear your concerns as sincere, but, from the outside, all I see are warning lights. Anecdata, but I don’t know where my people, my boss, and any of my thousands of coworkers are, but I rarely wait long for a thoughtful reply, unless it’s “hey I am tied up but will get back to you EOD. Does that work?”

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