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Some points are valid, but some others show a lack of proper tools. For example: > Assumptions and lack of documentation became obvious. [..] people reinvent

Some points are valid, but some others show a lack of proper tools. For example: > Assumptions and lack of documentation became obvious. [..] people reinvent wheel because they are unaware another team member has taken action already. I can't see how this is related to working from home or not. If your employees aren't documenting what they do and relying on "face to face meetings" to check in on what they did, well, good luck with that, especially when teams start growing in size. > People who didn’t come to the office missed out on things like ad hoc team lunches and dinners, discussions on the latest tech when a delivery arrives, tastings (wine, whisky, coffee, snacks, and a lot more). Again: lunches and dinners aren't documentation tools. Missing out on snacks, wine, whisky? Really? > Efficiency suffers. [...] there can be lags in responses that wouldn’t happen in the office. "Lags in responses" are productive, imho. I'd rather keep on doing what I'm focused on doing right now, then answer to your question in HipChat, than be interrupted to address "whatever's on your mind".

throwawaydbfif 10y ago
I don't see how working remotely can ever replace the human interaction of working in one place. People forget, humans are not machines. They are biologically wired to work better in groups than alone, and our biology includes the ability to signal others using our face, body, voice, and even the way we perform an action. Voice is still a faster way of communicating than anything else despite our 60's sci-fi level technology. Remote work will never replace face to face contact for jobs where high amounts of collaboration are needed, too many parts of the signal are lost. Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local internet outage. The IT guy literally stood up from his desk and said "holy shit anyone that knows our infrastructure get in the meeting room now." We could hear the warning bleeps from the server room merging into an incomprehensible chorus, the death rattle of a company hours from implosion. The seriousness was obvious just from his actions and the sound of his voice. The response time was a few seconds. How long would this take if we were spread across timezones with different hours and variable lag time between communication? If the internet is down is there any backup? How much would it cost to give every single employee a backup method of communicating? How does an employee separate a desperate please for help from the endless stream of BS emails and messages that aren't terribly important? Working in one place gives you a very powerful and natural means of communication that's nearly instant and can't be stopped by any hardware or software failure, save multiple employees dying simulatanously.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local internet outage. That's not a great example, because that's a problem that's already caused by over-centralizing. If you used colocated servers or cloud hosting, that doesn't sound like a local Internet outage would have been a problem. More broadly: at some point, every successful company will need to handle workflows of people who aren't in the same physical space. It's much easier to bake these habits in as a small company and grow with them than it is to retrofit them onto a company once it needs to open a second office in a different city or country.
  - throwawaydbfif 10y ago
    People are used to working with others far away constantly in daily life. I don't think it's much effort to say "yeah the guy that sits across from you, from now on youll have to call him" . Especially if most of the employees in the new office are new, I don't think it's much or any real work needed to teach people to work with remote employees. I'm just arguing that decentralizing has a fixed cost of more difficult communication, not something you can save up for or build into your company from the start.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > I don't think it's much effort to say "yeah the guy that sits across from you, from now on youll have to call him" . Let me start by saying that I'm not speaking hypothetically. I'm speaking from experience here, having worked for companies both remotely and not-remotely, and seeing where that's succeeded and failed. It is actually difficult to make that adjustment, because working in the same space breeds a lot of bad communication habits which don't scale. Working remotely from the start, you end up being forced to document work (even minimally), or to make decisions over a medium that is readily archive-able like email or Slack[0]. This is particularly true if you're working across timezones, even a small difference like east/west coast in the US (3 hours). Reading through an email thread to reconstruct history isn't the ideal form of company documentation, no, but it sure beats not having it at all because all of the discussions happened in real-life and nobody felt the need to send out an email afterwards to formalize it. If you develop a collective habit of never making important (or irreversible) decisions without some sort of asynchronous and archiveable communication, and always having canonical internal documentation and runbooks for internal systems (because some of the the people who may need to operate them are working different hours), you don't run into the situation where your company has suddenly hit 300 people and needs to open an office in Europe, but can't break the bad habits of relying on information held in people's heads and exchanged in ephemeral, synchronous form. [0] Lest anyone misinterpret what I'm saying: Slack is emphatically not a replacement for proper documentation. It can, however, be a helpful forcing function to bootstrap proper documentation, and it serves that role far better than meatspace interactions or even video conferencing ever do.

throwawaydbfif 10y ago

I don't see how working remotely can ever replace the human interaction of working in one place. People forget, humans are not machines. They are biologically wired to work better in groups than alone, and our biology includes the ability to signal others using our face, body, voice, and even the way we perform an action. Voice is still a faster way of communicating than anything else despite our 60's sci-fi level technology. Remote work will never replace face to face contact for jobs where high amounts of collaboration are needed, too many parts of the signal are lost. Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local internet outage. The IT guy literally stood up from his desk and said "holy shit anyone that knows our infrastructure get in the meeting room now." We could hear the warning bleeps from the server room merging into an incomprehensible chorus, the death rattle of a company hours from implosion. The seriousness was obvious just from his actions and the sound of his voice. The response time was a few seconds. How long would this take if we were spread across timezones with different hours and variable lag time between communication? If the internet is down is there any backup? How much would it cost to give every single employee a backup method of communicating? How does an employee separate a desperate please for help from the endless stream of BS emails and messages that aren't terribly important? Working in one place gives you a very powerful and natural means of communication that's nearly instant and can't be stopped by any hardware or software failure, save multiple employees dying simulatanously.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local internet outage. That's not a great example, because that's a problem that's already caused by over-centralizing. If you used colocated servers or cloud hosting, that doesn't sound like a local Internet outage would have been a problem. More broadly: at some point, every successful company will need to handle workflows of people who aren't in the same physical space. It's much easier to bake these habits in as a small company and grow with them than it is to retrofit them onto a company once it needs to open a second office in a different city or country.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  People are used to working with others far away constantly in daily life. I don't think it's much effort to say "yeah the guy that sits across from you, from now on youll have to call him" . Especially if most of the employees in the new office are new, I don't think it's much or any real work needed to teach people to work with remote employees. I'm just arguing that decentralizing has a fixed cost of more difficult communication, not something you can save up for or build into your company from the start.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > I don't think it's much effort to say "yeah the guy that sits across from you, from now on youll have to call him" . Let me start by saying that I'm not speaking hypothetically. I'm speaking from experience here, having worked for companies both remotely and not-remotely, and seeing where that's succeeded and failed. It is actually difficult to make that adjustment, because working in the same space breeds a lot of bad communication habits which don't scale. Working remotely from the start, you end up being forced to document work (even minimally), or to make decisions over a medium that is readily archive-able like email or Slack[0]. This is particularly true if you're working across timezones, even a small difference like east/west coast in the US (3 hours). Reading through an email thread to reconstruct history isn't the ideal form of company documentation, no, but it sure beats not having it at all because all of the discussions happened in real-life and nobody felt the need to send out an email afterwards to formalize it. If you develop a collective habit of never making important (or irreversible) decisions without some sort of asynchronous and archiveable communication, and always having canonical internal documentation and runbooks for internal systems (because some of the the people who may need to operate them are working different hours), you don't run into the situation where your company has suddenly hit 300 people and needs to open an office in Europe, but can't break the bad habits of relying on information held in people's heads and exchanged in ephemeral, synchronous form. [0] Lest anyone misinterpret what I'm saying: Slack is emphatically not a replacement for proper documentation. It can, however, be a helpful forcing function to bootstrap proper documentation, and it serves that role far better than meatspace interactions or even video conferencing ever do.