Re:Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?
by jedberg on Friday July 22, 2016 @01:41PM
(#12145217)
We don't either, but it comes up occasionally. Sometimes when figuring out a large architecture, it's just easier to be able to draw it out. So far we've solved the problem by waiting until we see each other in person every few months, so it hasn't been a huge issue, just the main issue we can't seem to solve well.
Maybe my company is just weird, but we don't use whiteboards all that much. At least for code our preferred collaboration method is pairing, which isn't as hard over a network.
We write NLP software, and most of our whiteboard usage is for drawing out linguistic constructs and often involves only one person doing the drawing, which seems like an easy subset of whiteboarding to handle remotely.