6 ms·

Face-to-face communication has not been supplanted with online tools yet, and face-to-face communication is very important to this job.

• CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  > and face-to-face communication is very important to this job [citation needed] It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team.
  • dymk 7y ago
    > It can be important for some people, and for some teams, but it's not very important for every person or every team. [citation needed] It's clearly important enough for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to invest heavily in already established tech hubs where it's incredibly expensive to build, so they can have their engineers working in the same physical location(s).
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      Do I understand your argument correctly? Effectively, what I'm reading is, "Because large tech companies do X, it's very important for everyone else too (including billion-dollar companies that don't do X)."
      • dymk 7y ago
        You're not understanding my argument correctly. I'm saying, in spite of it being cheaper to distribute their engineers and hire remote, they do not. These aren't companies run by incompetent people, and they're large enough to have some remote workforce, so they understand how remote workers compare to onsite with as few other variables changed. These companies hire onsite because it's important to be able to meet face-to-face. Emotion is particularly poorly conveyed over email or VC, and sometimes to convince somebody of something, meeting them in person is the best way to do that.
        • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
          Okay that's a more reasonable argument than what I thought you were making. I'd contend that you're not considering the impact of sunk cost fallacies on business decision-making. Or if you have considered it, you've probably discounted it far more than is warranted. It could be the case that, out of all the people currently employed by these companies, the majority believe they thrive in an onsite role rather than a remote one. Years of self-selection (especially if exacerbated by a lack of diversity in their employment experience, since these companies tend to hire out of colleges) could lead to a feedback loop. Just because they're smart people doesn't mean they're impervious to human cognitive distortions. How many of these companies have even trialed 100% remote positions, even if only for a year?
        • q3k 7y ago
          > These aren't companies run by incompetent people. It's not about incompetence, it's about not willing to introduce difficult changes and admitting they are wrong. See: open plan offices. There's tons of successful, fully distributed companies.
  • malcolmgreaves 7y ago
    It's quite literally how nearly every successful business currently operates. Digital communication suffers from lag and resolution. There simply isn't the requisite bandwidth and speed to communicate the same information that humans get from all of our five senses. Jobs are about relationships.
  • minwcnt5 7y ago
    I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Most people are healthier and happier spending their time in social groups. Even as a highly introverted person, I'd much rather interact with live people every day than work remotely and only interact electronically. Of course there are exceptions, but I would guess that building a company, or even parts of it, from the exceptions is a lot of trouble.
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > I don't think the fact that humans are social animals needs a citation. Humans can (and should) get their social needs met anywhere, not only at their place of employment. I've worked both onsite and remote throughout my career. I'd never advocate for forced remote work (because some people want to get their social needs met through their employer). Rather, I'd argue that it should be considered as an option.
      • minwcnt5 7y ago
        For me it's not just about having social needs met, it's also that for a lot of engineering work in-person collaboration is crucial. Serendipitous interactions are important. Passionate discussions involving emotion and empathy are important. Being able to easily grab a co-worker's attention for a minute to show them something on your screen or sketch an idea out on a whiteboard is important. You can technically make some of these things to happen remotely using technology, but in practice, there's just too much friction, and these sorts of interactions don't happen. I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.
        • slavapestov 7y ago
          When I worked at an open office in Google, a good fraction of the people had headphones on most of the day. While there was some serendipitous discussion, much of the time we'd book meeting rooms, specifically to avoid distracting those around us.
  • xauronx 7y ago
    I was actually doing research a couple of days ago to support more remote workers for my company and... unfortunately almost all of the research I found was backing co-location. There are degrees of remote work, but it seems that for most teams and most products being co-located provides the most productivity. There are a lot of shades of gray there, like, if someone commutes for 2 hours through stressful SF traffic to get to a campus where they jump on a Google Hangout since their team members are spread across 3 buildings... yeah, I don't think productivity is going to get much of a boost. However, our team is in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio where you can live within 30 miles, get here in 30 minutes and have dirt-cheap housing. I'm having a hard time coming up with collateral to support my "modern" viewpoint on the benefits of remote workers.
    • achenatx 7y ago
      my theory is that if you try to convert a co-located workforce to remote you are going to struggle because you have a mix of people that are able and unable to properly function that way. However if you start a company with that model from day one, over time you select for people that can handle the remote aspect. It becomes a core cultural value. Southwest is the fun airline. What would american airlines have to do to become a fun airline? They would have to fire 2/3 of their staff.
• toomuchtodo 7y ago
  And yet, there are fully remote companies (bootstrapped, lifestyle, and startups) collectively worth over a billion dollars that are fully remote. I don't buy this argument at all having worked for one of them. Face to face communication is only necessary if your collaboration tools and business/workplace processes are not up to par, and that's a business problem, not a social interaction problem. To echo the refrain others have said in this thread, "Hire remote, hire remote, hire remote." I would love to see HN's monthly Who's Hiring prioritize/bubble up fully remote jobs to the top of the list first. Give an advantage to those who are helping the situation. This is no different than roads. You can't just keep building roads forever. You have to destroy demand for local habitation once it reaches a point beyond which equilibrium can ever be reached, and the Bay Area is beyond that point. Let people work from places where they can afford to live better lives. EDIT: @aerophilic: Agree entirely with your comment.
  • davidw 7y ago
    Those companies are pretty cool and I think we'll see more in the future. That said, while they're better than the alternative of not existing at all, it's not a given that they're not inferior to a company operating out of one office where it's easier to communicate.
    • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      Open offices with white noise generators don't exactly strike me as the paragon of ease of communication.
      • minwcnt5 7y ago
        They work better than closed offices, in my experience, for the roles I've worked in (software engineering). I'm way more likely to ask a co-worker over to my desk to show them something or have a discussion if they're a few feet away within sight and earshot. In an open office I also overhear a lot of pertinent information -- I'm aware of issues that might be relevant to me as they develop, I don't have to wait hours or days for someone to communicate them in an email, issue tracker, or meeting. There's a cost in terms of readily available heads-down concentration time to be sure, but if I want to mess around with math formulas or something I pop on the headphones, go to a quiet room, or do it at home. It's much harder to replicate the benefits of an open office environment in a closed one than the reverse.
• Tade0 7y ago
  and face-to-face communication is very important to this job. For what purpose specifically?
  • Kalium 7y ago
    Effective and efficient communication is very important for a large number of job functions. Video conferencing has yet to supplant the efficiencies enabled by co-location.
  • davidw 7y ago
    Let's see - software development can take different forms. On one end you have work where someone gives you well defined specs and the tools you need, and you just go crank out some code on your own. That works well for remote work. On the other end there are plenty of software positions that require people who can understand and develop requirements, possibly by talking with disparate groups like customer support, finance, sales, marketing, and so on who are not at all technical. These people may not understand the costs of different options so subsequent conversations about costs/benefits for different groups are needed. Sometimes these discussions might be contentious, as resources are finite. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth involved, as the software person tries to understand the business - and vice versa.
    • svachalek 7y ago
      Cleanly isolated work that can be shipped anywhere in the world is like making plastic widgets, it's a race to the bottom in terms of wages. So as a general rule it's the messy, on-site, highly iterative and negotiated work that pays the kind of money no one is willing to believe on HN.
    • quicklyfrozen 7y ago
      To me, it has always seemed like face-to-face is very useful to get to know people and get the process started, but after that, following up via messaging and video conferencing is fine. But a similar timezone remains pretty important.
  • minwcnt5 7y ago
• andrew311 7y ago
  An alternative way of looking at it: whether or not face to face is important for the specifics of the job, it might be important for emotional connection between humans, fulfilling a common human desire to connect with peers and be happy on the job and _outside_ the job. In other words, we might want to be around peers for social (non-job) reasons.
  • dymk 7y ago
    Exactly. I wouldn't even say that's a non-job function - I've worked at companies with low morale and social cohesion before, and it directly impacted the quality and amount of work that people could do. We're smart primates that are still heavily dependent on social cues and a feeling of inclusion.
  • felipemnoa 7y ago
    This is a really good argument. It is the same reason why authors instead of staying in their homes by themselves writing all day, will go to public places to be around other authors/people. We are social animals.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    Yeah, and instead we're stuck in cars commuting. Remote working frees up more time to spend with other people.
    • davidw 7y ago
      If only we had the knowledge to plan cities so that it's possible to live near where you work. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but we could even stack dwelling units on top of one another.
      • CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        Witchcraft! Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.
• jriot 7y ago
  Face-to-face communication is not needed, it is a notion everyone says to keep the status quo.
• manigandham 7y ago
  My point was only about extreme consolidation. They can have multiple smaller offices in various cities. It doesn't need to be thousands of people all working from home.
• driverdan 7y ago
  I downvoted you because face-to-face communication is not very important to most online jobs. As you pointed out elsewhere it may be important for other reasons but those needs can be fulfilled elsewhere. Even if face-to-face is important for specific positions it's even more rarely a daily requirement. Most of the country is so much less expensive than the Bay Area that you could fly someone in one day a week and it would still cost less.