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I honestly think remote work is pretty detrimental to innovation and progress. Many of the best projects that I've worked on started as hallway conversations.
by CabSauce 9y ago
I honestly think remote work is pretty detrimental to innovation and progress. Many of the best projects that I've worked on started as hallway conversations.
Obviously, this isn't true for everyone and all situations... It's just like, my opinion... man.
- chaffe2 9y agoAlso, your physical presence is pretty much required if you want to have any sort of career progression. But it's great if you don't care about it and just want a steady paycheck that isn't eaten up by high cost of living.
- throwaway91111 9y agoThankfully the vast majority of work has nothing to do with innovation. I'd love to hear your argument for "progress", whatever that is.
- jdc0589 9y agoinnovation is relative. Sure, innovation on a global or market scale might not be common or necessary, but within the context of a single company the definition is broader.
- throwaway91111 9y agoTrue, but I am highly skeptical most people will have issues producing this level of innovation from a coffee shop.
- CabSauce 9y agoI meant innovation and progress in the sense of the sharing of good ideas, and solving shared problems. If a remote job only involves some kind of repeated task, it could probably just be automated.
- throwaway91111 9y agoThank god most code requires no innovation at all, and thank god i am the one automating others out of the job! Unless you're working on research, it's hard to buy physical proximity reducing throughput; just latency.
- maxxxxx 9y agoWhen I worked at a remote company we had a lot of "hallway conversations" on Skype. I would argue that we had more creative ideas then than I ever see in my current company at the office. In the end it comes down to people. Either people are innovative or not.
- basseq 9y agoI want to highlight how the importance of this comment. It highlights a major and common misconception from the OP, which is this: embracing remote work is more than "letting people work remotely". To be truly successful, you have to build a remote culture. That means hallway conversations move somewhere else. It doesn't matter if you sit down the hall or around the world: the experience is the same. Remote people don't miss hallways conversations because hallway conversations don't happen (or aren't as important).
- spacelizard 9y agoI disagree, a good office culture extends beyond meatspace. I've worked at plenty of companies where the general atmosphere was... not good. These are places where the "hallway conversation" was either nonexistent or didn't extend beyond small talk about TV or the weather. If your employees aren't comfortable sending instant messages to each other, they definitely aren't going to be comfortable being in the same room together.
- bearcobra 9y agoOne of the problems I have with instant messages is you can't tell if you are interrupting the other person. Some people may be able to ignore the message, but I think for many this kind of notifications create a sense of urgency and push them to reply still. Being conscious of this, I try to avoid sending IMs. In person, interactions give me way more signals about the other person's current state. Because of that I'm about 1000x more likely to say hi to a random co-worker walking down the hall than I am to send a random IM.
- Karunamon 9y agoIMO, that comes with the adjustment to using IM and is partly an office cultural thing. Most people I know toggle their status to "busy" or "DND" when otherwise engaged in a thing, and it's an understanding that being on open status means that people are okay to ping you or send memes.
- dasmoth 9y agoThere's some truth in this. The best solution to this is that if you've got something non-urgent that you'd like a colleague to think about at some point, use a truly asynchronous medium (e.g. e-mail, so long as you're not in an organisation which uses it as a de facto IM platform). This is true whether or not the people you're trying to communicate with are in the same building.
- convolvatron 9y agoso I completely agree that the culture is key. i also agree that given an healthy culture, remote doesn't matter that much but in the absence of a working culture remote just can be a compounding factor for dysfunction. its also more difficult to enculturate someone remotely. i think thats why 'senior contributor moves to montana and continues to be really effective' is such an unsurprising atory.
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoSomeone needs to tell all of those open source project things about this. They've been doing it wrong the whole time!
- jasode 9y agoOpen source development as "obvious" proof of remote work superiority is often brought up but proponents don't realize they aren't the same. E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on, with little or zero effects on careers for missing deadlines has different dynamics than businesses. If we want to convince businesses to adopt remote work, the Linux kernel is not a relevant example. Businesses have: 1) finite budget 2) deadlines 3) pressure to innovate for marketplace acceptance or go bankrupt We need a better explanation for why business-related success of Google Pagerank/Bigtable, Apple iPhone, Facebook, etc comes more from teams in the office rather than remote workers on Skype. The Linux project -- even though it is "successful" -- is not that explanation.
- svachalek 9y agoOpen source is wonderful but to be fair, it's rarely innovative. Nearly always, at least as the broadly used software like Linux, Apache, Firefox, etc go, it was developed in a traditional company environment before being released as OSS, or it's a clone of existing commercial software.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]