[iamthemonster]

I'm an engineer in the process industries (oil/gas) and we are constantly collaborating and running stuff by other engineering disciplines with different knowledge to us, and coordinating with management, logistics, maintenance, operations, commercial and contractors. Isn't there a similarly high level of interdisciplinary communication involved in coding? How do you keep up the quality of communication?

(in my industry in Western Australia we essentially never did work from home because we were Covid-free)

[jszopi]

IME software engineering is a mix of coding, which can sometimes be fairly independent of others and require focus, and a range of collaborative activities. Face to face meetings help building the relations that help the collaborative part go smoothly. But once the high level requirements are understood and the humam relations are in place, a team can complete projects online quite effectively, even as the requirements evolve.

Others have mentioned how tooling can make the collaboration smooth. A good Internet connection, a good microphone, tooling like Jira (work backlog, prioritization and status updates), Google Drive (documentation), Zoom (VC with screen share), Slack (instant messaging for informal async comms or quickly scheduling ad hoc meetings) and whatever tool people use for scheduling meetings ahead of time.

I'm curious what part of your work wouldn't go smoothly given such a setup? Are there any physical artifacts that are difficult to share, like blueprints or models? Or is it a human aspect like gathering people for an ad hoc meeting?

[fy20]

There is, but remote-first companies have learnt the skills to communicate this effectively without requiring members to be face-to-face or require hours of meetings.

That's what I see causes the biggest push-back against WFH: upper management who don't know how to communicate without being in-person, so they assume WFH is bad.

[whstl]

Funny enough, those of us who had to deal with international teams or offshoring had to develop those skills even before remote-first companies were a thing.

I remember some of my colleagues were working in an office doing WebEx or whatever it was calls all day already back in the early 2010s.