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Ask HN: Would you ever work for a company that live streams 100% of your work?

2 points by maruhan2 ↗ HN
I imagined an overly idealistic work setting where everyone has to be live streaming their work screen (either to the public or privately within the company). This would be like an extension of open source. This has the advantage that one can figure out what another person was thinking while developing and also get quick feedback on the development process. Ideally, someone watching would have answers to things you are stuck on, so you spend time less time looking for answers.

Of course, this is incredibly high pressure. Not many can work long hours under the pressure that others are watching. To compensate that issue, let us assume that you get paid per time spent streaming at a very high payout (the appropriate amount is up to your discretion). So instead of working long hours, you work in short bursts.

What's your opinion on such a work environment?

11 comments

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maxharris
Not practical. You could capture everything, but who would go back and index it all well enough to make the video useful?

Or maybe you could come up with some sort of standard "this is what I'm doing and why" preamble that each engineer would give at the start of the session?

maruhan2
What if each commit was tagged with the date of video?
viraptor
That would work for some people, but not others. My changes are often redone, history edited, context between work in multiple repos is switched as needed, code carried over using stashing. Indexing by the commit time would be next to useless in this case.
bobfirestone
No. There is no way that would ever be an acceptable work environment.

If a company seriously tried it productivity would go to zero. You have invented a system that aligns the developer interest with gaming the system not shipping quality code.

maruhan2
How would the developer game the system? Your code would be essentially reviewed constantly
viraptor
Yes, but that's not realistic. I mean, I'm already doing pair work from time to time - I don't care if more people join in.

But I see big issues in practice: 1. I can't imagine anyone paying higher rate just because I'm streaming. 2. You can't avoid displaying secret credentials once in a while, which would be a security nightmare. 3. "This has the advantage that one can figure out what another person was thinking" is BS. You can look at my commit messages and documentation to find out what I wanted to show. You'll never know what I was thinking.

maruhan2
Number 2 is a probably the biggest issue, and one of the main reason why I think it's overly idealistic. It isn't impossible to circumvent though with proper training, but yes very unrealistic. To solve that problem, what if only coworkers can see? (Assuming everyone is working remotely) I do think Number 3 is useful though. People are poor at documenting. In my opinion, seeing the process of what they were doing is often what you need to figure out what was happening. But as others mentioned, it's still rather idealistic because it's hard to index it to look back. However, in an ideal setting, with enough live viewers to guide you, there may not even need indexing.
mcx
Perhaps you could instead pivot this idea. I think it would be more interesting if you could have the editor play back all the actions taken that led to the resulting commit.
shortsightedsid
Nope. In an ideal situation the quality of my work and its impact is more important than the means and effort to achieve it. So live streaming won't work for me.
db48x
I suspect that you'll find that there are many people who are not outgoing enough to want an audience. On the other hand, some people already live-stream their work frequently. https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-episode-101/ comes to mind; he streams his ordinary work about once a week or so.

The difference between that and doing it full-time are partly just a matter of degree (can the streamer stand having an audience all the time, rather than just once a week), and partly a matter of tooling or staffing (to make streaming easier, so that it requires less thought and overhead on the part of the streamer).