4 ms·

Progress doesn't come from telling people to "get good". If remote collaboration can be comparable to in-person, we need to prove it.

dmitrygr 4y ago
We have proved it. See last few years.
- flkiwi 4y ago
  Or decades, for anyone who has worked for a company with more than one major office. The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom. I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity. Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    > Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. > [...] > Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades? Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  In my workplace, I think it proved the opposite. Sure, the sky didn't fall, but the quality of work certainly went down. The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions. I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop. Wfh clearly removed some methods of learning.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    In my experience it helped companies realize their onboarding sucked in the first place and was relying way too much on oral tradition. They were forced to act on it and implement processes that make them much better than before. For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know. Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think that is a fair point regarding IT/HR onboarding. I was thinking more of technical onboarding like project history, context, SOPs, real workflows.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company. There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed. Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them. Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.

dmitrygr 4y ago

We have proved it. See last few years.

flkiwi 4y ago
Or decades, for anyone who has worked for a company with more than one major office. The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.
spookthesunset 4y ago
Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom. I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity. Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  > Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. > [...] > Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades? Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
s1artibartfast 4y ago
In my workplace, I think it proved the opposite. Sure, the sky didn't fall, but the quality of work certainly went down. The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions. I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop. Wfh clearly removed some methods of learning.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  In my experience it helped companies realize their onboarding sucked in the first place and was relying way too much on oral tradition. They were forced to act on it and implement processes that make them much better than before. For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know. Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think that is a fair point regarding IT/HR onboarding. I was thinking more of technical onboarding like project history, context, SOPs, real workflows.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company. There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed. Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them. Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.