There's lots of communication which is hard to do remote. The water cooler is o e thing. But even in a meeting when presenting something the feedback is limited. When sitting in a room it's simpler to see whether people are following and one should go faster or iterate on a point. Also one can simpler intercept with a question or comment. The text based back channel is limited for that.

(I WFH exclusively for 10+ years and still regularly miss the office for anything which isn't deep down coding, but requires communication)

Presentations always seemed to me like one of those things that can be done without a meeting at all.

If it's unidirectional, true. If it's supposed to be a discussion it's different.

Why do I need either of those things? If I'm going to work from home permanently then whatever computers I need can come with me. Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; remote work due to pandemic is going to lay bare the stupidity of managers and their ranks will be greatly reduced. I predict that the written word is going to make a big comeback.

Yes, in my experience the key to a highly functional remote environment is async collaboration.

By this I mean written roundtables/stand-ups (with a focus on putting the detail in the tickets and just bringing up blockers), written RFCs and review periods for larger initiatives, comprehensive action logs (admin logs, etc), detailed documentation, detailed commit messages, etc etc.

Deadlines are fine, but people need to be able to be aware of the timeline up front and have autonomy to work within their own schedule to meet it.

This becomes especially important when multiple time zones come into play.

Essentially it's a matter of replacing as many meetings as possible with recored (written and/or multimedia) versions that convey the same content, focusing on maximizing transparency and collaboration.

The hostility that many programmers have towards managers is short-sighted.

If you’ve ever worked somewhere where the manager has way too many direct reports, you know it’s usually a shitshow.

Can you name some companies of more than a few people that don’t have managers? If you think they’re all a waste and a drag, what’s your explanation for why manager-less competitors don’t rise up and eat their lunch? Better yet, why don’t you start your own company staffed with only ICs and take over the world?

I hate to tell you but one of the reasons why google ate the world was their hands-off management and peer-to-peer project management and feedback schemes, which are efficient and effective. I know experiences at large organizations can vary, but for years at that company I had managers who existed, yes, but never showed their faces and were there chiefly to make sure that everybody had desks and chairs and computers. This style scales extremely well. I also had managers who were just other ICs to whom I reported, because there had to be a path from Larry to everyone in the org chart, but who were otherwise peers. Not every large organization is choked with weekly/daily meetings and org charts full of useless functionaries.

I hate to tell you, but the only reason Google “ate the world” during the times you describe (which I’m skeptical of, but that’s a separate discussion) was that they figured out they could sell ads against their search results. Almost everything else seemed exactly like what you’re describing: a bunch of ICs with no managers building cool stuff that didn’t affect the bottom line, had bad usability, didn’t have a clear use case, overlapped the work of other teams, or all of the above.

The Google of today is different: multiple billion dollar business units, all well-staffed with managers.

"Face-to-face meetings are a justification for middle management to exist; "

Communicating is 1/2 of business; it's really odd that so many people have difficulty with this.

I think because as Engineers, we measure value in 'code' then we tend to diminish all the other aspects of the business or process.

Meetings can obviously be a waste but they are also critically important.

Meaningful communication happens between your ICs. The weekly hour-long team meeting where the manager polls the room and nobody has anything to say is just a waste of everyone's time. Reducing what you have to say to an email has the effect of distilling and refining it, and in many cases leads to the realization that it was wrong to begin with, or doesn't warrant saying.

Sounds like you need a new manager.

Judging by the sheer level of resentment the poster holds for management, as a whole, it sounds more like it could easily be a case of their manager needing to replace a report.

ICs?

IC = Individual Contributor (worker who does not have a team under them)

Individual Contributors. In this case, the engineers.

I actually think the ranks of middle managers will increase as more people work from home. Especially on the engineering side. The whole point of managers is to facilitate communication between people and teams. WFH certainly doesn't help communication problems. HR should pretty much drop to 0 though.

How exactly does it help to pass communications through a person (the manager) that, for the most part, does not understand the technical details of which they are speaking? We literally pay for slack for communication. No one needs an arbitrary human to act as a gatekeeping communication conduit.

Maybe at tiny companies. At larger companies, you can't scale communication as a fully connected graph.

I guess that's why you have multiple slack channels instead of one. You're trying to justify paying someone over 100 grand a year to be a worse form of communication than the software you're already paying for to communicate.

I don't think I'm trying to justify any San Francisco salaries, lol. The point I'm trying to make is that a single person can only have so much organizational knowledge overhead. Facilitating communication between the right people without spamming the wrong people is tough.

The github corporate move from a flat structure to a hierarchical is probably a good case study to read if you're interested: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/800

What are the functions of HR that you imagine them doing such that they’ll all be made obsolete by WFH?

Pretty much anything related to the work environment. This can include maintaining a safe work environment, accommodations for specific employee needs, handling employee disputes.

That's a fraction of what HR does. Compensation, benefits, hiring, wellness, training, performance reviews, etc, etc. I doubt that even 10% of what HR does is tightly related to a physical space.

I don't see how this isn't still necessary.

Do you see how these problems greatly diminish if people cannot interact physically?

You don't see why maintaining a work environment wouldn't be necessary if the entire company were allowed to work from home?

The work environment remains, it just shifts location.

Reminds of that Office Space clip, "What is it exactly, that you DO here?".

I think there is still a lack of things like white boarding tools. I haven’t seen anything that could replace a big whiteboard.

Also webcam images generally look horrible. I am sure something could be done about that.

Better microphones and speakers in laptops would help. Better suppression of background noises like kids would help.

I think there are a lot of little things that could improve tools a lot.

If you plan on working from home full time then invest in a decent camera/microphone. I already had focusrite audio interface for guitar, an XLR mic gives amazing sound, decent interface and will probably get a usb camera (is there an action cam like GoPro that can double as a webcam ?)

You can buy a video capture device that lets you plug a GoPro or DSLR 's esque HDMI output to your computer.

How are you using the xlr mic? I have one but am using the USB output because I don't have a xlr port on my laptop.

I have Focusrite Solo [1] audio interface - I got it for guitar capture initially - then I plugged in my headphones in it and the DAC/AMP in it is amazing - this motivated me to go for studio headphones (beyerdynamic dt 990 pro) and now because of this crisis I went for AT 2020 condenser mic

[1] https://focusrite.com/en/usb-audio-interface/scarlett/scarle...

This setup costs ~400$ so if you are just in to calls I'm not sure if it's worth it - but for me it was just getting a mic and now I sound like a radio host on calls :D

I don't own a GoPro so if there is a clone that has this functionality out-of-the-box it would be ideal.

Problem is the camera has to be sitting in the middle of your screen or it will be looking like you are looking away. Even the built in camera on the bottom left of my dell xps looks stupid. And then video conferencing tools compress the video to shit anyway. Also most of us don't have fancy looking home offices. I'm currently working from a desk in my bedroom so a video call would have my bed and an unpainted drywall covered in plaster lines/patches.

My setup is a Shure SM7B, Cloudlifter (necessary for SM7B), and Focusrite Scarlett. It sounds really good.

Do you also commute by Ferrari? :)

USB mics like Rode NT-USB (or NT-USB mini) or Blue Yeti are fine, too. They are the equivalent of a very nice sedan.

The scarlet focusrites entry level are pretty cheap you can get the solo for £100 less than a nice mechanical keyboard and a decent mouse.

I went for the next level up the Clarret 2pre but I do use that for my dnd streams and want to process my voice and to mix in audio.

Main problem with entry level class compliant usb is your at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft making your interface obsolete and you cant change your microphone to suit.

It is not just the soundcard; but the entire solution.

When I looked it, it was for the microphone (400 EUR) + focusrite 2i2 (150, yeah, I looked at dual) + cloudlifter (150) + boom arm (75) + cables (let's say 25) => 800 EUR. I tried not to think about GoXLR...

Compared to that, NT-USB + boom arm (PSA1) was only 200. Plus the space saved on the desk.

I don't really understand, what you mean with being at mercy of Apple and Microsoft. The only problem with USB mics that I'm aware of might be timing/lag, if you need it to be precise. That could be problem for singers singing to instruments, but not for spoken word.

MS depreciated something in a fall update that stopped my £50 alesis core 1 working and both apple and mac no longer support my TASCAM which is why I needed a new sound card

If your in the uk the SZ-MB1 was only 17.99 compared to 150 for a cloud lifter and for mics I use some 10 year old entry level sure dynamics which where £25.

Depending upon your needs you plug the XLR mic into a converter with USB out or into a mixer.

You cant find good video capture adapters anywhere. Ie, any elgato camlink

Doesn't even need to be that complex.

There are really good USB mics these days that are just plug and play. The Blue series for instance (Yeti, etc).

It seems silly, but I think one of the biggest reasons to have an all-MacBook shop is the microphones built into the laptops. Their far-field noise cancelling just beats the pants off of any alternative I’ve tried.

You can also just issue $200 AirPods to each user that doesn't already have them (which will pair to anything that speaks Bluetooth), which may be a simpler/cheaper solution to this problem.

A $20 USB gaming headset with a mouth mic arm might work, too.

Still doesn't come close to a dedicated microphone

Dialing in a iPad to the zoom w/ the notes/whiteboard app is a good substitute I think a lot about for this.

I love this online free self-hostable open source collaborative whiteboard: https://wbo.ophir.dev/ Unlike many others, this one is nice and lean and hence works smoothly even on old hardware.

If you have an nVidia GPU, look into RTX voice- you can install it on any CUDA-enabled GPU with a simple tweak, and it's good enough to kill dryer noise and keep your screaming children from being heard.

Video conferencing is pretty bad IME. I think that all too many companies view Slack as an acceptable option for communication most of the time, and I think that's an extremely inhibiting factor for most remote work. I think some innovation around the tools we use for remote work would be great, fwiw.

For example Teams and Outlook have terrible search. Documents basically go into a black hole to never be seen again. We need the same search quality we have for web searches.

that's why you shouldn't use _either_ of those as repositories of information ... they're great for the ephemeral discussions, but once consensus is reached, you should have other ways of tracking that, whether it's: github/devops/jira issues and tickets, or some kanban board somewhere, or design documents, or a wiki. The discussion itself shouldn't be the artifact that records the decision.

Debian uses something called Meetbot. It seems like it would be sort of be what you are asking for.

https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot

Good suggestions for improvement, but I don't think they fit this context. Face-to-face communications are extremely unsearchable.

Interesting

[edit: lost context after parent edited]

What I can think of is a smartphone app that's always listening and transcribing, best-effort, all it listens. This can capture in person speech and make it searchable.

Also, are any of the current videoconferencing options offering machine transcribing out of the box? I know users could always hand-feed recorded video to a separate tool, but ease-of-use matters.

Emulating face-to-face-ness remotely is precisely the hard problem. As pg once said, the real world is incredibly high-bandwidth.

There are tools like automatic captions + manual tagging that can make search much better. The tools are out there, just not well adopted at this point.

Training people, both workers and management, how to work in such environments. Plus for many companies expanding the bandwidth and security for their entry points for the corporate network. This can include locking down connected equipment to block high data volume sites and activities; you cannot believe the number of people who try to stream across their vpn connection.

Not everyone wants to be remote, where I work they asked for volunteers for the first wave and had to turn people down for some groups. For these the separation of work and home is line they don't like to cross.

>>I think the biggest use case will be helping recreate the virtual water cooler.

I dont think that is hard to replicate. Group chat / slack / teams is a common feature and can easily be used to fill this void.

It's hard to force WFH people to create non-job related relationships. Like if your jobs don't overlap, you'll probably never talk in a WFH setting. In an office setting, forming relationships is both personal and functional. Maybe some of this communication isn't efficient but it probably has value.

That's recreating a water cooler with an HR drone sitting there spying.

There are ways to do it with out "HR Drone" spying

and further if you are saying things that would get you in hot water with HR then it is unlikely that a verbal conversation is better, in fact in many of these instances having a record of the conversation can be helpful....

Yeah, it is harder to be friends with your coworkers when you are remote. You do end up developing relationships though. My mom, for 30 years, spent so many years on the phone with other people, when they finally met up, it always ended up in friendship.

I work from home exclusively. I am in the same boat.

Earlier in my career, it was easy to make friends at work. I miss that. Lets go golf! Lets go drink! Lets go do this... etc.

I do think that ended up creating 'cliques' inside the groups though. Its probably better in the long run to try to establish a more professional relationship with coworkers. Just my opinion - and i'm likely wrong.