[this_na_hipster]

I completely agree. Additionally, as someone in the thread pointed out, this decision really doesn't make sense by Dropbox. You have a series of problems that I can't see a solution for.

1) If we have Dropbox Studios, who dictates the frequency of those visits? If a manager dictates, there will be resentment of some sorts. If its a democratic vote, what about the people that can't make that date?

2) Assuming the dates have been finalized, the people that cannot make that date are at a disadvantage. They might not be in driving distance to a hub or for other reasons. That would mean information again has to be propagated back virtually for all members.

3) If a date is set and all the necessary people have come together, is it essentially a company day off? If the goal is to meet and talk to people without doing solo-work, I would assume its filled with meetings or events. If this is true, this doesn't make sense to do it too frequently. If done infrequently, it defeats the purposes of these studios.

All of the thoughts so far don't even go through the cliques / groups that would form that can be gatekeepers of information for true remote workers that can't meetup.

[marcosdumay]

What I expect from something like this is:

The visits are either dictated by policy or agreed upon by the participants. A place will probably want both, a low frequency one by policy and freedom for the employees to set any frequency to themselves. Voting doesn't make any sense, you need all the participants to agree on a date.

The policy meetings ought to be fixed and with a low enough frequency that people can plan their lives after them. Like once every 6 months. Otherwise people will resent them.

After a date is set and the people come together, they can work on whatever they decided to have the meeting for. Of course, it's probably not for doing solo-work, but the company shouldn't dictate a lot here. It would go counter to the goal of the studios.

I imagine the company expects every worker to be able to meetup at some point.

[repsilat]

I figure it doesn't make sense to commit to it if they can do it without committing, but not a bad thing to give it a go. I figure

- most ideas are bad,

- judgement is a crapshoot but improves the odds up to 50/50,

- trying and either rejecting or committing (or going bankrupt) gets the odds of the better solution prevailing in the market up to 60-odd percent.

Plenty of confounding variables, lots of opportunity to get unlucky and draw the wrong conclusions (or just have your priors overrule weak evidence against them), but it's science and we haven't found anything better yet.