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I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes vi

I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.

keganunderwood 9y ago
We could still work from home and have time where we meet our coworkers? I read somewhere that gitlab is trying out something like this. I'd love to learn wrist they conclude from this experience.
- maruhan2 9y ago
  I find it psychologically very different knowing that anyone can talk to you (and you can't ignore like if you were online) and see you. It forces me into a "work mode" psychology. Granted, I'm pretty bad at self-discipline
  - blunte 9y ago
    If you're highly creative, self-discipline is often at odds with the way you work/think. Unfortunately, many office drones are not creative and have no concept of this. Some expect developers and IT people to punch a clock and start typing code until close of business day.
- blunte 9y ago
  At one company I worked for (that was mostly remote workers), people who lived within an hour of each other would periodically meet up for social or work reasons. We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun. So unless you're geographically too far from colleagues, there's no reason why you can't have meetups (and I would advocate for them... occasionally).
  - gerardflo 9y ago
    > but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled This is a fallacy. If something really needs resolving, the setting is not relevant.
    - blunte 9y ago
      It may be fallacy to you because you haven't experienced it, but it has happened in my experience. Sometimes on person describes an annoyance they have, and one of the other people in the room feels motivated to resolve that issue. Or a couple of people start talking about something, and a third person has a new idea that improves thing. There are endless scenarios that can result in something happening that otherwise might never have happened without the meeting.
    - salvar 9y ago
      Is the setting never relevant? Or is this just your anecdotal experience?
- sytse 9y ago
  It is working really well for us! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e56PbkJdmZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e56PbkJdmZ8 is a good introduction video
amorphid 9y ago
One thing we, or at least I, haven't seen is the remote equivalent of a whiteboard. Or pen & paper.
- coldtea 9y ago
  There are lots of such implementations (virtual whiteboard and/or pen and paper). Search for: "collaborating writing tool", "virtual whiteboard" etc. The latter are usually part of teleconference tools. Here's from an open source one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo
  - sidlls 9y ago
    None of the ones I've ever seen or used comes close to even approximating the in-person whiteboard experience.
    - amorphid 9y ago
      That has been my experience as well.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Not even sure what that means. They let you write stuff (even with a pen, on a touch capable display) and have others see what you write (and even write/erase themselves). What else is missing? Standing in person before an actual whiteboard? Smelling the marker's ink? Maybe with the advent of cheap VR and smell-o-vision we'll get that too.
      - sidlls 9y ago
        Two things stick out as most problematic: "whiteboard" real estate and latency.
      - scaryclam 9y ago
        The writing part isn't really the main benefit of whiteboarding. Standing there, pointing at things and chatting about it is a really big part. Then there's the physical size. Quite often I find it much nicer to stand in front of a board and draw on a large scale. The current attempts at remote whiteboards are really not suitable replacements. VR would a giant help as body language, gesturing and physical size all become much easier to see. Of course, that would require quite a leap forward in VR to accomplish that level of avatar.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I also hate video. Ugh. I don't know why I love face to face but hate video :/
- mbrock 9y ago
  One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face. That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare? And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings. You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 Sample: > It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. And: > This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
- 9y ago
gerardflo 9y ago
You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.
- lovich 9y ago
  I like remote work, but the benefits of searchable text barely materialized for us. There were a few times we needed to find some piece of information, especially from colleagues who had moved on. However, any moderately discussed topic just generated too much text to be quickly search able. Wed usually get thousands of results for any search term and whoever was looking for the necessary information had to not just look at those results, but the context they were in, to get the info they wanted. One time it took the course of a day
- tetromino_ 9y ago
  Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately. Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all. So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    > Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately. In theory. But when you are dealing with a lot of "anti-social" people who have a hard time communicating verbally, or integrating socially, it usually has the opposite affect, ime.
  - wolco 9y ago
    Remember those requirement we talked about last month? Writing it down or having a log of conversation helps so much. When in person it is harder to take notes and be part of the converdation.

keganunderwood 9y ago

We could still work from home and have time where we meet our coworkers? I read somewhere that gitlab is trying out something like this. I'd love to learn wrist they conclude from this experience.

maruhan2 9y ago
I find it psychologically very different knowing that anyone can talk to you (and you can't ignore like if you were online) and see you. It forces me into a "work mode" psychology. Granted, I'm pretty bad at self-discipline
- blunte 9y ago
  If you're highly creative, self-discipline is often at odds with the way you work/think. Unfortunately, many office drones are not creative and have no concept of this. Some expect developers and IT people to punch a clock and start typing code until close of business day.
blunte 9y ago
At one company I worked for (that was mostly remote workers), people who lived within an hour of each other would periodically meet up for social or work reasons. We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun. So unless you're geographically too far from colleagues, there's no reason why you can't have meetups (and I would advocate for them... occasionally).
- gerardflo 9y ago
  > but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled This is a fallacy. If something really needs resolving, the setting is not relevant.
  - blunte 9y ago
    It may be fallacy to you because you haven't experienced it, but it has happened in my experience. Sometimes on person describes an annoyance they have, and one of the other people in the room feels motivated to resolve that issue. Or a couple of people start talking about something, and a third person has a new idea that improves thing. There are endless scenarios that can result in something happening that otherwise might never have happened without the meeting.
  - salvar 9y ago
    Is the setting never relevant? Or is this just your anecdotal experience?
sytse 9y ago
It is working really well for us! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e56PbkJdmZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e56PbkJdmZ8 is a good introduction video

amorphid 9y ago

One thing we, or at least I, haven't seen is the remote equivalent of a whiteboard. Or pen & paper.

coldtea 9y ago
There are lots of such implementations (virtual whiteboard and/or pen and paper). Search for: "collaborating writing tool", "virtual whiteboard" etc. The latter are usually part of teleconference tools. Here's from an open source one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo
- sidlls 9y ago
  None of the ones I've ever seen or used comes close to even approximating the in-person whiteboard experience.
  - amorphid 9y ago
    That has been my experience as well.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Not even sure what that means. They let you write stuff (even with a pen, on a touch capable display) and have others see what you write (and even write/erase themselves). What else is missing? Standing in person before an actual whiteboard? Smelling the marker's ink? Maybe with the advent of cheap VR and smell-o-vision we'll get that too.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      Two things stick out as most problematic: "whiteboard" real estate and latency.
    - scaryclam 9y ago
      The writing part isn't really the main benefit of whiteboarding. Standing there, pointing at things and chatting about it is a really big part. Then there's the physical size. Quite often I find it much nicer to stand in front of a board and draw on a large scale. The current attempts at remote whiteboards are really not suitable replacements. VR would a giant help as body language, gesturing and physical size all become much easier to see. Of course, that would require quite a leap forward in VR to accomplish that level of avatar.

dingo_bat 9y ago

I also hate video. Ugh. I don't know why I love face to face but hate video :/

mbrock 9y ago
One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face. That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare? And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings. You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 Sample: > It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. And: > This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
9y ago

gerardflo 9y ago

You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.

lovich 9y ago
I like remote work, but the benefits of searchable text barely materialized for us. There were a few times we needed to find some piece of information, especially from colleagues who had moved on. However, any moderately discussed topic just generated too much text to be quickly search able. Wed usually get thousands of results for any search term and whoever was looking for the necessary information had to not just look at those results, but the context they were in, to get the info they wanted. One time it took the course of a day
tetromino_ 9y ago
Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately. Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all. So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  > Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately. In theory. But when you are dealing with a lot of "anti-social" people who have a hard time communicating verbally, or integrating socially, it usually has the opposite affect, ime.
- wolco 9y ago
  Remember those requirement we talked about last month? Writing it down or having a log of conversation helps so much. When in person it is harder to take notes and be part of the converdation.