[SubuSS]

I don't understand the push for remote work.

I have been a part of remote teams for over 11 years of my career (16 yrs). I have worked from home more days than I can count. It has enough drawbacks that I'd avoid it at any given opportunity. Here are a few reasons:

- You are not part of the hallway conversations / decision changes / fly by meetings / face-memory / kitchen run ins and every other benefit of having people together. When your level is senior enough, these are very much a deciding factor in whether your last 6 months of work is going to be thrown out or kept relevant.

- Video conferencing is terrible. If you notice a pattern, the conversation is DOMINATED by the side with most power. I have seen very senior engineers (including myself I suppose) have trouble corralling a meeting / participating in a discussion that's going back and forth animatedly when there are other senior folk in one room. When you are junior, there is a high possibility your chances to speak are just perfunctory because almost all relevant points have been made already.

- Yes I have heard and tried the notions of ensuring meeting etiquette. I have also been part of these meetings where there is someone (or everyone) trying to police how the meeting is run (let everyone speak, juniors go first, go in a circle ...). Those have been considerably less productive to put it mildly. (Remember - I am the one who is remote).

- There are always mic-hogs who don't make a ton of points - most of the efficient places weed these out real quick. In a different rant - I hate optimizing for the bad actors that penalize the good actors heavily. Anyway - in this case you are left with few folks with real talking points not being able to convey the whole nuance.

- Essentially this leads to you doing extra work in ensuring at least some folks on the other side are on the same page before the meeting to ensure your points are considered.

So yes - in short remote is bad IMO. Video conferencing pretty much doesn't work since it doesn't capture the full presence and energy of folks. This is going to sound metaphysical, but my real presence is a million times better representation of the full me than my text/video :). It may work when everyone is remote with an individual screen - the usual situations I am in is where there are 2 or 3 conference rooms with people.

[mawburn]

Having people work remote in a non-remote culture is a completely different experience than working with a fully remote culture.

If the entire team/division/org doesn't fully embrace it, it usually just doesn't work. That doesn't mean everyone had to be remote, either.

[SubuSS]

Can you please suggest some ways how to fully embrace this? I don't think offices are going away at least in my fang world.

I saw a note about everyone headphoning in - I can try this, but am skeptical because those people are still going to be more present than me (I mentioned this in my op). There are going to be side conversations, notes, glances, eye rolls, sighs I miss - the things I definitely need to get the full presence. Not to mention the walkie talkie nature of this - with everyone muting / unmuting and feedbacking.

I am open to other ideas - but am looking for ones that don't make the human interaction a lot more measured and artificial. As much as I like to be Spock, my xp points at emotions driving 90% of real decisions because the logical ones pretty much are a lay up in a sane group.

[mawburn]

Well, we went through the transition at my last job so I kind of have some incite. We had 3 or 4 people on my project who had came over from Invision, who are a fully remote company and I have a good friends at other well known fully remote companies that I gleamed things from to help us transition from 0 remote company to a fully remote project team (50ppl-ish).

1. Every meeting should be video first. Going without video should be extraordinarily rare. Even if that's just an impromptu meeting with 2 or 3 people. Kill conference phones completely. Get used to screen sharing. Good reliable tools like Zoom are invaluable. You miss a lot from body language and facial expressions if you use audio only, which will fix your major issue. It also makes people feel more included and that the people working somewhere else are actually real people and not just voices. Make good use of Slack video

2. Every meeting should be able to be taken as remote, even if that means just from your desk (or personal meeting room if you're in an open office). This means that the people who are in a conference room must be on video with an open mic, unless there is uncontrollable excessive background noise or something. No cross the table talk on mute.

3. Don't be afraid to make temp rooms with multiple people when you have conversations on Slack (or whatever you use), it'll help more people get involved as if you were talking at someone's desk.

The first 2 things are extremely important. Invision has recently released some blogs about cultivating a good remote culture that are pretty good. I don't have any links handy, however but it's worth a look if you're interested.

[dsfyu404ed]

Any team that spans several locations is going to have some/all of those issues anyway. Why make people suffer though living in a particular place on top of that?

[ebiester]

The push is that some of us are led by life circumstances to do so. (For example, I am married to an academic with a tenure track position outside of a top-50 city.) My choices are to commute to another city or work remotely. (Coming home for the weekends sucks, by the way.) ____

That said, I find that full remote works really well. Half-remote is a lot more difficult for the reasons you say, but encouraging all employees to work remote some of the time starts to equalize those issues, because everyone has the empathy of the experience.

I've developed a set of coping strategies, but I agree that it's a tradeoff unless everyone is remote.

[SubuSS]

Oh I understand the real world pressures, that's definitely not what I was discounting. I can see why people want it, I am discussing the efficacy of it and questioning this general push instead of opt in. IMO that's what you are trading for this Sophie's choice of a situation :/

Unless your exec board itself is fully remote, I don't think a company can be. I don't know of many companies like that :(

[bluGill]

The only remote meetings that work are ones where everybody is remote. Even if you are sitting next to someone in the same meeting, your both have your headphones on so that you only hear each other via the call. As soon as there is a room there is a struggle in my experience: it is too easy talk to the people in the room.

There is on type of in room meeting that works: the all employee meeting. The agenda is preset (first Joe will talk about goals, then Carla will go over financials, then Fred will update us on United way...).