Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently • Hacker News Board

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#171

Post by briandswartz » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #25

The headline says “remote work” but then the article immediately talks about “asynchrony work”. These are two different topics. Async work can, and often should, happen in the office is well. Synchronous work is often required in remote work. A big stumbling block for remote work is the belief that remote means you shouldn’t have to interact with other people much. Some people like that idea, while for others it’s a…

Well said.

Curious: what does your current team / company do to enable the real-time ad-hoc conversations that need to happen? Are there conventions or tools that have helped?

(full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates with Calendar, Zoom, and Slack to try to solve this problem and let people turn to one another in real-time, without interrupting heads-down time. Would love to interview you for user research if you're up for it)

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#172

Post by jensensbutton » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

> asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication

Problem is that most people aren't good at written communication. They're passable, but not good. This means the communication isn't actually "richer" it's just longer.

The rise of remote has led to so many wasted hours (for the author and readers) due to RFCs and proposals that just never had the chance of going anywhere, because the people that could help don't have time to figure out what the author is actually asking for or trying to get done.

Then people whine about how no one is listening to their great ideas.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#173

Post by avg_dev » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

sussexby wrote: post #6

Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that it's massively affecting my mental health. I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between. Eve…

i had the same problem. i solved it by becoming much more social in my non-work parts of life.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#174

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

f--k the "office" and f--k the soulless two-faced corpo-goblins who thrive within it. never going back.

in 20-30 years i'll be worm food. not going to waste anymore time rotting in an office. f---k no.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#175

Post by throwbadubadu » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #118

throwbadubadu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but I don't see how this relates to pandemic or being remote? Also not reaching out when getting totally stuck is a bad thing, but again unrelated?

There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than there was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk and didn’t look obviously busy. Solve that, and you probably solve a lot of low-grade communication challenges that are made worse by being remote as compared to in-same-office.

A 10 second convo is a two liner question I can shoot of via chat any time, not even needing to look for (and still fail or mistake) unbusy persons (and with a small team chat even broadcast to multiple people to also solve finding the unbusy person)? There are always many perspectives.. I have also seen introverts cope much better that way than approaching IRL. Heck you can even combine, "let me know when you are not busy to quickly explain me X" providing already the question async way, and then have the call or real desk meeting afterwards?

> There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than there was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk

Also just not getting that, hitting the call button (or a real phone call) was always quicker and easier than walking two floors down to another room just to find the person not at its desk. Where is the hurdle?

Really, just not getting it ;) What's to be solved? I see it may be a problem or hurdle for some, but for others the bigger hurdle is the opposite way. Don't extrapolate, generalize and state it like fact, because that is imo not true for everybody and may be the other way round.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#176

Post by lapcat » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #169

lapcat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like letting toddlers struggle to learn how to tie shoes themselves Junior engineers aren't toddlers. Hopefully they're a lot more competent. Nobody hires toddlers to do work.

It’s just an analogy. human progress is made from “standing on the shoulders of giants” not starting from scratch.

It wasn't a good analogy. For one thing, toddlers don't tie their shoes: the average age for learning to tie your shoes is 6 years old. And it's not clear that kids will learn for themselves if you give them a few hours. We're not talking about letting junior engineers struggle for weeks or months, but they can bang their heads for a few hours or maybe even a few days and figure out a lot of things for themselves. That's a useful skill to acquire.

Here's my analogy: if you want to learn how to ride a bike, you've got to take off the training wheels, and sometimes that means falling over.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#177

Post by esafak » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #58

> allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow. Sometimes you need lots of small synchronous communications and sometimes you need and fewer large asynchronous communications. Large asynchronous communications work when everyone already knows what they're doing. They work at a company which has already figured out its business model, built out its necessary expertise, and saturated its market, where everyo…

> asynchronous works great for open source, so why not business?

Hold your horses. Your constant synchronous communication reduces the aggregate throughput by increasing context switching, which incurs dead time for the interrupted parties as they refocus on their task. A better way is to reserve synchronous communication for urgent requests, and time block (batch) or async the rest.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#178

Post by ravishi » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #4

This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating). Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confi…

I had the opposite experience with junior devs on my team. The ones that knew how to communicate and ask for help thrived. It was easy to negotiate some head banging on the wall time while also pairing from time to time to discuss where they're going. I've seem them flourish in less than a year's time and be able to perform just like experienced devs.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#179

Post by prepend » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #164

andsoitis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully you updated the docs as you encountered them and figured out the most up to date context.

> Hopefully you updated the docs as you encountered them and figured out the most up to date context. I've been in an environment like this, and it really burned me out. People broke docs faster than I could fix them, and it was an accepted part of the development process. My conclusion was that fixing the docs was simply a waste of time. My resulting despair for the software and the company surely destroyed my produ…

> My conclusion was that fixing the docs was simply a waste of time. My resulting despair for the software and the company surely destroyed my productivity.

What did you do instead? It’s certainly frustrating to have people breaking docs that you fixed. But what else is there. You just figured it out on your own and left the docs broken?

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#180

Post by DiggyJohnson » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

hypeit wrote: post #150

sussexby wrote: post #6

Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that it's massively affecting my mental health. I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between. Eve…

I have to admit as someone who enjoys WFH and would never work in an office again, that having co-workers like you is one of the main reasons. You should work on not relying so much on others. You may be benefiting from all that social "charging up", but you're taking that from the person on the other side of the conversation. I work to make money, not to fill someone's social void. You'll be happier if you explore t…

They're not referring to socializing with you, per se. I see this mistake made all the time in these discussions. Many just prefer to be around other people, myself included. They're not necessarily the caricature of the "overly social office mate that needs to find friends outside of work" that you are implying.

I really think you're overassuming your knowledge of the person you're responding to.