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Comment by midrus | Hacker News Reader

Not my experience at all.

The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done.

Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.

For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job.

What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context.

If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.

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100%.

The reality is that most managers have done little to no thinking about (nor have they ever been formally trained on) actual management. So when taken out of the environment in which they "learned" to manage, largely through example, they have no framework or theoretical knowledge to fall back on for what effective remote working looks like.

We have a hybrid working model but some of our employees are genuinely remote and never come to our in-person offices.

It works well but it takes co-ordination effort by leaders to make it work.

I think there genuinely are benefits to in-person work for certain collaborative elements of work but it makes no sense to just say "there are productivity costs to remote work" without actually answering the key questions, namely:

-For what kind of roles?

-For what kind of tasks within those roles?

-By how much? Does any loss of productivity get made up for saving office costs, commute costs for employees, lower cost of living? If your productivity goes down but it's by less than costs... well maybe that's ok actually!

-Have you quantified other benefits like retention? Even if a remote employee is now less productive (not proven tbh) they are still more productive than the new hire who isn't up to speed on your tech yet, not to mention certainly more productive than the person who no longer works for you and the people who have to interview their replacement.

It's bizarre that people say, well there are costs and benefits to remote, without actually even attempting to quantify them.

> Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.

That's one of the key factors for remote work success. Tribal knowledge stops working when team goes remote. Especially onboarding sucks because there's nobody who could just drop by and help you with first steps. It's harder to do when remoting. Last two places I've worked had nothing written down and it was colossal waste of time trying to get started because knowledge was scattered among people, some of whom had already left the company. I mean, you know that you're hiring for a particular position, then ensure that everything needed is either taken care of or written down and accessible. But no, I needed to waste first weeks just piecing needed information together. 1/10, would not do again.

Out of curiosity, where and how things were documented? And where were important conversations posted?

In my opinion, any tool that allows teams/individuals to publish/post updates and subscribe to other teams/individuals' posts or updates can work. Bonus points if you can have threaded conversations (like HN), examples:

- https://friday.app/

- https://wordpress.com/p2/

- https://www.yammer.com/ (is this still a thing? used it like 10 years ago)

- etc...

We also used slack (or equivalent... also used hipchat, and even jabber before that) for ephemeral, one off, non important stuff. And then a lot happens also in READMEs, Merge/Pull Requests, Gitlab issues, helpdesk tickets, etc. Not much use of emails other than for notifications.

At the end of the day everything has a link and things can reference each other.

I think what most companies are missing is a way for employees to "post" and "subscribe" to updates that are interesting for them.

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