Inability to form genuine social bonds with colleagues, thus artificially limiting trust.
Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
11–20 of 128 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#12This article is entitled "There's No Such Thing as Quality Time."
It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter.
https://ryanholiday.net/quality-time/
When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose something there.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#13You generally miss the out of band communication, i.e. the conversations between other colleagues that you overhear, as well as the 'waterfountain' chat. Sure, these spaces can be created online, but in my experience the threshold is too high for such spontaneous things to happen.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#14On average, people are bad at it. Even if you are convinced that you are much more productive when WFH than in the office, most people aren't.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#15Online meetings seriously suck still. It's harder to form real relationships with coworkers (some would see this as a plus, but I think it depends on the company/team culture). But the biggest change is forming trust. How do we come to trust in each other and in the mission if we never interact physically? It certainly takes a different kind of leadership.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#16Assuming the work _can_ be done remotely:
- Connections with people are easier in person.
- Getting unblocked by talking to someone is easier in person.
- Collaborating with materials is easier in person (shared whiteboard, post it notes, no delay in comms)
- Meetings are easier in person as video conferences can have audio delays, people talking over each other, etc. No worries about people leaving their mic on while blending a smoothy or other tech issues.
- In a meeting, it is easier to keep distractions low when on site (everyone close your laptops and leave your phones in your pocket is easier at a location).
- Work socializing is waaaay harder when working remotely.
I say all these as a full time remote person before this whole COVID thing. That said, each of the arguments above are able to be mitigated and can we can learn cope with them.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#17In my experience with very early stage teams, a lot of creativity and innovation occurs as a byproduct of spending a large amount of time together in close quarters discussing a range of topics (work related and not.) I’ve managed remote teams as well and while there are ways to replicate certain aspects of this dynamic, overall it’s much more difficult.
Remote is so much easier to make work well with an established team and an ongoing project. When either of them is new, it makes things harder and slower.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#18This article is entitled "There's No Such Thing as Quality Time." It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter. https://ryanholiday.net/quality-time/ When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose so…
This still happens, it just happens on Slack. Perhaps not the same but it's not gone.
Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#19Re: Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
#20This article is entitled "There's No Such Thing as Quality Time." It's oriented towards families, but it makes the case that there's no levels of time, just...time, we spend together. Things happen in the cracks between scheduled events that matter. https://ryanholiday.net/quality-time/ When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition. No conversations happen that are not task-directed. You lose so…
> When you work remote, everything is scheduled, almost by definition
This assumption is not true in my experience. When shifting our company to full time remote we did have an uptick in scheduled events but we still have plenty of things that are unscheduled, unless you consider "hey can I call you right now?" A scheduled event