[mtpockets]

I’m an eng manager at a public company.

Short answer - relationships cannot be made via zoom. Thus, interactions are transaction based. I can provide a million examples of why this is a fact in as simple as online dating where you always want to end up meeting the person and digital correspondence is not sufficient to cross the boundary of trust between 2 humans.

…and trust is the one thing that gets you promoted, gets you the benefit of the doubt when you need to leave the office and inconveniently make your coworkers pickup your slack, provides a social barrier via awkward convo when your manager has to let someone go and is debating who vs the simplicity of 3 clicks to removing even a more productive person with whom they have no relationship with by just removing a person on slack and zoom and your jira board. Do you let go the person you know that has 2 kids and you met their kids and they do ok work vs the solo ic who does not seem to want to talk about anything but their work and go home? Surprise surprise most managers would easily coach the ok person they feel closer to vs even the most productive person who they cant get a read on and assume they may even leave some day. Humans being humans.

Trust also forms camaraderie, your tribe in an office, the people you can gripe to with trust in their silence vs someone can easily record or back talk you with your manager via zoom. In office, you can see where people move and who they talk to and thus their relationships.

Therefore, you cannot solve building better relationships via more technological solutions. Humans grasp many small pieces of meta data via in person contact.

Small companies may want whatever your solution is, but large ones where divisions need to scale and trust needs to scale already know this truth and will not buy into it. They would rather wait for covid to be less fearful amongst their constituents and bring them in office which is already happening at banks and apple and soon to be many other orgs next year.

BUT! For the fully remote small companies where work is distributed amongst maybe 20 people in different geos, maybe some small tools will work.

Just remember, a bunch of startups tried to build products to address this at the start if the pandemic and failed learning this truth that human relationships need in person contact.

And as you solicit more advice, notice how the proponents of wfh typically are in roles that are more transactional in nature or accept the risks of or want a more transactional relationship with their work. Most people, especially young ones without enough background understanding how human orgs work, will think they want wfh but in fact want in office with some flexibility to get their outside work life tasks done more easily. And it is not until peoples heads are on chopping blocks or they are passed up for a promotion that they will realize the mistake of wanting 100% remote work.

[brainfish]

As an eng mgr of a fully remote team, I do not agree with your assertion that "relationships cannot be made via zoom." Of the sixteen people I work closely with, I have met fewer than half in person, including a similar fraction of the engineers reporting to me. I seek to balance the lack of in-person interactions by leaning heavily into interest, compassion, and vulnerability. I take time in my 1:1s to ask about folks' lives, making sure to remember past details they have shared and to make it clear that I am generally interested in everything they have to share about themselves. But I think more importantly, I am conscientiously more vulnerable in my own sharing with those who take an interest than I might be otherwise. I put a little extra effort into "broadcasting" my interest in my colleagues as humans to make sure some of that truth makes it over the wire. The result is that I have very real human connections with nearly all of them, and the engineers on my team have stuck with me through some crazy s** that I don't think they all would have had it not been for those connections.

It's easy to get into a work mindset when using work tools. That can in turn cause us to skip those human interactions such as more personal conversations that might usually happen at lunch or whatever. Taking the time to elicit them, where natural, without the natural cues is hugely important. I have honestly never felt more connected with a team than I do with my current one, which was formed almost entirely post-pandemic. Hell, folks were building real human relationships with just pen and paper for ages not long ago. It can absolutely be done.

[mtpockets]

Managers like ourselves make the mistake thinking our close relationships with our folks means the relationship between our folks and others are equally close. That is because as managers people publish their info to us and are incentivized to do so where as two peers are not. And in large orgs, how do you gain visibility as an IC or build good professional connections or connect multiple young engineers together, the introvert to other introverts? To replace in office collisions at lunch or at the vending machine is equivalent to finding and randomly zooming folks in chat groups which is hard since calendars are hard to get on. Lots of friction.

But I speak of large orgs here, not 100 person startup where some of these things can be more easily managed… but still I know these companies do a lot of offsites to make up for the lack of connection in office.

[charlie0]

I agree with this 100%. As other commenters have pointed out, there is a difference between getting work done and actually building relationships. It's very possible to get high quality work done remotely, but relationship-wise, it's very transactional in nature for most people.

So far, I've been involved with several teammates and building meaningful relationships remotely has been impossible for one reason or another. It's always just a quick chat about the weather and maybe something interesting that happened to someone that week, but that's it. At best, it's just a shallow form of camaderie.

I do believe that good relationships can be built remotely, but it's not trivial to do. At my workplace, there was never a meaningful cultural shift towards remote work after COVID hit.

But hey, a bit of loneliness is better than being stuck in traffic for 2 hours a day right?

[jemmyw]

I've worked for fully remote companies and fully in office companies and large companies and tiny ones. I've been an IC mostly but also a manger and lead. My observation is: it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Decisions are made, people do the work. There has been no noticeable quality difference except in the case of large+office where the strong social element combined with the faceless corp equalled a lot more pissing about having fun rather than working.

The real insight a lot of people have had is that they can work just fine with their remote colleagues without a manger needing to watch them. I'm sure most managers such as yourself aren't like that, but it only takes one in an org to really make people unhappy.

[mtpockets]

True of bad managers. And in large orgs they are not isolated, usually a group under a bad director or vp of a division.

And totally agree on the work being visibly the exact same output if not more in my case.

But one example I can give is how for certain folks who want to build a professional career or want to grow, they need to know who in what group they can connect with. And in office it looks like you sometimes seeing a person many gravitate towards and ask about them and find out they are a somebody. In slack there are no similar strong signals and you have to browse many channels and who knows if they would accept your zoom invite to connect. And in most orgs, driving this kind of connection building is nearly impossible remote - asking an introvert to go be social is hard enough in person let alone ask them to browse slack channels.

And as a byproduct most people stagnate, feel alone. How do you try and make friends? How do you try to find people like you? Productivity is there but feeling of any other benefit from work is gone and lets be honest, not all software work is meaningful and clearly adds to the bottom line. Adding unit tests to a codebase is a lot more tolerable when you have people you chit chat with on your breaks or go to lunch with. Again.. big corp type work situations. But I know it is also true of non high growth startups or medium sized companies as well. The KtLo work (keep the lights on) is needed but not super invigorating.

[jemmyw]

I get what you're saying but my anecdotal experience is different now that I think about it. I made good friends in both office and remote situations. I'm only in touch with one person from the in office times, and that's by email. I chat online with plenty of people I've worked with remotely in the past. Interestingly one person who was at the same company when I worked in office, but he was at another office... It just seems easier to carry on the chat when you or they move on. These are now the ones who form my network and occasionally I do get to meet some in person.

[Mandatum]

Do you have relationships with people you formed online? I think there's a subset of people (potentially the majority) who are unable to do that, and you're likely one.

[syed_h5]

I have formed a lot of relationships online. But that is because I am good at doing so. Even then it took months to form real bonds. It would not have taken months if I knew what common ground to have conversations on from the start.

[throwawaysleep]

Can't you just haul in the managers then? I don't need or desire anyone's trust. My code gets reviewed, so there is no real need to trust me. Bring in the decision makers and leave the minions like me who just silently spin in chairs during meetings at home.

[mtpockets]

Hah yeah, I can relate when I was IC.

If you have enough leverage to know you don’t need relationships to be safe, to get promoted, to do what you want to do, more power to ya!

I speak of large orgs where not all people and teams can be like that. And unfortunately, large orgs cannot say “team a you stay wfh team b you come in since you need to gel with team c in office” due to fairness. So a one size fits all will be applied like Apple is doing.

[syed_h5]

I have been loving your comments. I very strongly agree with your other comment about how to do you get two introverts to talk? of course people will offer up info to the managers.

If you don't mind, please check out what we are doing here: https://www.getparallel.io/

We are big fan of WFH and want it to stay. We just wrapped up our MVP and talking to accelerators.