[Waterluvian]

Five years in office. Five years fully remote with a team of dozens of fully remote engineers. I find the latter, in my experience, to be strictly superior in all ways including working together successfully despite being remote.

I think we overrate the need to build in-person social rapports. Just be a professional. I think there’s a concept where often work colleagues become friends and we misidentify that as being a key part of the work dynamic. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Most of my work colleagues are not my friends and I’m quite fine with that.

[ttul]

To whit, open source projects have been run for decades over nothing but email mailing lists. People participating in these projects feel a strong social connection.

[necovek]

And a bunch of conferences like FOSDEM, GUADEC, LinuxConf, PyCon...

All the while not forgetting that people contributing to free software have altogether different motivations: they are (almost) all in it because they want to contribute their own time to something they believe in.

Quite different from what majority of people in any company are there for.

[doubled112]

I agree with you.

> Just be a professional

In my experience, there are many people that find this an incredible challenge. This is where it can easily fall apart.

[cj]

Similar story here. 5 years in person, 5 years running a fully remote company (remote before Covid, not because of).

I agree, for the most part. It's not too hard to build good working relationships within a small team that's remote.

One notable challenge, though, is developing working relationships between different teams and cross-departments. In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch. Remote, it's not unheard of to (literally) never interact with other departments at all.

So in remote, cross-department projects like "let's launch a new marketing site" become more difficult to orchestrate because the engineers simply don't know the people they're working with in (for example) Marketing until the project starts.

Granted, this issue isn't completely unique to remote work. At big 200+ person companies, even when 100% in-person, you won't know everyone and you'll face the same challenges. But for a 10-50 person company, it's pretty easy for everyone to know everyone when in-person. Still possible when remote, but it has to be encouraged at the management level since intermingling between departments for fun isn't something that most people will do on their own unless directed to.

Remote works really well for task-oriented jobs (like engineering, where you're assigned a Jira ticket to complete) especially when you're working with a small group of people every day. Remote starts to become challenging as an engineer if you're in a position where you need to frequently (and quickly) build working relationships with people on other teams to complete cross-departmental projects where collaboration is necessary.

This is also where good product managers can really come in handy. Good product managers will be able to handle the cross-team relationships, manage expectations, gather/communicate requirements (offloading that overhead from engineers).

[kwhitefoot]

>In-office, it's easier because you likely at least know of the people on the marketing/sales/service team by running into people in the hall or at lunch.

Only in very small companies or if you happen to work in the head office. I worked at the same company for thirty years and only met the sales people in the period before it was taken over by ABB. After that meeting anyone from sales was something that happened only rarely and always deliberately.