[vallavaraiyan]

Unfortunately, there is a drop in empathy and trust (to varying degrees) when interacting with those who one hasn't met in person. Being in office, talking to your teammates face-to-face is super valuable when the team members are new to each other. Once the rapport is established, let each person do what works the best for them.

[inter_netuser]

i wonder how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing, outstaffing, contractors in 5 different timezones, vendors in 12 different timezones, regulators in 3 different time zones, separate divisions for APAC, EMEA, US and so on...?

...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over?

Sounds like complete nonsense to me. If they can handle vendors located on a different continent - they can handle remote employees, full stop.

I'll believe the complaints about WFH when they'll ban offshoring.

[senko]

> ... how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing ...

All of this involves varying degrees of transaction costs (ie. how hard is it to have everone aligned, communicating effectively, etc). Outsourcing is usually done for (parts of) jobs that can be easily carved out into fairly complete packages.

For example, have the QA team offshore, or outsource the design or slide-deck preparation. Most dev outsourcing is also done at least per-component if not per-project.

True distributed teams are HARD. But having everyone aligned, on the same page and motivated, if half (or more) of the team is remote, means a lot more effort on clear communication, management, etc and many office patterns will need reworking.

As one example, onboarding (esp junior) team members is much harder, as new people learn as much by osmosis as by reading the documentation.

This is not to diss WFH - I prefer it to office esp. cubicle hell - but we should be realistic about the challenges involved.

[MattGaiser]

A former colleague of mine quit a job over this. They wanted him back into the office. He mostly worked with their Toptal devs from Nigeria and and Hungary.

[jameshush]

I worked on a team that was mostly Seattle people while I was based in the Los Angeles HQ. All my team members were in a different city. Needless to say "switching" to remote wasn't a big deal at all for me.

[inter_netuser]

what does he do now? Toptal?

[serial_dev]

I started at a company in February and was basically remote-only until June.

A drop in empathy, trust, relationships for me was very small. It's there, but for work related stuff, I believe it didn't actually matter. Everyone was nice with me and we got things done. Whenever I had questions, they would help me out.

We were since then a couple of times in the office and talking to them in person was nice, I felt I could ask more questions, I got to listen to their unfiltered opinions as we could have spontaneous 1-1 conversations in the office. It was also because we didn't make time to "just chat" online, except for online watercooler team calls, but with 3-4 people in the call, we pay more attention to what we are allowed to say.

[bilog]

IME it's also a good idea to organize periodic get-togethers to "coalesce" some collaboration aspects that are harder to manage remotely.