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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite thing about remote work is the written communication. It creates a form of documentation in itself.

I've worked remotely for 15 years. I can go back to any conversation on any feature we've ever had. It's extremely powerful.

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I miss this greatly from when I was remote. If I am walking back from a meeting and get detoured into helping some people with a specific problem it's hard to remember everything from the meeting. Having that "hard proof" of everything said and easy to refer to is powerful.

That's an anti-feature from a legal discovery perspective. Unless everyone is extremely conscientious about every word, you have 15 years' worth of chat logs and emails with offhand comments, jokes, etc. All of which can be taken out of context by a skilled legal team.

Sometimes ephemeral communication is a feature.

> That's an anti-feature from a legal discovery perspective. Unless everyone is extremely conscientious about every word, you have 15 years' worth of chat logs and emails with offhand comments, jokes, etc. All of which can be taken out of context by a skilled legal team.

I am ignorant of the operation of the law but why would taking quotes out of context present legal risk? Wouldn't the misquoted be able to supplement the record with the missing context?

I'm pretty certain that my 20 years' worth of /work/ chat logs and emails do not contain any offhand comments, jokes, etc. Perhaps you're not working with professional people.

I don't think it is unprofessional to make jokes in chat channels. It helps to build closer connections with colleagues which helps with non joke communication. I am honestly quite surprised you have not seen any jokes in 20 years in chat channels.

Jokes, sure, but not any that could be taken to be offensive or problematic.

> My favorite thing about remote work is the written communication. It creates a form of documentation in itself.

Agreed. Even when we do video calls, someone summarizes and posts what we talked about. I noticed Meet is now doing live captioning. It would be nice to email everyone the meeting at the end of the call.

In any meeting with more than 2 people, you should have someone take notes and email the group with the notes afterwards. It's extremely helpful in the frequent case when you don't remember what exactly you agreed to.

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