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by Gigachad 991 days ago
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.
2 comments
dickersnoodle 991 days ago
>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.

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Gigachad 991 days ago
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.
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dickersnoodle 979 days ago
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.
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viraptor 991 days ago
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.

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