by saghm | 2025-11-29 19:29:54+00:00
My point was that they don't at all phrase it as a personal opinion:

> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.

It's hard for me to read that as anything other than literally describing to me what my the experience of working with me remotely is. OP has never worked with me as far as I'm aware, so they have no idea whether it's accurate or not. Charitably, they might not mean what they're saying literally, but I'm making the argument that for topics that are controversial because of how people have been burned by overly prescriptive policies in the past, the burden is on the speaker to avoid voicing opinions in a careless way that relies on the listener to glean that their intent isn't the same as what people have experienced in the past.

My meta-point is that while people are free to express their opinions without spending effort trying to make their intent understood, but by the same token, people are free to react to those opinions with the exact same level of effort spend trying to understand their intent. In my experience, there are a lot of people who complain that they're treated unfairly for expressing their opinions without realizing that what people are actually reacting to is how they express their opinions, not their opinions themselves. I've personally struggled quite a lot over the years in having trouble understanding how other people will interpret my communications, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who also struggle with this, but if someone doesn't seem to even accept the premise that part of the responsibility for being understood lies with the person in expressing their intent clearly, I lose patience quickly. This is especially true when the "opinions" are expressed in a medium where the person communicating has an unbounded amount of time to work on clarifying their intent before the message actually is received by someone else; I don't expect everyone to be able to perfectly articulate things in real-time when talking in person, but when the opinion is expressed via a blog post, they don't have the same constraints in working on how they convey what they're saying. The fact that the blog post seems to be overall taking the stance that it's better not to try to worry about how someone will interpret their intent makes it feel even more likely they might just not understand what people's actual issue with their communications have been in the past.

It genuinely seems like they might not have been able to distinguish between good-faith misunderstandings and bad-faith intentional misinterpretations of what they've said, and that's unfortunate if it's led them to the conclusion that they just don't need to care about what anyone thinks about their opinions rather than that they need to learn how to better communicate to those who are attempting to respond in good faith and ignore the ones who aren't. A lot of people understand that people can disagree with them in good faith in the abstract but fail to actually recognize when that's happening in the present, and quite a lot of what's expressed in this blog post resembles what I've seen from other people who struggle with that.