[danw1979]

To further your point about new team members benefiting from RTO: I’m six months into a mostly remote contract gig (2 days a week in the office) at a large financial services company, in a team that was very well distributed across the country even before the pandemic. I’m based out of an office that would have been peripheral to most of the team anyway, even if we were fully onsite.

It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had. The total lack of face-to-face with any of the team means I can’t get to know anyone else, there’s no cooperation whatsoever and zero knowledge transfer… getting time to chat with your colleagues requires booking a meeting in their well-stuffed calendar weeks in advance. We get a half-hour slot per week with the Tech Leads to ask questions, which means I’m blocked frequently, and any other comms with them is through MS Teams, where you’re lucky to get a reply that day. I suggested more frequent scheduled time with the leads but that was knocked back immediately.

This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team. It’s a prime candidate for a centralised office with a mostly onsite policy, in my humble opinion…

[winrid]

I was at a place with the exact same problems that was in-office pre-pandemic. It was even worse: you couldn't book time with architects OR product managers. For PMs you had to add your questions to a document and join a sometimes daily 30min meeting and hope they got to your questions.

This isn't an office vs remote problem. It's a hiring not enough people and pretending that doing no planning is okay, problem.

and this was an insurance company. Hardly a "move fast and break things" industry.

[blub]

Not hiring enough people is a chronic problem for all companies. Being remote makes it worse though, since WFH tends to amplify personnel and culture problems…

The only thing WFH solves really is long commutes and noisy offices. It also makes it easier for families to organize their day, which is why a lot of parents like it.

[danw1979]

I think we may be talking about the same insurance company.

[winrid]

haha maybe. do they call their employees hippos? :)

[viraptor]

You got it right at the end: "This is a place with no culture. We are literally not a team." But this is not a remote/local issue. This is bad team organisation with crappy leadership. They could fail in the same way locally and it could work so much better remotely.

It's on your manager to fix it if your team can't communicate effectively or at all. You're letting them off the hook by thinking moving where you work would magically make things better without culture changes.

Source: Seeing my team every day. Talking with them immediately if they need help. We do group hangouts for current issues. I talk with them more than local team I worked with many years ago.

[danw1979]

There’s definitely a management problem, no doubt, but I’ve been in thriving teams before, despite poor management; we were all friends who shared the day in the same place together.

I’m in total agreement that remote work needs good management to be effective.

[Gigachad]

At this point its the "that wasn't real communism" argument. Is it possible to have a fully communicative remote environment with thriving culture and personal interactions? Probably. Does it happen? Not often.

Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.

[dickersnoodle]

>Relationships, communication, and culture pretty much set themselves up in office. While remote you have to work extra hard for it and it just doesn't seem to be happening for most people.

While I understand the motivation for this take I do not agree with it. You have to be intentional about supporting remote teams from the get go, which means you have to select for the skills that let those teams thrive when you're staffing them and especially their management chain. Expectations have to be clear, time needs to be protected from calendar pirates, outcomes need to be measured and accounted for, team members need to be able to talk to each other and management needs to keep reasonably close (but not oppressively so) tabs on team ops. It can absolutely work but it doesn't happen by accident.

[Gigachad]

That's just my point. So much stuff you get for free by being in the same room now has to be a deliberate, planned effort, and it's unclear if you even can get the same level of personal connection between people over Slack. And it just isn't happening at all the places I've seen.

[dickersnoodle]

For a ton of people and roles there's nothing really magical about being in an office. If you're any good at remote communications you can connect with people over Zoom, Slack or (ugh) Teams and form professional connections. Personal connections are a different animal.

[viraptor]

It's very different. The "that wasn't real communism" argument is a thing because we've never seen one. For remote work, we have many examples of companies where it works and we've got examples of companies with terrible on-site culture.

"culture pretty much set themselves up in office" - that culture is sometimes avoidance, aggression, backstabbing. You have to work on the on-site culture as well if you want it to function well.

[ohyes]

A big part of my job as a tech lead is to keep people unblocked and transfer knowledge. If I’m ignoring my DMs during the day, what exactly am I doing?

My individual coding output pales in comparison to what I can accomplish by making other people more productive, keeping everyone rowing in the same direction. I feel bad if I take more than 1/2 an hour to respond to a question, at very least directing that person to someone else who knows the answer (or help find it).

I don’t think this problem has anything to do with remote/in office work.

[dajt]

Prefacing this with the fact my office is essentially a farm, so quite nice surroundings, and also only a 10 minute drive away from home in a regional town, so there's no awful commute involved.

It's still not the same - I was part of a team for 5 or 6 years and never met them in person. Apparently I wasn't important enough to fly to the US even once to meet everyone.

We had very little rapport, didn't know each other at all, it was a very poor experience of being in a team and extremely demoralising and inefficient.

I took my current job because I wanted to go back to the office and get to know my team mates properly. It's much better.

I do like the hybrid approach, I can basically work from home whenever I want, but I go to the office most working days. I probably work from home less than 3 weeks of the year all up, and usually when I need to do something here I can't do at work like making some brackets or similar.

The incidental conversations you have, short brainstorming sessions over breaks and lunch, just being socially closer, makes a massive difference.

I used to go for smoke breaks with a different project leader, even though I don't smoke, because we could spend that time talking about stuff related to our projects and bounce ideas off each other. That job was also in an awesome startup complex that used to be a railway workshop - way cooler than sitting around in my spare bedroom on my own.

I admit I'm no fan of too dense an open plan or hot desking - both dehumanising efforts - and eating at your desk should be banned.

Slack/teams/whatever isn't on the same planet.

[scarface_74]

Opposite anecdote, I was hired remotely at AWS during Covid and I only met anyone on my team a year and half in.

There was a well organized onboarding process which was a combination of Amazon indoctrination, AWS indoctrination, and team specific tasks including who I should schedule a 1x1 with. There were tasks specifically geared toward getting to know the internal tooling.

Admittedly when I started at my current company fully remote - a much smaller company - right when we were hiring rapidly for a new project, it was on me to get up to speed about knowing what my role involved, who to schedule 1x1s with and create my own onboarding itinerary.

[somsak2]

If their calendars are full of meetings, how would being in an office change anything?

[Gigachad]

Even in this case you still meet people in the mornings in the kitchen, go out for lunches and such in office which you don't get on teams.

[musha68k]

I always like to point out to fellow devs that there are a lot of Bad Companies out there. It’s not an easy task to find a good one.

I haven’t needed to work from some remote open space office since March 2020.

Though since Covid cases came down late spring this year I do sometimes go - every other month or so - mostly only for when our toddler has to be at home for some reason.

At which point the company’s open office is temporarily less distracting than my (much better customized and equipped) home office.

Of course sometimes it can also be good to have lunch together or share some war stories for kicking off some planning or some such, not regularly needed in my line of work though.

So it’s nice to have the choice, have lunch together now and then.

I would quit immediately if there would be any form of direct manager pressure to come back.

I’m an adult and a professional, I do work on my own terms. If that’s something a company won’t respect then I will be giving my precious labour elsewhere.

Culture: it’s relationships all the way down.

[zimpenfish]

> It’s been the most difficult start to any job I’ve ever had [etc.]

Right but, dropping a slice of anecdata cake, I've had that experience multiple times before I ever did any remote working (and not just in contracts, in perm jobs too.) If the culture is rotten, it matters not whether you're onsite or offsite.

[slaw]

2 days a week in the office is not mostly remote job.

[danw1979]

I mean, 3/5 is “most” in my book… but the finer detail in my post was that I’m in a satellite office. The bulk of the team are elsewhere, effectively making me a fully remote team member.

[slaw]

3/5 days is hybrid. Mostly remote is twice a year in an office.

[helij]

This just sounds like every second large company.