InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by JoeAltmaier on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:14AM (#18168175)

Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product).

When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or so (depending on how far away folks were and the speed of light).

You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

It was wonderful. Our media node supported up to 100 participants; there was no friction to conversations, meetings, standups etc. I knew who was active (could see them talking/meeting on the map) and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed). It included chat with unlimited history, persistent document sharing and on and on. It took <10% cpu time even in big meetings, <1% when not in a conversation.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by carlosdp on Monday October 08, 2018 @01:16PM (#18169255)

I just looked up TeamSpace, this is actually a super solid concept. This kind of tool actually makes me think the casual-conversation problem of remote work could actually be solved.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by konschubert on Monday October 08, 2018 @04:05PM (#18170840)

That's so funny.

I wanted to build exactly this product half a year ago, didn't know it existed.

I am glad to see it exists. But they really have to work on their design.

Edit: Maybe the skeumorphism isn't so bad actually at explaining the concept to outsiders.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by dkersten on Monday October 08, 2018 @07:39PM (#18172235)

> You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

I wouldn’t like it if people distracted me like that. Part of what I like about working remotely is that it forces asynchronous communication on people. Send me a message on slack and I can ignore it if I’m deep in thought. If you need to talk to me over voice chat, send me a message on slack asking me to join you in voice chat.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by simplify on Monday October 08, 2018 @10:45PM (#18172960)

From the next paragraph:

> I knew who was active... and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed)

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by konschubert on Friday October 12, 2018 @06:03AM (#18200381)

But that's also what makes remote working less effective in many cases.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by konschubert on Friday October 12, 2018 @05:54AM (#18200353)

Hey, may I ask why you decided to leave the company eventually? My email is [email protected]

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by JoeAltmaier on Friday October 19, 2018 @10:40AM (#18257002)

Sure! New financing meant the old leadership was out and a new group. They were all open-source and WebRTC. First meeting they were "Hey we can use open source and save a lot of effort!" and I instantly replied "We didn't write it ourselves because we weren't 'smart enough' to use open source. We did it because we needed performance guarantees. If we switch to open source, you'll have to tell us what we can give up".

Silence from them. Then a managed exit for me!

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by konschubert on Friday October 19, 2018 @04:17PM (#18259695)

That's a bit sad. I wish the company all the best luck. The world needs their product. But just from looking at their website, I am worried about the quality of execution.

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Re:InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employe... by madcaptenor on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:35AM (#18168375)

Unfortunately my company uses a product that we got in an acquisition that is not very good. (It's actually end-of-life right now but the new product isn't much better.)

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