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by lostcolony 1745 days ago
It's worse than that; the skills and learnings -run directly counter to each other- in some cases.

For instance, in the office, what is the single best way to collaborate on something? Why, you get people together and chat, likely informally, in a free ranging discussion.

Remote, what's the single best way to collaborate? Why, you write up a document with your initial thoughts and send it out for everyone else to weigh in on; you have a fully asynchronous, documented communication.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but, tellingly, the people who are best with one of them are likely not the people who are best with the other. And trying to impose one in the other's context will lead to poorer results; written docs in the office when a conversation will do feel heavyhanded and process heavy, but zoom meetings, especially if the hours don't all line up, in a remote workplace feel unnecessary, and reduces participation.

A LOT of companies have treated the pandemic as "figure out how to carry in person practices to remote", rather than a new beast worthy of learning new ways of working.

1 comments

Not only that, but this article is being held up by Microsoft as the end all, be all of answers. No one answer fits all jobs. For quite a few coders, working at home while communicating over Teams (Microsoft) is a better fit, but for the execs and producers, of course they do better face to face in a dynamic group setting. Artists probably do as well.

Talking to your team and seeing what works best and looking at productivity metrics is probably a really good place to start =[