Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

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> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???

You're confusing people who are bad at communication with working remotely being bad.

Maybe you've never worked in an office environment with someone who has the same issues, but they're by no means alleviated merely by having their ass in a particular chair.

> Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?

From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?

> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.

Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

>> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time. > Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.

It actually works a lot better than I expected.

That actually sounds pretty effective, and would get around a lot of the inefficiencies I've had in the past with remote workers.

Curious, is it just a window with all the other video feeds that you keep in the background? Or a thumbnail version of to the side? Or a second monitor? I'm curious as to the difference between it being always visible, or something you have to pull up.

Most of the people from home have it on a second monitor. There are about four team rooms on the call as well. They usually have one or two 30 to 50 inch televisions showing the other members.

What technology are you using for the shared video conference? I'm looking for something like this. It needs to restore connections when they die (something like Skype will reliably crap out after an hour or so, and doesn't re-establish the connection).

Cisco Movi/Jabber. But it was down once and we used Google Hangouts pretty effectively. If a connection dies, you just fire it back up again.

> From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?

People make those choices knowing it limits their career options. Since when are companies expected to accomodate every lifestyle and location employees might desire? That's pretty self-centered.

> Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.

> People make those choices knowing it limits their career options. Since when are companies expected to accomodate every lifestyle and location employees might desire? That's pretty self-centered.

Companies make the choice not to hire remote workers knowing it limits their hiring options. Since when are workers expected to accomodate every workplace and management decision an employer might desire? That's pretty myopic.

> Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.

My point is that it's beyond the pale for anything reasonable. You don't record your offices 24/7 or install keyloggers on your computers, I hope, why would you expect anything different remotely? Can you really not measure effectiveness and communications skills except via panopticon?

It has nothing to do with measuring productivity or making sure they're at their desk instead of watching TV. It's about creating a virtual presence in the office to reduce communication barriers. I don't see anything ridiculous about that -- several people on HN have mentioned that their company does it.

Having worked nearly half my career as a remote employee, I find Skype mostly eliminates this problem...

Onsite Employee: "Hey, got a second?" Me: "Yep" Video chat commences

It's a horrible work habit to get into to interrupt someone like that, but sometimes it's necessary. Plus, sometimes it's nice to just chitchat with your coworkers, just like you would in an office setting.

The bottom line is, I'm good at my job and if you're not willing to let me work remotely, you are welcome to discriminate based on geographic presence and eliminate 90% of qualified employees and I'll just go work for the increasing number of enlightened companies that have figured that they can get better talent by making telecommuting a reasonable option. Not all awesome engineers live within a commutable distance to a major metropolitan hub.

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