Item — HN Reader

maybe just stop traveling to US would be easier and cheaper solution, why one need to be physically present anywhere in 2017?

i find it odd, i can understand it for my father that when some of his agricultural company partners has training, people from neighboring countries must travel there for hours to stay there for few hours and go back, but IT company in 2017?

reminds me of Huawei which is still organizing teleconferences (!) for trainings, because why not let people call across half planet in horrible quality instead of providing cheap full HD video stream work live chat, it's not like there are hundreds of us, max 100 people present

4 comments

> why one need to be physically present anywhere in 2017?

Because there is still merit to sitting face to face with people sometimes. Not all the time, sure, but sometimes. Also, not everyone works the same as everyone else, and sometimes people need to interact differently. I work remote primarily, but still get value out of my onsite times, just a different value than when I'm sitting at home working on a computer. Even in IT, there is value in sitting with someone and looking them in the eye for a few minutes, or holding two markers to a whiteboard.

Well:

A) - Full HD video conferencing for ~ 100 people is not cheap. At all. Bandwidth costs alone would be huge. B) - For teams that work together remotely, it is very important for them to meet in person from time to time. Communication issues drop when you can put a face and personality to a name on IRC / email. (and no, this is not achieved via video calls)

I agree with your second point, not so much with the first, I've seen very intelligent approaches to video conferencing (only full HD video for the speaker, and dynamic upscaling-downscaling based on who's speaking), not to mention bandwidth is very cheap now.

Communication is still a lot better face to face, but video conferencing is getting a lot better (and I'm betting on that with my own startup attempt :) ).

I'd definitely schedule periodic face to face meetings for remote teams, but that doesn't mean remote cannot work.

maybe i was not clear, there is no need to show participants at all, they would be fine with love text chat, you only need one video stream of trainee, which would be very cheap, they could even use Youtube

what's expensive about providing one one way video stream with live text chat for participants to ask questions?

as for putting face to name,I can't hardly imagine how this could be positive for concentration and work, I am more likely going to be neural and more efficient if I treat other party as robot than someone with face, because then you lose focus on work

Even most IT companies in 2017 still don't allow for home office, and the few that allow it, do a very timid "only in exceptional cases".

Meanwhile working for enterprise consulting companies, all of which have offshore teams, means remote work is a daily activity.

Funny enough some customers are exactly those companies that forbid home office to their own employees.

Some tax incentives for remote employees may help, would be good on for workers carbon footprints too.

It is already working, but not as you suggest.

As I mentioned on my comment, instead of allowing their own employees to do remote work, they outsource the work to consulting companies that actually do support working remotely.

i think this has more to do with tax optimization than location of work, many companies outsource everything to avoid taxes, otherwise they would not be able to provide competitive salaries for direct employee doing same work

I think the 'owners' don't believe at-home work can scale properly. Given a population a subset of humans will always try to beat the system. The 'butt in seats' mentality is believed to curtail that system cheating behavior.

The idea that a seat in the butt somehow would be a good deterrent against people 'cheating' the system always sounded amusing to me. One would think that companies have some way to measure someones work that's better than "Was he here for at least x hours? Yeah? Great, job done."

I've been contracting for the last 15 years and the lack of remote working means I have to do a lot less work! If the bosses are measuring your productivity on just being there then fine, they're idiots and I've no qualms about doing as I please with my time.

Because the costumer wants some of the developers on site to see that they are actually working on his problems.

Which is great, because now the developers can do their side jobs while their customers provide them with coffee.

Except they can't tell if they are actually working on their problems.

shouldn't customer care about results instead of how they are delivered?