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

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

#201

Post by meowface » Sun, Sep 12, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #119

meowface wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>say what you want about MS Teams, but they improved their product by leaps and bounds over the pandemic, much of which after the first 6 months Did they? I've been using it at my company for years, since long before the pandemic, and I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it until now. Every issue I have with it has gone unchanged. The only change I can think of is when they add…

> I don't think I've seen any improvements since the first day I started using it At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones. The discoverability in teams is horrible though. And something about it makes everyone want to create a new team for every thing.

>At some point they hid the new topic/thread input behind a button, and that really improved my life, since people stopped creating new threads when responding to other ones.

Actually, yes, I remember this now. This was definitely a huge improvement. I was just trying to think of an addition of something good rather than fixing of something bad.

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

#202

Post by mianos » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

wenc wrote: post #197

mianos wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vide…

The copy and paste bugs are supported on all platforms, as you say, likely on account of the common code base. Also, if you have 16 or 32G machines Windows machines you rarely see the performance issues. Working for a large corporate, in fact a very larger MS partner, probably why slack was not a choice, 8G machines are the par.

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

#203

Post by wenc » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

mianos wrote: post #202

wenc wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vide…

The copy and paste bugs are supported on all platforms, as you say, likely on account of the common code base. Also, if you have 16 or 32G machines Windows machines you rarely see the performance issues. Working for a large corporate, in fact a very larger MS partner, probably why slack was not a choice, 8G machines are the par.

Oh I have a 32GB RAM machine so that could be factor too.

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

#204

Post by hiptobecubic » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

DrJokepu wrote: post #113

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams. Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together. Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with…

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

Seriously. Some of the people in this thread... you need new managers, folks.

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

#205

Post by pdimitar » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 12:03 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #141

pdimitar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies are not graciously funded laboratories so to me the argument for "let smart people chat randomly" is moot. Those companies have plenty of creativity-killing processes that make sure people never looked beyond what they have to do today and maybe tomorrow.

Or just the reality that most employees don’t have a big picture creative role. I suspect most developers don’t really have a meaningful hand in shaping what they work on.

Yes, and that's by design. We are very often constrained from the start.

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

#206

Post by only_as_i_fall » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #162

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…

This is something I don’t understand. People have been having informal conversations with their friends, family and even colleagues over the phone for a hundred years. I almost feel like it’s a generational thing. People who came of age before widespread text messaging spent countless hours chit-chatting with their friends on the phone. It might be that late Millenials and Gen Z are less suited to remote work compare…

Do older people just call their coworkers for no particular reason or to ask something that could have been an email?

I think you're right about the generational difference but I'm not sure if I see it significantly affecting how people interact at work.

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

#207

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

snegu wrote: post #117

allenu wrote: post #99

One thing about slack- and zoom-based remote working I've noticed is that there's less room to be your "informal self". Meetings require more coordination since only one person can speak at a time and there are fewer non-verbal cues to communicate which topics are resonating with you. You also can't continue smaller conversations with people after a meeting. Everything is more formalized. Likewise, conversations outs…

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…

Even if it really is only you, that's a lot of edges in a fully connected graph. And odds are good a couple other people also feel the same way, raising that problem substantially.

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

#208

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

maxclark wrote: post #2

“Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.” Remote is hard and not every company is going to adapt to this long term. I’m happy that remote is now an accepted structure but I worry that full time remote employees will miss out simply because they aren’t present.

People will revert to the mean.

Notably, it's always been emotionally easier to lay off someone who is remote or less like you than it is to lay off people who are in your immediate social group. Expect the amount of remote-only work to tank in the next economic downturn.

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

#209

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #131

Being in meetings and "working with others" is not always collaboration. It's frequently waste. I can't tell you how many "collaborative meetings" are just 1 or 2 devs doing their thing with the other 4-6 sitting in the meeting in silence. You read that right - there are 8-dev meetings multiple times a week at my BigCo workplace. The wasted time is palpable.

Used to be you knew that in-person meetings were going badly when you had three people showing up with laptops working on other things during the meeting.

In a remote meeting it's very hard to tell what people are doing in the background. I'm finding myself missing things because I'm bored and working on something else, and so far I've only gotten as far as the problem statement.

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

#210

Post by hinkley » Mon, Sep 13, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

dcposch wrote: post #150

A lot of discussion here about productivity and flow of information. For me, the biggest downside of remote was something less measurable: it's much harder to build rapport with people you can't hang out with. Even more so with people you've never met. From the article: > Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges betwee…

I think we are going to find that the places that remain successful post-vaccination are those who encourage and subsidize business trips to trade shows. Getting all of your people together at an OSCon or similar convention can facilitate some of those connections without having to host everybody in your headquarters, which are likely not set up for it.