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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Remote working isn't for everyone.

The hardest part is motivation, not necessarily because the temptation to goof off is higher at home (sometimes it can be the opposite, if you are in an office where goofing off is common).

You don't get the human reactions to your work. For example you can't build some feature and just grab the nearest person to show and see their subtle reactions to it. You don't get to walk past another part of the building and see a room full of people using your software to get their work done or whatever the effect of what you are doing is.

Instead you end up sending an email at 7PM saying "I have completed item #232" and you get one back the following morning saying "ok, proceed with item #233".

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There really could be an encyclopedia of challenges for working from home. It is hard to do right. It took me over half a decade to feel like I really had it figured out. Combined with running my own company was quite a challenge.

Social isolation, stress, illness, lack of exercise, are things that people who work from home face. Without deliberate action you can develop life threatening conditions after just a few years of neglect.

Offices, working together in person, can add a great deal of value and productivity to a task. I'm not convinced it is so valuable as to do daily.

Be mindful and pay close attention to your own personal health and relationships, and working from home can give you the opportunity to live a drastically higher quality of life.

I agree with you, but this is purely a software problem. Something like https://www.sqwiggle.com/ solves most of the human interaction issues. And if everyone could view everyone else's desktops in real-time, that would let you strike up conversations with others about what tools they're using.

Everyone in this thread seems to be talking about remote collaboration as it exists today, but I'm talking about how it will be in the future. The software isn't there yet, but it's bound to get there eventually.

Why don't you just grab the nearest person on IRC?

Also, the way your write it sounds like you and your teammates communicate so tersely as to be an impediment. Don't do that.

In every office I've ever been in, all the programmers type to each other all day long on IRC. In all the distributed workplaces I've ever been, they do the same exact thing, miles apart.

Talk to each other. All day long. Constantly. On IRC. Just like you do in an office.

I don't know if IRC is a great substitute for seeing a personal reaction complete with body language. Just little things like seeing whether someones eyes light up or glaze over when you show them something.

IRC can also be easily ignored as people go "AFK" or "busy", it's harder to ignore someone standing in your face.

I really think you hit the nail on the head. In a really good group, instant social feedback can be a big energizer. I think its pretty necessary to keep going after a while. Maybe you can get some of that remotely, but nothing replaces getting excited by other people in person.

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