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Comment by codingvelocity | Hacker News Reader

While i'm not 100% remote (i'm part of a small regional office that has a massive head office in another part of the country, but I can work from home). Something i've found incredibly important is jumping on video chat. There's something about seeing someone in a video while you talk to them that reminds you "hey i'm working with other humans, i should respond with a level of empathy i'd expect in return"

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Beyond that, I'd say the ease with which a video chat can be initiated is important so that the annoyance of starting one does not become an impediment to using them when they are appropriate. My team uses Sococo which, while not without its problems, does allow for one-click video chats and screen sharing with 1 or more co-workers. It's really nice to have the option to jump into a 5-minute video chat/screen share with the click of a button to work through something that would otherwise be a 25-minute chat conversation.

Are these individual or group chats? What kind of solution do you have?

I work in a small office of a big company and have a 10 hour timezone difference to my most important co-workers. We chat on the phone but I don't really enjoy it. I'm not sure video chat would help, but I might be willing to try.

But it would be slightly inconvenient because of the timezones. We might have 10-20 people from 5-10 locations around the world. This means that many participants call in from home before work in the morning or after work at night.

That said, I'm quite happy working remotely mostly from home.

I feel that travelling occasionally and meeting the people in person (and having lunch, dinner, beers together) makes it much easier to work together. There's no substitute for human contact.

If you're ok with the Google machine and spending way too much money on a computer that does basically nothing, there are these from Google[0] which have been great for me and my team.

We have a Hangout open all day in the office, displayed on a 60" TV. Anyone that's working remote can jump in whenever and it's somewhat like they're in the office. Audio is my only complaint. Sometimes it is difficult to be heard

[0]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/1677/h...

That's interesting. Are you aware of other teams using video chat like this, ie. all day long?

Do you know what the Google monthly fees are? Is the bandwidth consumed a concern?

If they're using Hangouts I presume it's free. I've used Hangouts while partially-remote (very small scale) and we just used regular google accounts.

Yeah, hangouts itself is a completely free service. I am not familiar with too many others doing this.

I've heard a couple other stories like ours. One I remember specifically was a company with a 50/50 mix, they did ALL meetings from their own desks on a hangout so that everyone had the same presence, the remote people didn't feel left out, because everyone has to fight for the same one audio track.

As for bandwidth, it hasn't been anything that we've been troubled by. Been using it for nearly 2 years now. The client on the remote machines has some hiccups from time to time and is somewhat of a resource hog. But if you keep it in the background it isn't too bad.

They are both types of chats. We use a combination of skype for business and zoom (zoom supports external people far better than skype, and actually works better in all regards).

Our time zone difference isn't as extreme as a 10 hour difference. We have offices -1 and +1 from our current time zone so it makes it easier.

A talk I attended earlier this year had a similar setup to yours and what they did was record all meetings and had a culture of always doing the meeting regardless of wether people could join. Then if you missed the time you chimed in later after you watched the video. Decisions were handled in a similar async fashion.

Even for quick conversations, video chat is much better than a phone call because it has higher quality audio and you can see the visual cues of when it's your turn to talk.

There are plenty of easy browser-based video chat applications using WebRTC like https://appear.in/. You can send people URLs to your video room and there's no software to install.

I have pretty much moved over to appear.in 100% now, I find its latency is much better when working with remote teams (I am based in Australia and the stakeholders are in the USA (East and West coast) - Appear in is flawless, have had 8 people on a call and it just works, hangouts frequently craps out unless bandwidth is perfect!

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