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Every time that I read this about remote work, all I can think is how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. We were doing remote work effectively

• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• layer8 10mo ago
  Electronic chat is really not the same as face-to-face communication. Neither are video calls.
  • sodapopcan 10mo ago
    For me, electronic chat is better most of the time.
    • layer8 10mo ago
      Everyone is different. I vastly prefer email over chat, but also wouldn't want to live without the occasional face-to-face.
      • sodapopcan 10mo ago
        "Everyone is different" is my point. Face to face once in a while is nice, though I don't care so much about having it very often with my colleagues in a professional setting.
      • theshrike79 10mo ago
        The difference between email and chat is 100% psychological. It's just text over a transport method. Some people consider email something you MUST answer ASAP, others can have 9000 unanswered emails without an issue. They'll get around to it. And with chat, some think it's real-time and expect an answer in seconds, others will check $chat_app a few times a day like email and reply. I personally prefer chat, because you can use it asynchronously, BUT you can escalate to near real-time if everyone is present at the same time. You can have an actual "conversation" via chat - you can't do that with email.
  • AlotOfReading 10mo ago
    Of course it's not the same, that's the point. I personally prefer the async, chat based mediums I've used since I was a child. Some of my coworkers have disabilities that make conversational typing difficult and prefer video calls as a result. Consider the effort to accommodate those preferences though. Accommodating a video call preference is easy. Same for chat. Accommodating a preference for face-to-face requires spending an hour (2x average US commute) traveling to meet you. That's quite a significant ask of the other person.
  • devmor 10mo ago
    Yes, it’s not the same at all. In electronic chat I can ask someone to explain their question and wait for it in writing. In person, I often have to listen to them stumble over the concept because they didn’t think about what they wanted to ask before asking it. In a video call I can clearly see the other person’s screen and zoom in on what I’m trying to look at. In person I have to lean over their desk and squint at the right angle.
• Kerrick 10mo ago
  > Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote. I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams. I wonder if it's because the failure mode was, as you said, to "drop by." Now the failure mode is... just failure.
  • cogman10 10mo ago
    I can't speak for everyone, but I'd say that I've noticed that younger devs simply do not chat. My team rooms are pretty dead. I'll send stuff there but by and large the team simply doesn't use chat functions.
    • LtWorf 10mo ago
      It doesn't help that reporting people to HR is a way to career advancement.
      • kasey_junk 10mo ago
        I’ve never worked _anywhere_ where reporting someone to HR was anything but negative impacting for your prospects at the company. And I’ve worked at lots of places in many dimensions (company size, industry, age, etc)
        • MarcelOlsz 10mo ago
          This usually applies to Big Bank.
          • derrida 10mo ago
            The karmic cost / benefit is all worked out then.
          • 10mo ago
• seneca 10mo ago
  > Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote. This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings. Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard. I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.
  • LtWorf 10mo ago
    Debian works like that but the startups can't manage… interesting.
    • stackskipton 10mo ago
      Open-Source Project that doesn't have Project Managers and MBA telling you to work faster is a lot different then working at Startup that does.
  • _ea1k 10mo ago
    IDK, some of the remote teams that I've worked on were only able to meet in person once per year, if that. They were very communicative on the tools that we had though.
    • HDThoreaun 10mo ago
      No one is saying it’s impossible to build fully remote teams from scratch, it’s just very hard and requires strong leadership. Most companies have crappy management so they can’t pull it off.
      • kelipso 10mo ago
        I don’t even think it’s about leadership. Isn’t it weird for somehow to care about people who they only know through the phone or zoom calls? Some people won’t find that weird but I think a significant number of people would, or just can’t do that at all.
• atomicnumber3 10mo ago
  Yeah. Random example: I have better "ambient awareness" remotely because with slack I am in every hallway simultaneously, and can skim the conversations and set up highlight words
  • Kerrick 10mo ago
    I wonder how much of that comes down to culture. Since going remote I have come to wonder if a direct-message-first chat culture is harmful to collaboration.
    • LtWorf 10mo ago
      I hate direct messages. They were normally considered rude in IRC.
    • makeitdouble 10mo ago
      IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received. It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
    • tayo42 10mo ago
      It is. You need to be aware of it and have people that can set examples about chatting in public rooms or who can recognize when to stop a dm chat and move to be public
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • sailfast 10mo ago
      DM-first is an extremely frustrating culture. That kind of operation tells me that that folks are too risk averse and political to discuss things openly. Typically this is led by panicky managers that are worried about involving too many people or having to explain things to folks they don’t want to deal with, and it escalates from there and gums up ALL the things. It makes Slack basically useless. The same people DMing however will also extol the virtues of posting in public and lament why there is not more conversation happening in the open.
• fHr 10mo ago
  now we do the work of 7 projects in half a team paid 50% less and can't get to help anyone as we all drown in 7 tickets we should do in parallel with agents writing docu on the side and assist and some of the easier code on the side because management drank the koolaid of going full into AI and "the Team now can do 300% more right". I miss the old times where making 100k and still could have few minutes to help each other and now we're in this hypercapitalistic garbage AI age were we have to just output, output, output and fuck quality and else they lay you off and get the next guy from wherever.
  • redrove 10mo ago
    Everything is FAST now, I 'member 10-15 years ago if someone came to you for help you actually had the time to pull up a (possibly virtual) chair and spend 3h helping them. If you do that now you'll get canned in 4 months. Obviously the help also came with you bonding and chit chatting about other stuff, I miss it.
    • fHr 10mo ago
      100% this
• agumonkey 10mo ago
  It's a strange pattern I observe often, whenever an idea gets promoted from organic-natural-human-ritual to official-new-visible-main-idea, it becomes bloated and off point.
  • flir 10mo ago
    Agile. Case in point.
    • sailfast 10mo ago
      Did you read the article? :)
      • flir 10mo ago
        Uh.... Caught me red handed. Ok, gonna go read it. (Hmm. The author says "Follow Scrum, Lean / Kanban, or eXtreme Programming to the letter, and let your team focus on the product." I disagree - quite vehmently. I guess that's obvious, given that I'm calling out the various capital-A agile methodoliges, and the parasitical industry around them, as harmful/bloated/mostly pointless. But how did you figure out I hadn't read the blog post from that? Now I have, I just think he's wrong).
        • sailfast 10mo ago
          The author pretty clearly states that Agile works well and we should stick to it without deviating too much with our own processes. Your point was related to the parent post but contradicting the article and didn’t acknowledge the contradiction or why your opinion about Agile might be more correct than the author - that’s basically it. The industry around it makes total sense - often bloated and misusing terms, but the process itself can work well as a starting point. I get the impression many engineers never attempt it because of bad experiences named Agile sometimes. Understandable of course.
          • flir 10mo ago
• devmor 10mo ago
  One of the author’s primary reasonings for why remote work sucks is apparently that they find it difficult to treat other people like human beings without close proximity to them. That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.
  • redrove 10mo ago
    It's a big problem especially if you haven't met the people you're working with. It's easy so think one dimensionally about a person, I catch myself doing it all the time and I can't say I'm wise enough to always stop it dead in its tracks.
    • devmor 10mo ago
      I can’t say I have ever experienced this problem after conversing with someone more than a handful of times. Sure it applies to things like random people on social media and such, but after a mutual exchange or two you should be over it.
      • redrove 10mo ago
        Maybe it applies more if you’re on the spectrum? (and the spectrum being wider than most people imagine)
        • devmor 10mo ago
          Anecdotally, I don’t think that’s true. A lot of the good friends I have made purely through the internet are on the spectrum.
    • saghm 10mo ago
      I have coworkers from past jobs who I've never met in person but still stay in touch with because we became friends when we worked together. That's not to say it's not an issue for you or for the author, but at least from the way they phrased it in the article, it's not at all apparent to me whether they're actually intending their complaints about remote work to be personal opinions or if they think they apply to everyone.
• globalnode 10mo ago
  Yeah text based beats video a lot of the time.
• gedy 10mo ago
  I think it's largely that as this became more of a business, the "yappers" who want to talk things out got more leverage as PMs, etc. It sounds like a caricature, but they honestly seem to get super antsy only typing and sitting in one spot.
  • redrove 10mo ago
    I've never seen it put this way but I think you've hit the nail on the head. Text requires correctness to some extent; bullshitters will just yap away for hours and nobody can point to one piece of text and say "Here, this is where you are objectively wrong, and/or misrepresenting things". The unfortunate reality of remote work is there's a lot of zoom meetings where yappers in high places will BS away -- a lot more "important" zoom meetings than "important chats", especially in public.
    • thenanyu 10mo ago
      You seem to discount that the yappers are good and convincing writers as well
  • stuffn 10mo ago
    It is exactly that and it’s clear the author is one of these “yappers”. I like that term. These people are also absolutely obnoxious irl and completely fail to read the room. I once had a PM like this who went into a near mental health crisis that the team of engineers were not “engaging” enough with her (in her head) witty “engineer” banter. Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day. There’s a subset of people who have weaseled their way into tech coming from the world of hyper-anxious very public social media engagement that simply make life miserable for everyone else.
• noman-land 10mo ago
  I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels. Part of growing up in chatrooms was an implicit bravery of saying something out loud in a room full of thousands of people. There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms. Chatrooms have evolved in a really interesting way. I think the first generation to have them didn't fully understand how "public" they were. Maybe there are more people in the more recent generations that have a more visceral understanding of online "publicness" as they have grown up with (and perhaps have been burned by) those concepts from the very beginning. Maybe they have a better understanding of the permanence of online utterances and therefore have a more conservative approach to interacting on what feels like the permanent public ledger. Maybe it's because the concept of pseudonyms has devolved since the early days. Corporate social media has an interest in doxing its users to advertise to and control them but pre-corporate social media was filled with anonymous usernames. Posting in a large group under your permanent forever name is much scarier than posting under an anonymous, temporary identity. One of the things I advocate people do is post online anonymously, instead of with their real name. It alleviates a lot of the fear of speaking your truth, which we need more of! There is something there. The ability to try on identities in a safe environment before you discover which one you really identify with. It's much harder to do this with your real name. Your past comes with a lot of baggage and people who know you don't want you to change because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
  • sailfast 10mo ago
    The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation. I like to post ideas, brainstorm, engage if I have a minute to respond to someone with a thought - kinda like being in an office - whereas many others seem to use it to blast out information after a lot of polish and they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies. Use tools for what they are good for and create a culture that makes each tool work best for your organization.
    • baq 10mo ago
• 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  Right, because there's nothing special about remote vs in-office. It's just communication and collaboration. Living beings do it all kinda ways. Bees waggle their butts, crickets rub their legs, geese honk, snakes hiss, some fish detect electrical signals. And to collaborate, the bees' dance indicates a flight path, birds singing indicates interest in mating, the snake's hiss and the geese's honk tells you to watch out. You use the tools you have and develop collaboration with them. There's clearly no right way, there's just ways. But tomorrow morning, would you wanna learn to honk at people, or rub your legs, or waggle your butt, to order a latte at Starbucks? It'd be awkward, weird, painful, and unnecessary. So if you were asked to, you'd probably not try very hard to adapt to it. And if everybody you knew were in the same boat, all being forced to change with no real guidance, kinda not trying that hard to make it work? It would suck for everybody. People just don't like changing what they're used to. They probably don't even mean to fight it. But we do like culture we're already familiar with. Change is hard, not changing is easy. We like easy. So people who grew up with remote work (on IRC, mailing lists, etc) find it easy, even more productive. But a company that's thrown into it without a healthy established culture are going to be swimming upstream indefinitely.
• Aurornis 10mo ago
  > how much I miss IRC and the culture that came from it. IRC selects for people who like chatting and communicating via text. I think the mistake made with remote work was assuming that everyone could easily work that way. The best experiences I had with remote work were pre-COVID, when the teams working remote were carefully selected for having good remote work abilities and anyone who couldn’t handle it was kicked back to the office (or out of the company) Then something changed during COVID and remote work was treated as something everyone could do equally well. The remote teams I worked with were now a mix of people who could work well remotely and people who wanted to work remote but tried to force communication to happen like we were back in the office: Meetings for everything. Demands to “jump on a quick call” when a few Slack messages would have done the job. Then there were the people who read “Four Hour Work Week” and thought they were going to do their jobs from their iPhone while traveling the world or at the ski resort. I don’t know. Having seen the before and after it doesn’t feel so surprising that remote work faltered when applied indiscriminately to everyone. The best remote teams I work with to this day are still the ones who know how to communicate in that old school IRC style where communication flowed easily and everyone was on the same page, not trying to play office games through Slack.
  • saghm 10mo ago
    Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.
    • Aurornis 10mo ago
      > Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers. Working remote is a skill that must be learned. Many people have barely done it at all before their first WFH job. It doesn't come as naturally. It's not a symmetric comparison.
• pythonbase 10mo ago
  I started doing remote back in 2002, working with companies in the UK and US, something that was largely unheard of in my country. While our mode of communication was web messengers (AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc and the aggregators), I used IRC a lot to get tech help, and participate in online dicussions.
• Yoric 10mo ago
  Yeah, I joined the Mozilla community in ~2003, and that was all IRC, and distributed all over the world, and it worked very, very well. Note that these days, the Mozilla community has moved to Matrix, which also works very well for these things.
• victorbuilds 10mo ago
  I've worked with teams across UK, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland over the years. The best remote collaboration I've seen wasn't about the tools, it was about the culture. Some teams just default to writing things down and sharing context. Others expect you to already know. The tool doesn't fix that.
• j-bos 10mo ago
  > I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much I believe the change is largely demographic, and I'm NOT referring to gender/nationality/age/race. Rather to the personality of people working in tech today. Long ago tech people were almost exclusively sourced from the weird kids who couldn't/didn't read the room and other things of that nature, they just said stuff, asked stupid questions because they wanted to know. Most people don't do that, so if tech is now made of more "commonly adjusted" people, then there will be less dexterity in navigating a less social and more (actual) productivity focused medium (remote/async comms).
• Havoc 10mo ago
  Fixing bugs via teams chat is not what author means with "breathe the same air as the folks you work with". Better example would be picking up subtle social clues like Frank looks quiet today and has a frown on his face...let's take him aside for a coffee chat and figure out what's wrong As much as I hate RTO, chat/video really does have lower social clue information density
• jayd16 10mo ago
  You're comparing a subset of passionate users that was supplementing in-person collaboration with the general population and no in-person. It's not going to be as good as the self selected users.
• didibus 10mo ago
  A lot of people formed their view of remote work during Covid, but that wasn’t real remote work. Companies had no idea what they were doing, everyone scrambled, nothing in the culture or processes actually changed. And it wasn’t just working from home, it was lockdown. Total isolation. Of course people missed human contact and blamed it on remote work. Even the "productivity" data people cite is skewed, because most of it compares lockdown productivity to normal-life office productivity, which isn’t a fair comparison at all.