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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm still convinced that we're just a few years away from a time when people don't have to commute to an office just to sit at a computer. That company in London could save some money and so could the employee in Barcelona if telecommuting were an option.

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I think a lot of geeks have a vision of a perfect world when a detailed, unambiguous spec arrives in their email, they write the code and upload it, then the money is transferred to their accounts. There is a fundamental flaw with this concept, which is writing a spec that good is more work that just writing the code yourself. And the guy who writes that spec will need to collaborate with others enough that having everyone in the one place to do that makes sense. Videoconferencing works if you want to discuss something with which you are both familiar with someone you already know, and this admittedly is a large part of many people's jobs. But for everything else, you really do need to be there.

I'm sure there a jobs in this industry where a constant physical presence is needed. But many of us are professionally employed and notice that we go into an office every day and then communicate entirely over the computer. Given that situation, it makes sense to conclude your job would me more efficient if you simply telecommuted (provided you wanted to).

The rewards of telecommuting become even more pronounced for those of us who live in expensive cities and are forced to either spend exorbitant amounts of money to live near the office or else waste a lot of our lives commuting in traffic.

I used to think that too, but as I have gotten older I have realized that I'm absorbing huge amounts of non-verbal data just from the ambience. People put in a email what they want the record to show, but what they actually want from you is something more subtle. A 2-minute chat in the corridor can convey far more information sometimes than a whole day exchanging email.

I realize this is a personal issue and others certainly don't feel this way, but telecommuting every day would be so ridiculously lonely to boot.

Telecommuting doesn't mean that you have to be alone. You could go to a shared work space that is closer to home, or to a coffee shop, or the mall, or a park.

As someone who spent years working out of coffee shops nearly every day, I can say it is definitely not equivalent to the level of engagement and concentration provided by a proper workspace.

Oh, you can get a lot done there. But it's no office or home office. And the home office is monotonous and lonely.

I think videoconferencing sucks because the tech is so primitive. In 10 years we'll have proper videoconferences which are using augmented reality and have sufficient quality to replace physical meetings 90% of the time.

Of course, even conference calls suffer from the use of low-quality software and hardware. For some reason companies tend to use $1 microphone and $5 speakers for conference calls.

At one job, we had a full, no-expense-spared, telepresence suite. For formal meetings or presentations it was acceptable, but you still had to think about it a bit (e.g. pay special attention to whose turn it was to speak next, compensate for the body language or lack thereof, etc). For just hanging out, which is how most collaborative thinking work actually happens, it was useless, even with the best shared whiteboards money could buy. If you had 10 hours to work on a problem, you'd get far more done if you spent half of them traveling and actually stood in a room with everyone around a real whiteboard.

I could have made the exact same statement 10 years ago though. And where are we? (I think we're in a place where we realize it's really difficult to replace face-to-face.)

When I used to work in banking - they had high quality equipment from Tandberg (now Cisco) - and it was genuinely as good as watching SD TV.

Nothing beats face-to-face, but proper kit gives decent results.

If someone cannot write it, he will want to say it, and if he cannot even say it, he will want to come over to gesticulate.

God that annoys me. He can explain things properly, so assumes moving his arms around will make it clearer.

There is a fundamental flaw with this concept, which is writing a spec that good is more work that just writing the code yourself.

Some in Congress should probably read this, too...

The irony is that this is positioned as something that devs want to happen and businesses oppose. The reality is that the large companies want to offshore work as much as possible. This would be extremely bad news for developers in first world countries, if it weren't for the fact that they only have jobs because it works so badly in practise.

So you believe the job of an engineer is "just to sit at a computer"? You dont make other useful contributions outside of that?

So you believe the job of an engineer is "just to sit at a computer"?

The job is to write code, which could be done from anywhere (home, coffee shop, on the train, at the beach). The other stuff like collaboration, meetings, architectural discussions, etc., could be done virtually or scheduled for, say once a week. The benefit of a few hallway discussions is far outweighed by the 10+ hours per week spent commuting to the office.

There is a HUGE number of engineer positions where the job isn't just "to write code". If that's all you're contributing then you're in for a very limited career.

Having worked in both I realise recently. You can stick to the corporate world. Get told to use Java, Oracle, etc. Get well paid. Have decent career prospects. "Just write code".

Or my current position which is to develop the in house database, in the language if my choosing. Get to experiment with new technologies. Design it all myself (so no one to blame if it goes badly).

I would be better paid in the first job, but its way less interesting.

In the corporate world in the UK, most developers move onto more businesses roles anyway. Due to outsourcing, more respect and what not.

"The job is to write code"

Eh, this is kind of what I was getting at. This view is insanely simplistic. Outside of writing code I feel like people make contributions to the product in discussions, train their more junior peers, interview prospective new team members, do a code review for someone else, etc. The job is not to just write code. This is my point. If you see it that way, you're looking at it the wrong way.

Only in the sense that a civil engineer's job is to pour concrete, or an electrical engineer's is to burn coal.

There's always the occasional sperm donation to eager groupies :)

Haha

In my impression, all valuable contributions made by an engineer can be expressed by a set of commits to a set of files. I do not believe for a second that contributions that cannot expressed in that way would actually be valuable. Can you give us one example?

Your impression or your experience working with/as software engineers?

Here's what i did last week excluding bureaucracy and writing code. Talking to people to get requirements. Mentoring junior engineers. Discussing solutions with colleagues, code reviews, spec writing, spec review.

The spec writing is expressed as commits to files (we use a wiki) and some of the rest could be expressed as commits to something but bandwidth would be lowered converting it to text

I think a lot of companies will push back against this. A lot of service companies don't really make anything but provide a kind of social network based around offices. If you eliminate the offices the company looses power and could be dis-intermediated.

Your boss may not understand what exactly you do, but he can surely see you come in, sit at your desk, and see you leave at the end of the day. How is someone who cannot program his way out of a paper bag otherwise going to manage things?

Task lists and measuring customer satisfaction?

Peer assessments?

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