> Your exaggeration and dismissal is perfect evidence of your inability to empathize with the struggles of people you haven't met in real life.
Calm down, you're overreacting. A single sentence is hardly "perfect evidence of inability to empathize" with others. Talk about "exaggeration"...
I somewhat agree with lupire: If someone only has empathy with their coworkers – who they're interacting with daily – if they can physically see them, then that's saying something.
I would think that if anyone is overreacting it's the person who thinks people who struggle to identify with remote workers are sociopaths. I haven't made any black and white statements or used absolute terms such as "no empathy". I know people in general struggle with nuance, but come on - I'm making it easy here.
> I don't want to work with sociopaths who can't be kind to a voice on the phone.
Sociopaths are an outliers and rare.
But most people empathize less with people they have not met in person (prof: the internet, even before social media).
Add deadlines and stress to that, and you have otherwise normal people behaving worse than they would otherwise. Source: me, working with remote teams for past 20 years.
Like the person above said, you (or someone) have to
be actively on the lookout for such issues, or things can get get bad really fast (I am talking days and weeks not months).