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> The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. There is no inherent adva
by chronofar 6y ago
> The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction.
There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." Lower trust or communication or higher friction are not inherent to working remotely, they are the product of poor and overconfident management (at least in tech, given our forum here) and can be seen in any number of environments. You can replace "working in person" with various other specious truisms like "having an organized workspace" or "having weekly status meetings" or "using agile methodologies" and the two sentences above will be likewise banal and true only in specific instances.
Most technology work can be done remotely, and I'd argue should be done both remotely and asynchronously (many companies recently forced to do the remote piece are still are holding dearly to 9-5 and constant meetings), unless there are specific use cases that require more in person synchronous efforts (and to be sure this is the case in some cases, especially when specific hardware must be used for instance). The perception that there is something "better" about 9-5 in-office work is more a product of tradition and resistant over-management than inherent advantages to either setup.
- d1zzy 6y agoPeople are different and they have different needs and skills. Working in meatspace is different from working remotely so those needs and skills may better match one model or the other. That is, SWEs aren't bug tracking robots that only need to communicate online using emotionless text.
- chronofar 6y agoTo be sure different models fit different situations, and there are other needs people have aside from getting shit done, namely social interaction (which is at its root the biggest cause of resistance). If you don't get those needs meet elsewhere, the workplace is historically a good place to do so. But of course there are all sorts of ways outside a traditional office to optimize for this.
- jayd16 6y ago>There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." I really miss whiteboard sessions and and being able to chat without lag.
- summitsummit 6y agoyeah, that 80ms lag for DMs to go through really cuts on productivity
- jayd16 6y agoI'm more referring to natural conversation in group video calls. The cross talk caused by lag can get pretty grating.