[kevincox]

I don't think this is a surprise for many people who have been working with people in different offices for a while. I don't have any hard evidence but from my experience you can work with people in other offices for months, often getting the feeling that formality and lack of trust was getting in the way.

But then I burn a ton of fossil fuels to fly over and spend a couple of days with them in person and the discussion changes dramatically. It feels so silly that you need to damage the environment and spend so much money for something that logically seems the same. I am looking at someone's face and talking. But it works, it is so unreasonably effective that from time to time I need to fly just to see a colleague in person.

[r_c_a_d]

My experience is that after you have met someone once (for more than a few minutes) then video calls work a lot better than with people you have never met.

I guess you develop some degree of trust (and a stronger mental model) during a meeting that persists afterwards.

[LyndsySimon]

My own feelings echo this.

I've been working remotely for several years. I changed jobs in March, right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic really impacting daily life. As a result I've never met any of my colleagues in person. I often feel like I don't have a good feeling for how they feel about a given topic and spend far too much time and energy trying to manage those relationships.

I'm looking forward to being able to travel again so I can meet at least some of them. In the past, I've participated in "team building" events where the entire (small) engineering group rents out a beach house somewhere for a week. That time is spent split approximately evenly between regular work, brainstorming/planning for the future, and social engagement. I didn't see the value of it before experiencing it, but now I'm 100% in favor of it.

If I ever get to the point where I'm leading an engineering group at a funded startup, semi-annual engineering retreats will definitely be a priority for me. They don't have to be "rent a beach house for two weeks in the Outer Banks", either. I live in rural Arkansas, and there are large cabins on the Buffalo River and White River that go for ~$200 / night or less during the offseason and can comfortably sleep 35 people.

[rabidrat]

35 rooms for $200/night? That's incredible.

[LyndsySimon]

"Sleeps 35", not "35 rooms" - I'm talking about a "lodge", where there are usually multiple bedrooms with multiple beds per room. It's not a hotel situation but it's roughly analogous to the OBX beach houses that I've experienced in the past in that context.

Also, granted, I live in this area and have personal contacts I can reach out to. The listed prices are going to be much higher than that - but last year I reached out to the owners of a couple of these places personally to see about booking something in the offseason, and that was the lowest price I got.

For someone not local and able to negotiate face-to-face, I'd say $500-$700 / night is about what I'd expect. Even so... when you consider the cost of travel and the cost of more "traditional" locations, the difference is pretty much insignificant.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you develop some degree of trust (and a stronger mental model)

For me, the former flows from the latter. When I meet in person, there is eventually a moment when I get a click feeling. Following that, a person's behavior becomes more predictable. Or at the very least explainable. That leads to comfort, which is a commercial substitute for trust.

That click take me a long time reach on the phone. For whatever reason, it has never happened over video chat.

[dr_zoidberg]

With one of my best friends we met playing online games and we developed trust between each other by force of voicechat and game-specific trust-based mechanics (remember those Portal 2 game trailers?[0] Well that kind of stuff, but along many different online games).

When we met in person it was like we'd known each other for years because we had known each other for years.

I think the issue here could be related to the dissonance of seeing a face, the brain expecting eye contact, but being totally unable to get it because of technological limitations. Since the brain doesn't have any other "source of trust" for that face (be that the voice, past behavior/experiences, having met that person to being with) it clicks the "do not trust (entirely)" response.

Of course I'm not a psychologist/psychiatrist/neurological MD and I'm talking entirely from my experience.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMSAzZ76EU

[kevincox]

Definitely. You only really need to meet once and the trust can be maintained for many months, or even years. There is just something about meeting in person that sets it up in a way that video calls can't easily match.

[notacoward]

Ditto. I've been full-time remote for a decade. This slight continual erosion of trust is something I've often observed - and commented on, including here not too long ago. Online-only interaction might work great for the constrained and voluntary tasks in an MMO, but not so much for the work we do in our careers. Even teams renowned for their prowess at remote collaboration often seem to rely on periodic in-person "summits" to maintain those connections. Even among introverts, true comfort with long-term fully-remote interaction is an outlier.