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Comment by nullspace | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why you got downvoted, your points are certainly good and reflect my one personal data point.*

I have also seen that face 2 face interactions are the best in order to align within or across product and engineering. Especially at the level of longer-term goals. Not so much at the level of weekly or monthly cycles.

And I’ve seen the exact same thing with coaching and mentoring people and teams. It feels like it’s much harder. I think when you are the person who needs to upskill, it is a lot more obvious when you are sitting next to a person senior to you. That you have to grow becomes more “material” maybe?

I love remote work, the benefits brought up are very real. I’m curious about solutions to these very real issues.

* Although in my case, I’m sure someone could come and say “you are not doing it right!” We were fairly new to this.

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I agree that face to face is important. Part of how we handle remote work is that people have to be comfortable doing video calls. This doesn't mean someone has to be available for surprise chats, but everyone has to be comfortable hopping on a video call when necessary. Gitlab has the rule that if a question/topic goes back and forth 3x, then it's time for a video call. I think that is a good place to start.

And there’s one more thing, I’ve found that building good interpersonal relationships are quite important to having effective discussions with someone. Especially when the topic is controversial. I’ve found this to be a lot harder when two people have never met each other.

How do people work around this?

Hey, I'm the author of the post and have been working remotely for 6 years.

There is no replacement for meeting up in person periodically. Anyone who tells you it's not a key requirement of remote work is foolish. Smart teams + companies have figured this out and do regular meetups.

With that being said, there are ways to "maintain" relationships with coworkers. I wrote a big post about this last week you might like: https://www.friday.app/build-relationships-remote-team

Did you write anything about remote team management ? The "value proposition" for remote work for IC is obvious to me, but much less so from a management perspective.

Good idea - I will write about this shortly. I've written a "how to" post, but it's mediocre.

> * Although in my case, I’m sure someone could come and say “you are not doing it right!” We were fairly new to this.

I think you've hit on a very important and somewhat subtle point here. Remote work is very sensitive to doing it wrong in ways that aren't always obvious and that office work is more tolerant of.

I think we need better tooling that allows people to work sync (as opposed to async) while working remotely.

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