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Let me bring front and center something that has gotten a surprisingly (to me) small portion of this discussion: ENABLE MORE REMOTE WORK. Why am I living in a

Let me bring front and center something that has gotten a surprisingly (to me) small portion of this discussion: ENABLE MORE REMOTE WORK. Why am I living in a high cost area? Because this is where the jobs are. Why are costs high? Because thousands of other engineers essentially _need_ to do the same thing. So to answer Sam's original question with another question, in addition to merely making this a one sided "businesses must be more accommodating"; What can engineers do to increase remote worker availability for startups? (Companies in general, but inverted Sam's wording for more poetic "fit") What pain point solvers, major technologies, processes, etc are missing that would make truly distributed teams less of a risk, or more desirable? While I certainly think there are already great reasons (you get access to more talent potentially lower cost, more "diversity" out of box, more flexibility from your workforce and less overhead per employee) I'd be curious to hear how this dovetails with what the powers that be think are missing. (In the case that one thinks there are intractable problems re: remote, I'd also be curious to hear those for the purpose of confronting this problem regardless.)

usaar333 11y ago
From my experience working with remote workers, problems tend to be bucketed under "loss of context". The remote worker misses so many ad-hoc (e.g. lunch with a colleague) workplace conversations that they end up knowing less about what is going on. Time zone differences further complicate thing (misalignment of working hours). Secondly, and something perhaps tech could solve, is difficulty of working on problems together. I haven't seen a good video conferencing solution that comes close to two people in a room drawing on a whiteboard.
- mjevans 11y ago
  Working in actual VR would do it. Sort of like have an 'office' room of standard size and layout (no one deviates on the placement of furniture; decorations and quality might change). The slip on some immersive 3D thing and have an actual avatar that's mapped to the worker's actions. This includes drawing on the virtual white board. It probably also includes a decent face-rig and several other non-verbal communications.

usaar333 11y ago

From my experience working with remote workers, problems tend to be bucketed under "loss of context". The remote worker misses so many ad-hoc (e.g. lunch with a colleague) workplace conversations that they end up knowing less about what is going on. Time zone differences further complicate thing (misalignment of working hours). Secondly, and something perhaps tech could solve, is difficulty of working on problems together. I haven't seen a good video conferencing solution that comes close to two people in a room drawing on a whiteboard.

mjevans 11y ago
Working in actual VR would do it. Sort of like have an 'office' room of standard size and layout (no one deviates on the placement of furniture; decorations and quality might change). The slip on some immersive 3D thing and have an actual avatar that's mapped to the worker's actions. This includes drawing on the virtual white board. It probably also includes a decent face-rig and several other non-verbal communications.