Comment by kethinov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kethinov | Hacker News Reader

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"And because we were all together in the same room when Vitaly found it, we isolated, analyzed, and weaponized it in minutes, rather than in hours or days."

It wasn't because you were all together in the same room, it's because you were communicating effectively and you're assuming there is no way to replicate that level of effective communication without being in the same room.

With proper tools and training, everything you did in that room could have been done over the internet instead. There are communal whiteboarding apps, collaborative code editing apps, amazingly expressive chat apps like Slack, not to mention good old fashioned audio/video chat tools.

It can be done. It is done frequently, every day. It makes me sad to see so many people on a place like Hackers News, dedicated to building the internet's Next Big Thing repeatedly claim that it's not possible to collaborate as effectively on the internet.

It's truly ironic.

I'm sure there's some amount of money and time Matasano could spend to make extra-office communication so fluid and effective that the sort of serendipitous collaboration I just talked about would happen with any two people on the planet. But, like most companies, they haven't. Meanwhile: they value that collaboration. So, there you are.

While is it true that the tools exist to collaborate equally well online vs. in person, the culture of an organization also needs to support it.

It is nearly impossible to just throw a new toolkit at a company and expect them to be able to thereby switch from an in person culture to a remote one.

It requires a transition of culture, which in turn requires both vision and support of the switch from the leadership of an organization.

Certainly remote collaboration works. But there is more to it than just flipping a switch or adding some tools.

Yes, I completely agree and didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Working remotely is a skill unto itself like any other and it must be developed and honed across an organization.

I guess what frustrates me is so few people see a need to develop and hone that skill. Some even actively argue against doing so.

Another aspect to consider is that given the sensitive nature of our work and access to what is often crown-jewel intellectual property, we have several clients who require we work from their offices. They are sometimes unwilling to cover travel costs. With a more geographically distributed base of employees we'd either have to eat the costs of bringing someone remote in for these projects, or rely more heavily on the now smaller subset of our staff that is present in these geographies. Neither is a desirable scenario.

Most of us like working in an office close to home, and don't like traveling a lot. It works for us.

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