Comment by sytelus
5 years ago
I've gotten into remote work experiments (unplanned) and it hadn't been all rosy. The good things are huge cut on unnecessary meetings and great productivity but the bad things include much harder path to collaborate.
For example, if you are designing a very complex system requiring multiple participants then it's very very hard to communicate your ideas over video conferences - even when tech worked flawlessly. It's not because people are not able to articulate the ideas but there is a lot goes on in body language, facial expressions and quick back-and-forth exchanges over whiteboard. The high bandwidth of occupying same physical 3D space permits speedy iterations while low bandwidth constraints what you must express in given slot you are expected to express.
So, remote work doesn't work for all scenarios. It works well when everyone knows things fair bit, number of iterations during communications needed are small and number of ideas don't need huge bandwidth. It doesn't work as well otherwise. For example, early days of startup where the product is in embryonic state, everybody working remotely would not work out well. However, if product is mature and roadmap is well under control then remote team might work great.
Don't forget we've spent a lifetime learning and perfecting the use of things like body language in face-to-face meetings. You can't just switch to video conferences and expect it to be flawless without practice. But if you do it a lot, you learn when you need to verbalize things you'd rely on conveying non-verbally in a face-to-face meeting, such as when you don't quite understand something.
I supervised an entire PhD remotely many years back. We made it work, and learned as we went. Over time we got better as expressing confusion, double checking understanding, and all those sort of things where we use non-verbal clues in face-to-face meetings. It worked, but it wasn't an easy path at first. But there was an unexpected plus side - I'd learned to vocalize my doubts and confusion better, and to double-check we're on the same page. And so ever since I've found I'm more effective in face-to-face meetings.
> But there was an unexpected plus side - I'd learned to vocalize my doubts and confusion better, and to double-check we're on the same page.
That's funny but it reminds me of my relationship in the beginning. We didn't speak each other's native language fluently. Unexpectedly, harder communication had the effect of being clearer when expressing ourselves, and double-checking assumptions before reacting. It ended up very healthy.
And yet, startups have been started as fully remote. Stack Overflow, Zapier, Seeq, just off the top of my head. And there are countless of successful open source projects as well.
Personally, while I agree that the bandwidth is higher locally, I don't agree you are prevented from expressing what you wish by communicating remotely; it just takes a bit longer, which is more than compensated by the time saved on other things.
I work at a fully remote startup, after working at a mostly remote startup before.
Having an easily accessibly video conference software, committing to getting employees good headsets, and enforcing videos on/1 person per screen makes collaboration very easy.
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The only thing that's missing is whiteboarding sessions (which seem to be more about fun than actual productivity). Instead, we typically ask a single engineer to write up a proposal doc then have everybody comment on that.
It requires a bit more lead time - write up, feedback, then finalization. However, the actual developer time is significantly less. One developer doing most of the work, with others chiming in periodically.
One day I hope everyone's equipped with a connected whiteboard (perhaps small enough to grab and take to the desk, but not tiny like a tablet) in their home office that works live in meetings.
But I'm not a huge fan of whiteboards in general. Of course one problem with offline whiteboards is that the information tends to get wiped away (unless someone's snapping and uploading photos), the other is that they tend to be messy and unsearchable and hard to edit & update afterwards.
IMO it's generally better to flesh out ideas in text. It's just that sometimes a figure or two, maybe a flow chart, would get the point across quicker. I haven't found software I like enough to consider it better than hand, but hand sucks too. I often brainstorm on paper, and run out of paper or end up having to squeeze stuff because I didn't start with things in the right place. A software solution would help.
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It sounds like your taking your existing workflow and trying to virtualize it, this always fails. Remote work (especially with timezone differences) requires text based asynchronous communications, just look at large successful and international OSS projects, they thrived with mailing lists and IRC and this wasn't just because of bandwidth limitations.
IME unless your a particularly good teacher then your whiteboard isn't as high bandwidth as you think anyway. In face to face meetings everyone will just smile and nod because you have to go away and dig into the details to find issues. Put it in a graphviz drawing with the accompanying text and you'll get better results.
That is just the inability of the participants to think more than talk. For example Lisp requires more thinking, or chess requires lots of thinking.