[mfitton]

I think you're right about this, but there are companies that are putting distributed teams back into open offices just so that... they can sit in zoom meetings with their team. But now, they're less likely to have ad-hoc collaborations over Zoom because it's a pain in the neck to find a conference room and feels borderline disrespectful to one's neighbors to carry on a long call when they're trying to focus.

It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.

[wtarreau]

It's not necessarily the case, it happens that most of the people who come are happy to be in the same room for a meeting, but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.

At work we've bought small PCs for the meeting rooms so that all those present can be in the same room, and have the rare distant ones participate to the call remotely without preventing other ones to discuss in the room. It's obvious the quality of the participation is much reduced for the remote one in this case, which proves how poor such exchanges are when they're all remote. At least here we can preserve a good communication between those who make the effort to meet in person.

[tekknik]

> but often they still have to endure one single distant coworker that preferred to stay home and selfishly forces all other ones to use the shitty tools.

How does this hateful comment reconcile with geographically distributed teams?

[wtarreau]

the same way some believe that forcing talented people to waste their time trying to use inappropriate communication tools will in the end disgust them so much they will give up trying to excel at what they used to.

[mfitton]

It's true that it isn't always the case. We have no more than 2 people on the team at any given office, and are spread across 5 offices and a few full-time remote on a broader team of about 10.