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by zhdc1 2157 days ago
It's not the social isolation as much as it is being disconnected from your work environment. There's a very real benefit (that varies a lot on individual circumstances) to being close to the flagpole.

This discussion reminds me of Richard Hamming's anecdote about open and closed doors: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html.
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D895n9o33436N42 2157 days ago
What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.
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zhdc1 2157 days ago
There were a lot of companies that were remote work first before COVID. The issue is that this is only possible for companies in certain fields (tech being one of them) that have the right tools and management structures in place, and where explicit knowledge is more important than tacit knowledge.

I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm sure that small companies in a larger number of fields could, theoretically, go remote work first.

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pX3q54Q55945w7E 2157 days ago
> I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication

I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.

"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.

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