[EliRivers]

You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question

Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

training is AWFUL remote. Not even close

Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).

[JohnFen]

> In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.

Where I currently work (100% in the office, sadly), there is a coworker who did this to me regularly. He was causing a serious loss of productivity, and wouldn't stop.

So I started doing the same to him, stopping by his cube a few times a day at random to ask some legitimate technical question.

The end of the week I started doing that, he complained to me about my constantly interrupting him. It was causing him to fall behind in his work.

I told him "Of course, I'll start messaging you instead of stopping by. Would you extend the same courtesy to me?"

He stopped needlessly interrupting me.

[lolinder]

Agreed! Companies were basically sticking a bunch of people in a primordial soup and then stepping back and hoping for abiogenesis. It turns out people are pretty creative, so you would often get it, but that doesn't make the primordial soup the be-all-end-all of company organization.

At some point you have to develop self-awareness, you have to develop structures capable of improving intentionally. Those structures will dramatically outperform the primordial soup approach, but they do take work to build.

[BenisMaximus]

Absolutely nailed it. Remote work requires a bit more upfront involvement but the payoff is a more independent and healthy workforce (generally speaking). This will 100% highlight any failures in your current system/model.

Our onboarding system has been terrible for as long as anyone here can remember. Remote just made it stand out but it was always shit.