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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

It's much harder. We are social animals on a whole. Nothing beats in person interactions. I am not against remote work btw.

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And we continue to be social animals over video chat. Harder in what sense? I hear this a lot, but I rarely hear concrete examples. Feels to me more that people are just not accustomed to fully online communication at work rather than that it actually being harder. Change is hard, yes. But that doesn't mean that what you change into is actually more difficult.

Also, I'm not sure of newer generations where you're from, but here what I see is less and less want from people to have in-person conversations. Newer generations have everything done remotely. Ordering food, socializing (online video games, etc), that in-person conversations often are intimating to them. Which begs the question, have the people who say juniors need in-person help actually asked juniors what they would like? Or is it more that _you_ are more comfortable _teaching_ in-person, in which case again, the problem seems to be you, not the juniors.

All-in-all, I'm just not seeing the difficulties people seem to say they have. Just my $0.02.

The single biggest issue I've noticed is that body language communicates a lot, and in remote environments you cannot see this. You don't feel at all invested in the other person either, and I've noticed people multi-tasking instead of listening to what the other person is telling them - often followed up with a "Sorry, I missed that. Can you repeat it?"

As another example, I've worked with some people who are quite confrontational and dare I say, aggressive, on camera, and have raised their voice a couple of times in the past. This same person has very different interactions in real life, a lot more empathy, where it becomes apparent the other person is in fact, an actual person with emotions.

The disconnect is real indeed, and in my experience mostly solved with company get-togethers. After the first get-together, people have a much better idea of other people, vibe better together and thus have a lot more empathy as well.

That said, if a person is unable to conduct themselves professionally whether it is via a video call or not, I think it has nothing to do with remote work and all to do with that particular person being bad to work with.

Sorry to be all 'yet you participate in society' about it but it's notable that you're choosing to have this conversation on an international, text-only website on a Sunday rather than in a local public space. Nothing beats in-person interactions, except perhaps the ability to interact with a community with niche knowledge that's thousands of times larger than what's within a 30 minute drive.

You can be social over a video call. No one needs to suffer through all of the bullshit of modern offices just to lean over someone's shoulder to read some code.

At 3 AM when alerts are firing, documentation beats half-remembered talks with former teammates. We need to get over our aversion to writing stuff down, or at least recording our impromptu brain dumps.

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