
Ask HN: Weekend project ideas for remote workers? - thakobyan
Need inspiration&#x2F;ideas for a new project that can solve a problem that remote workers face.
======
brudgers
A meaningful fraction of the problems remote workers face are related to the
organization, communication habits, and workplace culture of the organization
for which the worker works remotely.

For example, some great tool for video chat is only applicable if it is
adopted as a default means of communication within the company. The remote
worker typically cannot drive adoption. To the extent that they can, if it is
only used to communicate with remote workers and not within the workplace the
remote workers are less integrated into the ordinary flow of the company.

~~~
apohn
I'll echo this and also say that you should target companies where remote work
is the norm, not companies were remote work is allowed but not actually
feasible.

I've worked at 3 employers that allowed some degree of remote work.

At two of them, everybody worked at home at least 1 day a week and some people
were 100% remote. Everybody understood that somebody was going to be remote
for any given meeting, so web conferences were standard in every meeting.
People also called/chatted with each other when needed. Focus on companies
like this for a weekend project. These are the places which are open to remote
work and are open to addressing the issues with it.

I worked at another company where HR encouraged work from home, but there was
no enforced standards and the company had a strong history of butt-in-seat
time. The end result was that any work from home (even for a day) was
perceived as slacking off and adding a web conference to a meeting was seen as
an massive inconvenience for the people who were willing to attend meeting
face to face. This company did not need a tool to help them with remote work,
they needed an organizational change.

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apohn
How about a tool to help keep junior employees engaged, motivated, and
confident that they are not incompetent?

IME, remote work is a situation where people need to have a lot of self
discipline and be okay with guiding themselves. With senior employees, they
typically have a good framework (from past experience) to guide themselves in
the right direction.

Junior employees typically don't have the experience to know the direction
they need to take, and they need feedback. They also don't want to look like
fools so they are reluctant to ask for help/guidance.

In an office environment a good manager can notice this and provide help
without the junior level employee needing to ask explicitly. In remote work,
it's easy to have a junior employee basically feel like they are drowning
(figuratively) and nobody will notice until it's too late (e.g. person quits,
their part of the project has clearly gone off the rails, etc). I think
somebody that would allow for greater mentorship between remote employees
would be useful to helping juniors get over that initial stage in jobs.

~~~
itamarst
It's not really a good idea to hire junior employees for remote work, for this
very reason. Doubtful technology can solve the problem.

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itamarst
1\. Go to a forum for remote workers.

2\. Read it for a while, looking out for problems.

3\. Implement.

~~~
bitlax
Can you recommend a forum for remote workers?

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johnpython
Automatic green screen background so when on a video call, the remote worker
does not have to masquerade where they are. Additionally this adds privacy for
remote workers working from home who dont want their colleagues to see what
their "home office" looks like.

~~~
sogen
The Simpson’s mayor at the Bahamas?

btt, there’s a nice product for that, a screen that goes in your chair adding
a white background.

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davidscolgan
If you can solve the "help, I'm addicted to the internet" problem that this
person posted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431208)
you could do a whole lot of good. The existing apps out there don't work for a
lot of people, but something new might.

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ruairidhwm
Isolation is a big problem that remote workers can face. I would welcome
something that could alleviate that.

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ccleary00
Are you a remote worker yourself? It's probably going to be hard to understand
the problems if you haven't experienced them yourself.

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mindhash
call breaks -if you can implement a better way to recover broken
calls/connections. Especially with VPN things go mad.

Joining calls when onsite team is in conference room - this sucks big time
when you are on speaker and you don't get a word of what is going on.
Especially when some folks are away from speaker. This requires a bit of DSP
background but interesting problem i think.

De-noising- this is something i am already working on. Background noise from
your house can really be annoying or embarrassing. I am trying to use DL for
source separation.

Remote workers also lack view of everything thats happening. An automated way
of sharing updates with remote team will be helpful. It could be meeting
notes, an ability to for team members to scribble and share.

~~~
freehunter
Conference room calls and background noise are the two biggest problems I face
as a remote worker. I have hard floors at my house and two dogs, so I've
actually taken some very important calls in my car to isolate the sound. I
wish my bluetooth headset could do that though.

And people holding side conversations in conference rooms, or even people
actually trying to talk directly into the microphone on a speakerphone, is
always terrible. I always cringe when clients take my calls on a conference
speakerphone.

Phones in general are awful. Just awful. They have one purpose: to transmit
human voice. And they fail at that spectacularly and constantly. It might not
be noticeable when you rarely make calls or if you've had extraordinarily good
luck, but if you're on the phone all day with different people who have
different phones and are in different environments and natively speak
different languages, it's just the worst thing. The fact that it hasn't been
solved yet is unacceptable.

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tixocloud
Staying connected with the work place. Missing out on all the social
conversations that happen when you're in the office but balancing it out so
that it's not overly distracting.

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old_relic_
A decent touch screen on Mac/Linux (or a remote white board).

I've been working remote for 4 years now and one of the biggest pain points is
not being able to just white board a solution or ideas.

~~~
muzani
Doesn't Zoom handle this? Not sure but I heard some people conduct interviews
on it for this reason.

~~~
old_relic_
Using a mouse to draw isn't as fluid as a pen like object

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anon1253
better video chat with screen share abilities and decent noise cancellation.
We tried Skype, Zoom.us, Slack video, Google Hangouts and WebEx … they all
have issues and none of them work reliable enough even with decent internet
connections across all three major operating systems. If we would need custom
hardware for that: we'd even buy it, a good high quality webcam and headset
would go a long way.

I honestly can't believe that's the biggest problem we've had so far, other
than that it has actually been a smooth ride.

~~~
jackgolding
Zoom has been incredible for an online class I'm doing - some kind of screen
sharing for peer programming/code reviews would be amazing - maybe instead of
screen sharing google docs-like sharing with markup like genius.com on github?

~~~
anon1253
Try zoom under linux, the UI is completely broken…unfortunately

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Grustaf
Work remotely for a month and see for yourself!

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ianai
How about a presence tester. Ie a Bluetooth receiver that activates when your
phone is near it. It also texts or calls that number once an hour to prove
you’re near your phone.

I’m aware this is a huge breech of privacy but you shouldn’t expect privacy in
your workplace. I’m also assuming it’s only on for your assigned work hours.

