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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it harder to learn from others if you're working remotely? I don't mean to say that it can't happen, but I imagine that overhearing complaints from coworkers about their problems or them sharing knowledge with you is more likely to happen when you're physically in the same area.

I do think that remote working should be more common, but it's important to think about the things we might lose if it became the norm.

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Learning in a physical office seems easier for the person being taught because it's accomplished at the expense of a priority interrupt on the part of the person doing the teaching. You hit a snag in your work, you get up, walk to my desk, and tap me on the shoulder. I help you out, then return to pick up the pieces of my concentration.

When working remotely, you hit a snag, put a "@here anyone available to help me out with XYZ?" message in Slack, and do some stretches by your computer, wherever that may be. Eventually, someone surfaces from their zone, sees your cry for help, and gets you unstuck. No one need suffer.

But it's not just that. When you're in a physical office you can see people's workflow to a degree. You can see how somebody gets up to take breaks, maybe you'll get a glimpse on how their windows are laid out, maybe you'll see some useful tool being used you didn't know about etc. There are a lot of things people do that they themselves don't think anything of that can help others improve. If you require the teaching side to actively share what they know then a lot of these things are going to get lost.

I've been utilizing the VS Code "Live Share" for remote paired programming. It's been a great help in getting that mentorship aspect.

I work remotely full time. Recently I’ve been running Twitch-like live programming sessions with an audience of coworkers. They get to see my workflow and interact with me as I build something from nothing. These sessions have become quite popular, and accomplish the sort of learning you describe without any of the pitfalls.

Perhaps one day I may become a Twitch celebrity due to my live programming prowess. What say you, chat?

That's a nice coincidence. What actually made me think of this in the first place was video game live-streaming. I improved much more by watching someone play a bit than reading about it or trying it just on my own. That made me think of the same thing in the workplace. I think being able to see live programming is really useful in the same manner.

I have remove coworkers, and we learn from each other all the time -- it's mostly through code reviews, design discussions, and pair working on tough problems. We also recommend resources to each other when we find useful stuff (books, sites, etc).

I've seen this too. It definitely takes remote workers much longer to on-board and get up to speed. And once they are up to speed they tend to impart much less of their knowledge to new employees coming in. Remote work seems to work much better for more experienced employees who aren't doing a ton of collaborative work.

I worked in an all-remote company for years early in my career, and while I did learn a lot, I was kind of surprised how much more quickly I learned new things when I shifted to an in-office work environment. Somehow just being able to sit next to someone at a desk helps. But I think more than that, most people have a much higher empathy and willingness to help a person they can see and touch than someone who is just a name on the chat, or an occasional video presence. It’s that intangible social factor that I think made the biggest difference.

I've found it's so easy to start a slack call with my coworkers (especially when they too are working remotely and don't need to find a room to start the conversation).

There's only been a few days out of the year that I ever overhear anything where I could be useful or someone would be useful to a conversation I was having with someone else.

Steep price to pay.

No doubt a lot of things are harder when working remotely, but bear in mind that remote workplace culture is still nonexistent while office culture counts 2 centuries. We will need to change some habits and develop new sensitivities. The writing is on the wall that remote will only keep expanding, as the scifi visions of the past suggested

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