[jacobr1]

I've enjoyed both environments. Having an in-person, highly engaged, collaborative environment is fantastic. Having a remote first, well-considered remote team is great.

But having a mostly in-person, and some-people remote setup, where the remote folks are left out of the hallway conversations sucks. Having an "in-person" setup, where your team is distributed between building locations and remote sites, and you can't ever schedule conferences rooms and you are working in a cube-farms/open-office sucks.

The key is finding a way to be engaged with your colleagues remote or local, and figuring out how to scale that.

[grogenaut]

I was in a remote office from the main one before and about 30% of the time people would forget to dial in, and another 20% of the time the AV setup would be broken. They ironically got that all fixed during the pandemic, and it's great now. At the minimum the default is you will be on VC now and so it makes it much better for everyone, and everyone has the hardware all figured out.

We had a large onsite last week and a ton of the young engineers said to me "people told me stuff immediately in person that I've been trying to find out for months". Humans are still kinda humans.

[ryandrake]

It definitely takes discipline and a little culture change. I work for a company where teams are spread across many offices, so the company culture is: there's a video conference for every meeting. Period. End of story. When you walk into the conference room, you press one button and the VC starts. Everybody does this, and it's engrained. So, thanks to this discipline, remote workers are never left out.

Same goes for the "hallway conversations." You just got to get out of that company-habit where major decisions and information transfers happen in this ad hoc way. It takes discipline (often on leadership's part) to properly document and communicate. Again, where I work, we would never consider "Oh, I talked to Director Xyz in the hallway and he said our focus is on the Foo project rather than the Bar project now" to be any kind of official guidance. Totally unacceptable.

[strogonoff]

In-person, same-air is objectively different experience from a video or audio call—higher bandwidth, unmediated, spontaneous, visceral… not something one can “get out of” as if it was just a habit.

Perhaps some find IRL distracting, so they suffer less and have easier time compensating for the difference between in-person and remote. Meanwhile, some others are good communicators who thrive with and make the most out in-person, and for them it’s more of a challenge to WFH. I personally suspect many of those who want to WFH are naturally not that great at remote communication without realizing so.

I personally had insightful office conversations that started as tangents from semi-idle chance chats and would be impossible remotely, since in an online meeting you must be mindful of others’ time because you don’t know how busy they are (IRL you can sense if a person would rather be doing something else, but you know it can be perfectly faked remotely—so you will never have a chance convo; meetings must have agendas—culture!—and once the agenda is over, everyone gets to be free). Such random conversations can easily alter the course of whole projects.

I don’t see WFH vs. RTO as a black-and-white, high culture vs. lack of culture, good vs. evil sort of battle; more like people have different natural tendencies, life circumstances, desires, and everyone wants it to work best for them.

[grogenaut]

Yeah we didn't even have that one button integration until 2019 and it didn't work well and the mics were all broken. They started leaving usb jabra mics in the conference rooms to supplement the very expensive cisco setups. That's mainly fixed now.

Interesting on the hallway conversation thing. I have no idea how I'd handle that.