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Comment by luch | Hacker News Reader

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally.

Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.

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You just described Teams, Slack, Skype, and Zoom. all ubiquitous and industry standard.

Erm, also Meet and the rest of the Google Suite (Chat).

All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.

Do you live in a region with poor internet, or do your coworkers? I've been fully immersed in Meet and Zoom calls for 6-7 years now, and all the issues that used to come up are now mostly gone as they were rooted in people not having the correct habits and setups.

lol. No amount of good internet fixes remote calls.

Most people working for organizations with multiple offices have to videoconferencing all the time anyways. If video calls were really that big of an issue, having offices around the country/world would’ve stopped being a thing by now.

So what you’re saying is that if video conferencing works, regardless of it works well or poorly, it works therefore it’s not an issue. Even if a team worked faster, more efficiently, in person. It’s ok to be remote because it worked even tho they are less efficient and it doesn’t work as well.

Are you proposing that my management should be able to see my chat messages and email ad hoc and without approval or assistance from IT, legal, or their management? That seems bonkers to me.

Bonkers or no, that is a current legal reality if you're talking about chat or email messages which are sent and received using employer-provided means. If an email address ends in your employer's domain, it's not your email account unless you're self-employed.

I can't reply to the reply to this comment, but you raise a key point. While employers control the data, they don't use it like people seem to assume. Managers are not managing if they attempt to resolve conflicts by attempting to decipher private conversations.

There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."

That's not what I wanted to say. With remote teams, you need to establish a way to organize the work using written communications which are either mail/slack/sharepoint/whatever and within this framework management needs to have a "view" into what the team is doing.

It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".

I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.

I think in all team and project rooms/channels/email d-lists, yes, those should be easily readable by managers because they're not contemplated as private. I think DMs and individual emails should not be accessible to managers (absent a very specific legal/compliance/HR concern).

Oh, I certainly agree with that, and was hoping this was considered the norm (as it has been in my experience).

> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in

So tools to spy on your employees?

Obviously no what I mean that is ok if your superior and his boss are invited in your team's slack channel even if they only lurks, and you don't create a "shadow channel" with your teammates to talk on the project without being read by your hierarchy.

Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.

>> Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings.

How is that specific to remote work? People in the same building have the same misunderstandings with the same tools. The way to fix it doesn't involve management spying on the communications and attempting to decipher them.

So, teams??

Basically industry standard

Teams is not reliable. It's a steaming pile of dog shit.

As are the rest of them in my experience. Zoom has been hands down the worst for me, seconded by Teams and then Meet.

Zoom has been far and away the best of the meeting tech I use. Excellent audio processing and generally reliable. (Also a nice convenient slack interface, so /zoom <RET> <RET> starts a Zoom meeting and pastes the connection info into the channel.)

Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.

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