Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?

Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by twunde on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:43PM (#22970890)

The strongest argument against remote work (generally speaking, not specific to the current coronavirus) is that a company is not disciplined enough to communicate well, especially across teams. This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.

There's also a case where some jobs need to be done in-person. A good example is a restocker for a grocery store. You can't move boxes remotely. Similarly a surgeon can't do a surgery remotely.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by octorian on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:00PM (#22971117)

> This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.

Also, don't forget that there's a lot people naturally discuss in those side-conversations that they really don't want to have "on the record" or "discoverable" in the legal sense. The moment someone tells you that lawyers might scrutinize everything you discuss, you become far more hesitant to have open conversations.

Of course that's why many business types quickly transition from Email to "call me", but that's less likely to happen with tech types and more casual topics.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by Natsu on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:10PM (#22971227)

> You can't move boxes remotely.

You just made me envision a robot warehouse where humans drive the forklifts remotely to move items around.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by LyndsySimon on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:49PM (#22972191)

... while simultaneously building a training dataset for the AI that will replace them.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by minasss on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:25PM (#22971933)

> a company is not disciplined enough to communicate well, especially across teams. This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations

this is a very very good point! but I don't think that being remote or not make this communication problem worse or not.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by twunde on Friday April 24, 2020 @04:34PM (#22972639)

It typically does. Most people are used to communicating in-person, often by chatting in casual interactions. Once you go remote, especially on a distributed team, individuals who are used to chatting in-person often don't have the discipline to send messages out to every member of a team. They typically also don't do multiple notifications (for example my company cross-posts announcements in both Slack and via email).

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by Natsu on Saturday April 25, 2020 @12:59AM (#22975709)

I solve this by keeping a running log of the important things I worked on that day and any questions I'm researching and sending it to my whole team.

A lot of people like it, learn from it, and also provide me with advice when they happen to know something I do not.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by fitzn on Saturday April 25, 2020 @08:02PM (#22982822)

It doesn't fundamentally or categorically make it worse, it just increases the importance of the communication discipline. So, if the discipline is lacking or slips temporarily, then you're more likely to pay the cost for that than with in-person work. I agree it doesn't exacerbate the amount or lack of communication, it just increases the dependency on good communication.

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