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> I'm building my own company now, fully remote How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shoul

> I'm building my own company now, fully remote How do you counter the common argument that face-to-face communication is the most high-bandwidth and one shouldn't throw away that competitive advantage unnecessarily? I'm not a proponent of that position; on the contrary, I don't want to accept it. But a lot of people think that way.

linuxftw 8y ago
I find video chat to be as productive or even moreso than face-to-face meetings for small groups of people. In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another. So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.
s-shellfish 8y ago
It's not the most high bandwidth for all of us. More information doesn't always equal better.
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  What specific drawbacks, or groups of people for whom face-to-face is a problem, do you have in mind? FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    Some people are hyper-reactive to certain types of information. Whether you want to call it a preference or a handicap, I don't know. I personally have PTSD. I will nearly instinctively read things into faces that I can never be sure is there. This is perpetually confusing and often overloading for me, not to mention a useless waste of thinking cycles. It's taken me years to learn how to be less reactive, but it's always a process of reducing information down to a minimal set of what is most consistent, structured, and true with respect to the social environment. Which often does reduce down to pure language, the direct translation of a statement and the direction it aligns with. It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments. I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle. I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
    - mwcampbell 8y ago
      Thanks for that. So I gather that audio is also more difficult for you than text, but less difficult than face-to-face.
      - s-shellfish 8y ago
        Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as this ties me to a structured reality, as well as focusing on math and logic because I need those reasoning systems to maintain self direction. It has gotten better in some ways and more difficult in others. I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide. But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have. Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
  - green7ea 8y ago
    For me it's hard to describe but I get a feeling of knowing how the other person feels from a face to face meeting. Keep in mind, this only works for people I know well and in person (close coworkers, girlfriend, etc.). I still get this over a video chat but it's at a 10% level so I feel like I'm operating without one of my senses. I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.
groby_b 8y ago
Face-to-face is more effective than video conferencing, but not in the way that you'd trivially expect. Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :) Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine. But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained. IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  It does seem plausible that requiring an in-person team to switch to IM and other electronic communication would be more difficult than starting out remote. I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.

linuxftw 8y ago

I find video chat to be as productive or even moreso than face-to-face meetings for small groups of people. In face to face meetings, many companies (like ones I have worked for) have limited meeting spaces and it's quite hard to book a conference room for more than an hour. Often times, we'd shuffle from one conference room to another. So even in-person isn't quite as effecient and productive as it could be.

s-shellfish 8y ago

It's not the most high bandwidth for all of us. More information doesn't always equal better.

mwcampbell 8y ago
What specific drawbacks, or groups of people for whom face-to-face is a problem, do you have in mind? FWIW, I personally don't benefit from the "high bandwidth". I'm legally blind; I can't read facial expressions or body language, or even recognize specific faces. SO for me, face-to-face amounts to little more than audio communication with full frequency range and zero latency or drop-outs. All that to say that I can only understand face-to-face communication (edit: as it works for most people) second-hand, so I'm curious, not being argumentative.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Some people are hyper-reactive to certain types of information. Whether you want to call it a preference or a handicap, I don't know. I personally have PTSD. I will nearly instinctively read things into faces that I can never be sure is there. This is perpetually confusing and often overloading for me, not to mention a useless waste of thinking cycles. It's taken me years to learn how to be less reactive, but it's always a process of reducing information down to a minimal set of what is most consistent, structured, and true with respect to the social environment. Which often does reduce down to pure language, the direct translation of a statement and the direction it aligns with. It gets labeled many things, like social anxiety, aspergers, many other stigmatized disorders - but this is often my root problem - being overloaded with the amount of information present in social environments. I have greater clarity when I can think separated from people physically, most often through text. I've gotten better with audio, but in person communication is still something of a struggle. I'm not being argumentative either. Just people have differences, and they aren't always easy to notice, identity, or correct.
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    Thanks for that. So I gather that audio is also more difficult for you than text, but less difficult than face-to-face.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      Audio in a business environment, at least from my experience, is more predictable and algorithmic, so my sensitivity to that has reduced significantly. Every face to face interaction in my organization routinely feels like a disaster I can't understand in entirety, during or locally near the experience. Reasoning out of it (grounding) is often challenging, I prefer focusing on inanimate objects to ground myself as this ties me to a structured reality, as well as focusing on math and logic because I need those reasoning systems to maintain self direction. It has gotten better in some ways and more difficult in others. I have some folks I'm very close with where this is not the case. But that's taken a very long time for me, and it is something that has required a lot of patience, understanding, communication, tolerance, forgiveness, hope, and perseverence. It's still something that is just about, the opposite of easy, for every new person I'm introduced to. I am generally told that I'm a reasonably easy to get along with person casually, aquaintance wise, although I consistently apologize for random social behaviors, masking them over with the words awkward, impulsed, compulsed etc. I have a tendency to ramble about technical things and this is bad when I have a tendency to be hypercritical over software (as I'm never sure how my preferences about code may approve or reject the preferences of those I talk to, but that's getting off track). There'stuff that just goes down to the core of us that is intrinsic to our orderings, organizations, and structurings of information - which I'm sure you understand from being blind. In my experience, attempting to change these things is more costly than the benefit 'correction' would provide. But that's me, PTSD and an understanding of psychology has made me a better software developer by refining my understanding of automation, as well as helping me remove myself from the headspace of what originally was so painful to experience. It doesn't go away, but it gets easier to live with, some days are harder than others, but I still consider myself fairly lucky given everything I've been able to do with what I have. Text is just crystal clear. I have a tendency to ramble on the internet and I've gone into that wormhole of introspection of 'what will this do to me if I say this', some variant of the halting problem, recurrent infinite descending chains of when minds decide to stop inferencing using limited, selective sets of information, but, shrug. People have said I'm good at writing, and I hope my tendency to overthink has only led to improvement.
- green7ea 8y ago
  For me it's hard to describe but I get a feeling of knowing how the other person feels from a face to face meeting. Keep in mind, this only works for people I know well and in person (close coworkers, girlfriend, etc.). I still get this over a video chat but it's at a 10% level so I feel like I'm operating without one of my senses. I often express myself poorly and this extra feeling helps me realize it and take some corrective measures. Really helpful when trying to communicate a difficult technical concept.

groby_b 8y ago

Face-to-face is more effective than video conferencing, but not in the way that you'd trivially expect. Most designated meetings, you can have just fine over a video conferencing system. Where f2f excels is in the conversations after you leave the meeting room - just a casual question to some other person from the meeting, which evolves into an impromptu 5-minute chat. (That is usually more valuable than the entire meeting :) Spontaneous conversation is incredibly valuable. (Which, ironically, is also cited for open offices). I believe that if you start with a fully remote setup, you are growing a culture that will move these conversations to IM or other channels, by necessity. You'll likely be fine. But you cannot move a company that has grown up with a culture of f2f meetings to a culture of IM conversations - it's too deeply ingrained. IOW, you're not "throwing away" something if you build a remote culture from the start. Both models can work, but switching models is hard.

mwcampbell 8y ago
It does seem plausible that requiring an in-person team to switch to IM and other electronic communication would be more difficult than starting out remote. I work on accessibility for people with disabilities, and I'm blind myself (well, legally blind), so I think a lot about including people with disabilities. It seems to me that working with people with some kinds of disabilities, e.g. deafness or a severe speech impediment, would be akin to forcing an in-person team to switch to IM. (I have no direct experience working with people with those disabilities, so I'm happy to be educated.) So I speculate that starting out remote would also make the team more inclusive in this area.