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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Communication. People think that software is a coding problem, but for anything non-trivial, communication is a far bigger bottleneck. The amount of code on a project is O(n) with number of developers, but the amount of communication required is O(n^2). Anything that makes coding cheaper at the expense of making communication less efficient becomes a net loss at scale.

This is why engineers who can communicate effectively make several times more money than engineers who can't.

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This. Also applies in small team and freelance situations.

If your client just views you as the person who writes a code function they need, it's pretty easy to outsource you. If your client views you as a trusted person who can take their requirements, work with them in a pleasant way to clear up any vagueness, and then recommend and deliver a technology solution that just fixes their problem ... your gold.

Exactly!

I was doing research at a large European bank that has a lot of development outsourced. The project management primarily located at their HQ in Europe while the development is mostly in India.

They have had to resort to moving over a fair few people from India to their HQ as the communication just doesn't work as well otherwise. There is simply no replacing face-to-face communication.

The Communication has the be incredibly specific when outsourcing, not to mention the time difference which carries another set of issues. Both contribute to communication issues, at which point it may simply be better to do it locally, or at least move contractors over from outsourcing location to your HQ.

Remote work is popular right now but the value of just being able to walk over to a colleague to discuss a problem should not be underestimated.

Most international projects I've participated in has come to this conclusion sooner or later. Not having the physical space divide and the language barrier coincide helps a lot. Not having a huge divide between business and development helps, too.

A stop gap method is getting the whole team together for a couple of weeks, so you get to match faces with voices and learn manners and habits of your overseas team members. This helps a lot with further communications.

Still, the amount of information you miss can be staggering - not just from decreased deliberate communication, but from not getting ambient information about your team members knowledge.

>Still, the amount of information you miss can be staggering - not just from decreased deliberate communication, but from not getting ambient information about your team members knowledge.

Which is actually one of the positive points of Open office spaces. Despite many engineers disliking them, they do force employees to communicate more.

There are of course other negative things about open office spaces but that is a big win.

It doesn't work for communicating anything, all the decisions are made in small conference rooms and the noise remains in the open space where noise happens.

Big spaces are ok if you can concentrate in the middle of the jungle and to casually chit chat to someone, but that's it.

My experience with open-plan offices is that most decisions are made in the hallway, in informal chit-chat between people. In some ways this is bad for organizational health becomes it means not everyone is on the same page, but it also can lead to some very quick, creative new ideas.

I don't agree on the face-to-face part. Remote work does not predetermine bad communication. It IS correlated because most of people that do attempt it do it in this outsourcing style. If you have a company-wide remote-first culture your communication can be as good if not better than traditional arrangements.

You certainly have a point. Remote work doesn't have to have bad communication but there are barriers to communicating and if the organization is not set up to properly handle the barriers it can cause issues.

Outsourcing to a different country in a different time zone with entirely different management styles is asking for communication trouble.

A company built on remote work from the start seems to be more likely to succeed with remote work than one who has adopted it kind of ad hoc.

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