Comment by THENATHE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by THENATHE | Hacker News Reader

I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.

Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.

Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.

I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?

(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)

There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings.

That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.

Funny enough, those of us who had to deal with international teams or offshoring had to develop those skills even before remote-first companies were a thing.

I remember some of my colleagues were working in an office doing WebEx or whatever it was calls all day already back in the early 2010s.

IME software engineering is a mix of coding, which can sometimes be fairly independent of others and require focus, and a range of collaborative activities. Face to face meetings help building the relations that help the collaborative part go smoothly. But once the high level requirements are understood and the humam relations are in place, a team can complete projects online quite effectively, even as the requirements evolve.

Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.

I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?

It's funny how the internet became widespread which enabled what you say in theory but it wasn't enough, we needed a global pandemic to push us to use it as intended and get over the stone age type of culture we had before (remember doing your taxes on a frickin paper? Working only from the office? Having to sign papers with a pen?)

It makes me think about the other tech that's just waiting for the next catastrophe to become 10x more helpful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com