The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers • Hacker News Board

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#191

Post by pracer » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

epidemian wrote: post #170

snegu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel this. I've been working remotely for a few years, and will probably continue doing so for the foreseeable future, but there is no such thing as informal conversation in that setting. My company encourages everybody to set up "salon" meetings with random people to just chat, but these conversations end up being awkward and forced (though that could just be me). The result of this is that I feel completel…

That's exactly the feeling that has most weighed down on me doing fully remote work: lack of connection. And i mean with people. Doing software, i find it easy to feel somewhat "connected" to the work i'm doing because of the sort of immediate "it works / solves the problem" quality software usually has. But with people, even though we're all on the same situation and we make our best effort to have some casual hango…

Being myself a big advocate of remote work (and being working remote for the last 3 years, before pandemic) I agree that usually people underestimate the downsides. The thing is, in my opinion, that the key should be, does it really works having remote workers compared to in person offices? I think it does, once the dynamic changes to the new environment. And in the medium to long term makes people happier as they can improve their personal lifes with the time they can recover (as well as being able to organize the time by themselves).

The main problem I saw people had with the remote work is how to make friends outside of work. Most of us are used to "find friends" from our schools, then universities and then from work, so many people got the feeling that they were isolated. But that's because they didn't know how to find "pools" of people to find new friends from.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#192

Post by _y5hn » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

Salgat wrote: post #94

ren_engineer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hardest thing remote work has to replicate is just random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. This speech from Richard Hamming about Bell Labs sticks in my mind, especially the segment about open vs closed office doors. I'd say remote work is objectively better for pure productivity in terms of getting things done, but you run the risk of limiting innovation I think https://www.c…

>random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas. Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

> Outside of maybe a very innovative R&D department I don't really see these "brilliant ideas that only smalltalk could achieve" in your typical run of the mill company.

So where are good ideas supposed to emerge from? I've yet to see much of that beyond technical smalltalk.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#193

Post by _y5hn » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #125

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say. Academia is relatively dispersed, compared to the few tech hubs around the world. Creative people will be creative wherever they are. And there are plenty of cool open-source projects, from k8s to jupyter, that have been built by dispersed teams.

The academia can handle this, because it focuses on long-term collaborations that may span decades. Your closest coworkers and the topics you work on don't change just because you got a new job and moved to another place. You continue working with the same people on the same topics, and there is an elaborate system of conferences, workshops, guest lectures, research visits, and sabbaticals that keeps the collaboratio…

In normal jobs, innovation and creativity are optimized away, and may even be seen as threats to status quo. There's little incentives as well, as you can get blamed and fired at any time. It usually doesn't go that far, but contracts often say company even owns your work in free time, so everything is set up against the employee to end up the way it does.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#194

Post by _y5hn » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

datameta wrote: post #159

jpindar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I engage in random small talk between smart people that can lead to great ideas, it's usually on Discord.

Are there any public servers on topic you enjoy that you'd recommend?

You're better off browsing what interests you personally. If you come by a great group of people or person, it'll happen by chance, and will be fueled by your personal interests.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#195

Post by wombatmobile » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #144

wombatmobile wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If there's one thing in business that's certain, it's uncertainty." -- Stephen Covey "It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man." -- Richard P. Feynman "There is no such uncertainty as a sure…

But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That’s the trade off. Employers must then offer more for uncertainty.

> But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty.

That's one kind of gig. It isn't what Apple employee 100 signed on for, or Google employee 12. Some employees are looking for upside and challenges more than certainty.

In uncertain times, the most valuable employees are the ones who thrive on uncertainty. The most difficult are those who prioritise something an employer can't guarantee as a prerequisite for performance.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#196

Post by aaomidi » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #195

MattGaiser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That’s the trade off. Employers must then offer more for uncertainty.

> But the employer/employee relationship is heavily built around certainty. That's one kind of gig. It isn't what Apple employee 100 signed on for, or Google employee 12. Some employees are looking for upside and challenges more than certainty. In uncertain times, the most valuable employees are the ones who thrive on uncertainty. The most difficult are those who prioritise something an employer can't guarantee as a…

Hence why I left. Company didn't want to make a hard choice and I found a better job.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#197

Post by wenc » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

mianos wrote: post #168

wenc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS Teams is probably the worst tool of its class in this area yet it is, evidently, chosen by people in higher positions who make decisions based solely on their opinion and for the sake of complying with corporate standards, once again, not based on evidence, but, by some MS white paper saying it is. Could you expand more about why you think it's the worst tool in its class for collaboration? My experiences with i…

On the mac, the video and audio randomly do not work. In a team of 20, this means every day someone has to stop the app, restart it and rejoin the call. Doing stand-ups every day, this is a PIA. 2,000 'user-voice' votes, broken for 3 years. Occasionally it has some bug that makes it use up endless ram. The cut and paste does not work properly. This one has thousands of 'user-voice' votes and has been broken for over…

Thanks for providing that insight. It sounds like a platform issue.

I’ve often been curious about the animus towards Teams because I’ve always used Teams on Windows and the experience has been pretty good. I’ve been very productive with it, especially the last little while when I had to use it to coordinate a large distributed team. I haven’t experienced any of the above issues on Windows. In fact on Windows the video codecs and video networks are so good that they rival or exceed Zoom’s in many cases. As well, we have the large enterprise license too (most of us are in E3 or E5 tiers) —- I’m not sure if it makes a difference in terms of QoS but many of the complaints I’ve come across from small business or free users I simply don’t experience on an enterprise Teams license.

I think the biggest issue is that on non Windows platforms, Microsoft does not pay enough attention to make sure there is feature or reliability parity.

I realized this recently switching to macOS. Outlook on the Mac is crippled and simple things that I relied upon on the Windows client simply don’t exist on the Mac client. Even simple features like showing a calendar panel or being able to define more complex mail rules are missing.

For Teams, the code base is ostensibly the same since it’s an Electron app but it sounds like Microsoft’s QA efforts on the Mac are not on par with its efforts in the Windows side.

I say this because if Microsoft wants to, it can do better. Visual Studio Code for instance is excellent on all platforms and keeps getting better. My main desktop is a Linux machine and i’ve switched from trusty gVim which I’ve customized for 20 years to VS Code for dev work because it’s that good.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#198

Post by Jare » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

mianos wrote: post #129

other_herbert wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it can be similar to having your company support slack channel open.. not necessarily subscribed but seeing the issues that customers come to your support staff with… that can provide surprising clarity… maybe product owners should be focused on that sort of thing and maybe this highlights issues with where I am…

At Spriggy we had senior developers enrolled into Intercom chat. This takes agile to a whole another level. I knew with certainty what we had to get done. It was not a jira ticket close but 100s of customers to help. Stressful, yes, but getting real problems solved, double yes.

Do you think that can scale to only half the real problems solved, but zero stress?

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#199

Post by halfmatthalfcat » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

aaomidi wrote: post #25

Here's an anecdote. I left because Microsoft was being weird about long term remote plans and I wanted to actually be able to plan ahead. They lost me because they couldn't give me a straight answer if I can continue working there if I went fully remote or not.

Same with my current employer; pussyfooting around the topic with vague language around whether they’ll let me work permanently remote.

It’s one of the many reasons I’m about to leave.

Re: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers

#200

Post by kbenson » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

quelltext wrote: post #181

DrJokepu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who manages people for a living, the problems on Team 2 were entirely your manager’s fault.

What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?

I imagine a few small group tasks to help the new hire come up to speed on certain things might help. That is, assign the new hire and 1-2 other team members to work on a somewhat small task, something that the team members could easily accomplish in an hour or so, but will take a bit longer because the new hire is also being taught at the same time. Highly encourage them to use group video chat, and not to just have each be hidden behind a screen share. Being able to see the faces of the people talking is important to getting the right nuance of what they are expressing (sometimes that's the difference between something obviously being a good natured joke and an ambiguous and anxiety inducing statement).

Hopefully after a few of these ice breakers, everyone will have a better grasp of each other and more natural communication and relationships might come about.