Comment by redhale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redhale | Hacker News Reader

While the benefits of remote work are impossible to deny, something is obviously lost. In-person collaboration is just an order of magnitude richer than remote collaboration. I think the argument that the benefits of remote work outweigh the reduced fidelity of live collaboration is a strong one, but does still have this weakness.

I am just patiently waiting for some technology or innovation breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs) that closes this collaboration gap and effectively ends this argument. I've tried dozens of remote collaboration tools, and it's basically all shit compared to sitting in physical proximity to other people. Maybe it'll never happen, but I'm hopeful (though it still may be a ways off).

I'm thinking of things like: presence (knowing when someone is actually at their desk/truly available), ad-hoc conversations that drop in and out, swinging by someone's desk when they don't look busy or deep in thought, overhearing a discussion or debate that is interesting or that you can contribute to (or easily ignore), walking a few feet to a physical whiteboard to quickly sketch out an idea, visually noticing that a junior is struggling and rolling your chair over to offer help, having a colleague hearing you sigh loudly over and over in the course of a few minutes and stop by to see if you need help, friendly non-verbal or very brief greetings to coworkers as you pass in the hallway or make eye contact across the office but whom you don't actually need to speak to, and so on...

Has anyone found any really good live collaboration tools other than the typical slack/teams/etc?

>I think the argument that the benefits of remote work outweigh the reduced fidelity of live collaboration is a strong one, but does still have this weakness.

to be frank, I don't think many people on the worker side of the argument even care about reduced company throughput. Be it because the pay is unsatisfactory, the project is uninteresting, or they are entirely numb to the company's interest and simply want to get out of the workforce ASAP.

>I am just patiently waiting for some technology or innovation breakthrough (or series of breakthroughs) that closes this collaboration gap and effectively ends this argument. I've tried dozens of remote collaboration tools, and it's basically all shit compared to sitting in physical proximity to other people. Maybe it'll never happen, but I'm hopeful (though it still may be a ways off).

in the far, far future, I can see some VR/AR environment doing this. But the level of fidelity and processing power needed to project the subtleties of body language and the fine point precision of our hands means that we won't see this for decades. I'm sure it will happen in our (Millenial/Gen Z) lifetime, but probably not while we are still working.

But for maybe 70=80% efficiency, I can see VR coming far enough in a decade to start closing the gap between current conference tools and in-person interaction. I don't know if any but VR dedicated companies like Meta (and I guess Apple now) will really invest, but it will be interesting to see.

It improvements in the next generation of VR (e.g., expression and iris tracking) could open up big improvements here, but the inherent latency of long-distance communication feels like a fundamental challenge comparing anything to in-person.

VR and mixed reality is going to be a huge thing for work pretty soon.

There are going to be lots of cases where the latency is really manageable, such as when people are in the same country or general area.

With AI enhancements and eye tracking etc. it could become extremely realistic.

So there will probably be a new fight about virtual attendance where employers want you to be in your virtual office seat so they can monitor you that way.

That may actually be one thing that helps drive realistic AI and robotics in terms of emulating human behavior. People may eventually become their own employment agencies for AIs they train or curate and then rent out or apply for jobs. In some cases the employer may not know for sure if they have a human or not.

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