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0 pointsTheOtherHobbes9y ago0 comments

Why are you teaching people at all? If you hire professionals they either know what you need already, or you tell them "We use X. Go and learn X."

There are remote-only outfits, and they do fine - at least as well "We're not getting any work done because we're in an open plan office and we can't hear ourselves think" outfits.

But hiring policy is an issue, and so is PM. It needs people with a compatible attitude, and that includes management.

It's not that remote is a panacea, but it shouldn't be a showstopper either. There are plenty of productivity killers in non-remote work styles too.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

user59944619y ago· 3 in thread

How are you supposed to onboard people onto a project? with training and teaching.

What do you professionals do? They work with other professionals and progress with each other.

What do you do with the world class experts you have? Make them work with other world class experts to make the impossible possible. Again, lots of collaboration and interactions needed!

For anything non trivial or not explained by a stack overflow answer, the "go learn X by yourself" could easily take weeks to years, whereas it could be explained in a few days with face to face interactions.

The "can't hear ourselves think in an open plan" are dysfunctional organisation. Of course, a lot of things do better than that, including other dysfunctional organisations. Let's have a better point of comparison than that ;)

Clubber9y ago

You give them a task, point them to the source code that the task involves and let them figure it out. They can ask questions here and there, but they won't learn unless they are ass deep in the code trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

I mean the world was educated through text for over a millennia. It works.

felipemnoa9y ago

>>I mean the world was educated through text for over a millennia. It works

I would replace text with mentors

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lazerwalker9y ago

By your reasoning, open source projects should never be able to onboard new contributors or maintainers.

You seem to be suggesting that "collaboration" and "interactions" are things that necessarily can only happen synchronously and via richer media than text. Even if you want to move away from OSS as an example, I'd point towards the centuries of intellectual discussion that took place via hand-written snail mail letters.

Is in-person communication faster? No question. Is it the only way to effectively communicate ideas as part of a two-sided discussion? I should hope not.

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