Re:Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote wor...
by BaseballPhysics on Thursday October 20, 2022 @10:00AM
(#33274807)
Ah, that's probably pretty simple: Other folks don't see the same value in sitting in the same room with the team. It's really no deeper than that.
Look, I'm a pretty extroverted, social guy, and as a senior manager, the vast majority of the problems I need to solve involve high bandwidth, 1:1 communication because the problems I solve are people problems first and foremost.
So obviously, for me, in my role, face-to-face interactions have a ton of value!
But I absolutely recognize that a lot of other roles are not the same.
When I look back at my days as a developer, I spent a lot of time in the same room with people! And 80% of that time, our headphones were on and we were banging away coding while interacting digitally. Sure, we'd often pop those headphones off to have those high-bandwidth problem solving conversations, but the vast majority of time those conversations were 1:1 discussions, and could have easily been had over virtual meeting tools like Zoom or Teams.
That's the reality for a lot of individual contributors.
Just because you can't wrap your head around that, doesn't mean that experience is invalid.
Look, I'm a pretty extroverted, social guy, and as a senior manager, the vast majority of the problems I need to solve involve high bandwidth, 1:1 communication because the problems I solve are people problems first and foremost.
So obviously, for me, in my role, face-to-face interactions have a ton of value!
But I absolutely recognize that a lot of other roles are not the same.
When I look back at my days as a developer, I spent a lot of time in the same room with people! And 80% of that time, our headphones were on and we were banging away coding while interacting digitally. Sure, we'd often pop those headphones off to have those high-bandwidth problem solving conversations, but the vast majority of time those conversations were 1:1 discussions, and could have easily been had over virtual meeting tools like Zoom or Teams.
That's the reality for a lot of individual contributors.
Just because you can't wrap your head around that, doesn't mean that experience is invalid.