[drchopchop]

You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year).

Meeting people in person, at least once, is valuable. It improves communication, helps people feel assimilated to the company and team, and creates a mental image of a three-dimensional co-worker (instead of just a faceless Slack handle)

Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable. This is especially true for those who have significant commutes or families.

[wreath]

> You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year).

Unfortunately this doesn't really cut it. There is a huge difference between the teams I worked in where we were all remote vs the ones where all of us were in the office. The camaraderie, the amount of slack we gave each other, how fast we delivered and the overall mood was much better despite having wildly different personalities.

With remote, you are interfacing with only one dimension of someone's personality and they may rub you the wrong way in a PR comment or otherwise and you can easily right them off. It's different when you go for lunch with the same person and talk about work or other stuff.

Another thing is that talking about work-related-but-not-current-project-related stuff is much easier when people in the same location and the conversation starts off spontaneously. Whereas in a remote setting it needs to be a bit more organized so there is an overhead.

There are a lot of pros to remote though, like not having to be subjected to your colleague's poor hygiene.

[RestlessMind]

> You can solve that with occasional, in-person team meetups (a few times per year).

Doesn't ring true to me after spending 2 years in a remote-first setup. Even post-vcxx setup where everyone could meet freely didn't facilitate as much in-person interaction as I was looking forward to.

> Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable.

For junior engineers trying to onboard, sitting close to their mentors is big help. Same for senior TLs who are coordinating complex technical projects across a team of 10-12 engineers or even more. Having everyone around is a big time saver for the overall project. WFH/Remote setup is great only for the engineers who are self-sufficient and neither need mentoring from others nor have to coordinate and lead other engineers' work.

[drstewart]

>Sitting physically next to people every day, especially for engineers, is often not valuable.

You make a lot of questionable assertions. Why would meeting up a few times a year be as good as seeing someone every day?