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> My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you That's typical of situations when yo

> My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those people, and that's fine. In my case, I ought to have been collaborating, but the remoteness plus time difference (plus language difference!) exacerbated the communication problem. IRL communication is incredibly high-bandwidth. If a person sits next to you and doesn't communicate with you much, you already know something about that person: that he or she does not enjoy chatting. When the absence of communication is due to remote location, you don't even know that. The communication problem at remote workplaces causes everyone to underinvest in building long-term relationships with everyone else (because nobody really knows what everyone else is really like), and the culture nosedives.

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Noseshine 10y ago
> That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those people You disregard the rest that I wrote, probably because of an unfortunate habit of mine to edit my initial two sentences again and again until I end up with 20 more sentences half an hour later... my commenting habits are more appropriate for chat. In any case, my point is collaboration is not a question of distance. A lot of highly successful projects by distributed teams not least in the open source scene show that too. Even in my current pre-startup project I'm working with another programmer whom I only met once long after we had already done a lot of work together, very successfully and requiring a lot of cooperation. It is a people/personality issue though, thinking of all the programmers I can think of it's true the same thing would definitely not work with all of them. It's good you bring that issue up.

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Noseshine 10y ago

> That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those people You disregard the rest that I wrote, probably because of an unfortunate habit of mine to edit my initial two sentences again and again until I end up with 20 more sentences half an hour later... my commenting habits are more appropriate for chat. In any case, my point is collaboration is not a question of distance. A lot of highly successful projects by distributed teams not least in the open source scene show that too. Even in my current pre-startup project I'm working with another programmer whom I only met once long after we had already done a lot of work together, very successfully and requiring a lot of cooperation. It is a people/personality issue though, thinking of all the programmers I can think of it's true the same thing would definitely not work with all of them. It's good you bring that issue up.