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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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