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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

what always gets me, is why in this day and age we are still stuck on localizing everything. In this day and age, you should be able to run everything from a small village in spain from your iPhone.

Teleconferencing with investors and other CEOs, having programmers work remotely, etc. Instead the culture is so localized that everyone is pretty much expected to go to SV.

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having programmers work remotely

From my fairly limited experience, not having the people you work with in the same physical space is a huge annoyance.

I second this. It makes the team much harder in coming up with innovative solution. Instead of taking 3 days, it might takes 2 weeks.

Personal communication is better. People evolved to detect all sorts of subtlety in in person communication that you just can't detect when it's filtered through some other medium.

Lets say you have 10 million dollars at stake. If in personal communication is 10% better, and communication accounts for 10% of costs (i think both are higher than 10%), you're looking at saving 100k just by being near by. Suffer now to boom later.

Agreed. I find even a two-way conversation on Skype with blocky, stuttering video is noticeably more productive than a straight phone call. The internet really needs ubiquitous video conferencing. It should be as trivial to set up as a Skype call (which, to be honest, is not always that trivial), but multi-way, cross-platform and much better quality. Maybe Opera or Google could build it into their browsers...

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