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by mooreds 3800 days ago
I work from home often. I like working from home. I fight to work from home. I've worked from home off and on for over a decade.

That said, in my experience there are some things that are just done better face to face. Not many, but some.

* meetings where you want to sketch something out--I haven't found a digital solution for sketching say, architecture diagrams, that works as well as a whiteboard.

* the chance to meet and interact with someone outside of your team/department by happenstance, say at a FAC. Of course, you can go onto different slack channels, but I think the interaction wouldn't be as fluid.

* one on ones. While I guess a hangout might give you some of the face to face time, video conferencing isn't as high bandwidth as face to face conversation, including all the nuances of pauses, body language, etc.

I think there might be others, and I bet they all have the component of physicality that can't be delivered digitally. (Yet? Maybe VR will deliver it.)

I'm not a fan of required in office work, but see the tremendous value in it on occasion.

Edit: formatting

2 comments

I don't doubt that there are good reasons to work from a central location - I do a lot of pre-sales work so I understand the importance of face to face - however, if I weigh up the cost of commuting (as a whole for society) then we just cannot justify having all office workers commuting 5 days per week.

We can still make face to face work, I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday - it's all about balance - we just need a culture shift.

> I just don't believe everybody has to commute everyday

Agreed!

You should take a look at Lucidchart. I can attest that it works well for sketching diagrams collaboratively.
Any idea how it compares to Astah Share?

http://astah.net/editions/share

Will give it a try, thanks for the recommendation.