[I_AM_A_SMURF]

I have been fully remote for about 2 years. My personal experience is that collaboration is way easier when being remote. When I need to talk to a team i just drop a line in their slack room and I usually get an answer within minutes. So much easier than walking down the hallway and hoping that someone is in the team office area (not to mention no social awkwardness involved). Also when most people are remote in your company, you are in most hallway discussions! Just subscribe to the channels and read it. Not to mention lurking when high level engineers talk about stuff. I never really interacted with principal level engineers when I worked in an office. Now I just need to know which channel to listen to.

[nerdwaller]

Having a culture that discusses in public channels definitely helps, though many remote organizations aren’t this way unfortunately and silo chatter to known relevant parties vs any interested group.

[harpratap]

What do you do about folks who's first language isn't English? Face to face communication is somewhat doable because body language helps to convey the real message but communicating over text is a completely different ball game. So much nuance gets lost

[devdas]

I find it a lot easier to communicate with polygots whose first language isn't English. A lot of the body language issues go away because everyone actually uses words to say things.

[itsspring]

It works better in my opinion. My ESL friends can re-read the words and use a dictionary. They don’t miss things if the conversation is too fast. And you can still video/audio chat if you want. It is the best of both worlds

[Chris2048]

How do you communicate technical detail via body-language?

[harpratap]

Is 100% of your communication with your co-workers always technical details? You never talk about broad concepts and ideas?

[Chris2048]

Fine. How do you communicate broad technical concepts via body language.

[harpratap]

Have you ever talked to humans in real life?

[Chris2048]

Yes. Is that an answer, or just a dismissive insult?

Do you have co-workers who never have need of any detail or specific nuance? Or do you just mean water-cooler social chat?

Implementation of a task requires broad technical knowledge of what is to be accomplished, as well as specific technical details. How will body language communicate either of those?