[me_me_mu_mu]

I wouldn’t mind going to the office if the whole team I worked with was on site as well.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t really give much of a shit when I’m the only one in this office while the rest of my team is all over the world. And no I’m not going to cater to their needs when it’s outside of my normal hours. Deal with it, else I will (and have).

Why don’t companies just have local teams that are nodes in the broader graph?

A fully local team in California that works on X, and interacts with team Y that’s based in Singapore, and team Z in Europe.

Each team is self sufficient and works on a piece of the work that can be done by them. In conjunction with the other teams, we get global coverage without having some dumb working hours or waste of an office.

I don’t mind going to the office, and having worked as mainly a product engineer I like whiteboarding with our Product manager and other stakeholders, or getting on calls with customers to demo something (team in the same room, read body language).

Product teams benefit the most being local and all together. It’s hard to build a great product when everyone is not in the same room. Remote might work to make a decent product, but I don’t think you can build something great.

[ipaddr]

You are describing a typical large global company pre-covid era. Usually your expensive US teams get smaller while Singapore gets larger as you transfer knowledge and move on to another role only to get a call 6 months later when they decide to rehire the US team.

What we have now with a global workforce working together from different timezones has a lot of benefits and some downsides

[edmcnulty101]

> Remote might work to make a decent product, but I don’t think you can build something great.

Gitlab, Automaticc, Cockroach Labs...So many companies dispute this point.

The open source Linux team is fully remote for christs sake.

Meanwhile Microsoft is office based.

It seems to me the opposite of what you're saying is true.

Remote companies make great products, office companies make average products.

[up_o]

> Remote might work to make a decent product, but I don't think you can build something great.

This was the most egregious part of this post, for the examples you outline. But I also take issue with the framing that remote workers are remote because they have an issue with coming into the office. As a remote employee of and on both before and after the pandemic, I've never had a problem with being in an office, and fully enjoy quarterly visits for a week.

Working from home, I put in my regular 40 hours, and then another 10-20 after-hours, depending on the week/deadlines/insomnia. But outside of that time, my family is not in a tech city. If I were a bachelor with no children this fact wouldn't matter as much. But as it is, when I go afk and back into my life, I want to be physically planted _where my life is_. It is incredibly uncomplicated.

[edmcnulty101]

Yeah that person was rediculous. Just talking out their ass because they have a fetish for commuting or something.

[KptMarchewa]

Pre covid I've worked in a team of 5 people in a company with 5 offices in Europe. Every one of us was in a different country.

Of course, 100% office based too.