[quectophoton]

> We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.

To me this sounds like neither you nor your coworkers... talk? Like you're not used to communication unless the photons you receive in your eyes are the same ones that bounced off someone's face (or unless there's a face at all).

I still took coffee breaks to unwind for a tiny bit of time, and I still talked with teammates during those times while I was taking a moment to unwind. Async. The conversation would either stop after a few exchanges, or continue for the next minutes.

Not much different from, say, IRC or Discord. Obviously there will be professionalism in the "real" channels, but other than that it just happened that sometimes a teammate would just send me a DM like "hey, have you watched this series?", or I would post in a shared channel something like "yooo look at this thing I built last night".

I don't really need any specific medium to talk to a person. I can have my preferences, and other people can have their preferences as well, but there's still not much difference either way when it comes to getting to know each other. There's some people I only know through text chats that I'm on better terms than with some I know in person. There's some people I know in person that I'm on better terms than with some I only know through text chats.