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Comment by starik36 | Hacker News Reader

I am gonna go against the grain here and agree with Marissa. A situation where you have a couple of people that are remote (while everyone else is in the office) creates all kinds of issues.

For instance, at a meeting 20 people have to wait for that one guy to get on the phone. Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote worker would hear properly. And god help you, if the remote folks are in a different time zone - now 90% of the people in the office get inconvenienced because someone is 3 hours ahead of us.

We have this very situation at work and it's very unhealthy and annoying. I've come to conclusion that on large teams it's either everyone is remote or no one is.

Hanselman (http://www.hanselman.com) has a good series on working remotely and making it work - he outlines the problems and how to solve them. At least he is trying - other folks simply do not.

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Anecdotally, it's typically the people in the room who are either a) late to the meeting or b) go off on tangents or c) cause the meeting to overrun. There are lots of good and bad things about remote workers... but being a hamper on meetings shouldn't be one of them.

If you have 20 people in the office - and 1 remote worker - your conference times should be at the preferred time of the 20.

Yeah, I agree. In my experience, the biggest problem with remote people on the phone is that they are actually doing other work during the call and being productive, so if you don't make it clear a question is aimed at them, they might miss it.

They should be, but they are not. And don't get me started on the ensuing hell if you are trying to share your desktop via WebEx or Lync.

My favorite exchange at the meeting couple of weeks ago (with a remote sales rep).

Meeting organizer: Just press the Start button and then type... Sales Rep: I don't see any Start button.

This went on for 5 minutes with 20 people in the meeting waiting around. Turned out, sales rep got a new Windows 8 laptop - no Start button.

Ugh. Biz people can be really bad at this, because they think everyone has Powerpoint.

Once when I was remote, I specifically arranged before the meeting with one coworker to set up a kibbutz session (kibbutz is an expect-script that works a lot like screen, and screen may well have worked, too) showing my terminal, and she was hooked up to the projector, so I could visually walk everyone through my code.

Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote worker would hear properly

There are other issues with remote work, but honestly the company should spring for a decent phone. A few hundred bucks is more than enough, and your business surely has other needs for a decent speakerphone.

If you have meetings with 20 people with nontrivial frequency, you've already lost.

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