Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
“What do you mean, How to join a meeting’?! You click a button, doofus!” Yes, dear friends, and that is exactly the problem. If you’re not accustomed to remote work, you may not dwell much on the mechanical processes of remote interaction. It’s just always awkward, isn’t it? Every meeting starts with several minutes of…
Why do we have meetings? Our computers and phones are loaded with dozens of communication apps. I’m far from the first to ask this question. I believe it’s well-established that different modes of communication have different information bandwidth. More information is conveyed by a face-to-face conversation than an email, for example. The conventional explanations for…
Now that we’ve covered the basics of remote work — headsets, cables, and software — it’s time to think about some of the smaller, more subtle things we can do to ensure a good remote experience for everyone. Today, that’s profile pictures.
In the first two posts in this series, I talked about hardware: networking and headsets. I’ll come back to hardware eventually, but the next thing on the checklist is software.
If you saw my last post, you’ve got your computer wired up. Time to get yourself wired up too. The next piece of hardware you need to be a successful remote worker is a headset with an adjustable microphone boom.
So you want to work remote. Or you want other people to be remote. You want space. Perspective. Distance. Escape the corporate cubicle farm and work in your pajamas. First, you need to get some network cables.